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Thinking seriously about disaster response
Some ambitious thinking at The American Thinker about what the country must do to prepare for the next natural or man-made disaster. Joseph C. Myers, an Army Lieutenant Colonel with a background in peacekeeping and disaster relief operations, lays out the steps that he says are needed, from the local to the national level. The two main features of his plan are thorough, concrete, and very expensive preparations by local communities (two examples: facilities such as the Superdome that are intended to shelter evacuees must be set up in advance with all the needed supplies; and all gunshops must have “hard rooms” in which to store guns in the event of a disaster to prevent looters from stealing guns), and a much more pro-active federal posture. “Our national government’s focus should not be merely to support state and local governments when natural or man-made catastrophes are of such scope that they demolish any standing plan,” he writes. “The DOD mindset should be that a major hurricane is like an invading army, and the Pentagon must develop a contingency force plan to counter-attack.”
It’s not clear what Myers is aiming at, however. Is he saying that each city should prepare for disasters that are reasonably likely to hit that particular city, e.g., New Orleans preparing for catastrophic flooding? Or is he saying that every city in America must prepare for a total, nuclear-type disaster that would necessitate the total evacuation of its population? If he means the latter, he’s talking about turning over a major part of the national wealth to disaster response, all directed and mandated by the federal government. Myers’s treatment of the disaster-relief challenge sounds like a recipe for a centrally planned society. Email entry |