Federalizing Weather

Be careful what you wish for. In the case of political and press reaction to the horrific natural event called Hurricane Katrina, we need to be careful what we demand. I’ve been angry over the irrational path that many politicians and reporters are leading us down, and though I realize that my few words here can do nothing to counter all of that, I can add my small voice in the way of a warning for my fellow citizens.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, a truly dangerous drumbeat of blame has erupted and promises to do much damage to all of us before subsiding. Why is it dangerous? Because, in the future, under this President, or the next, or the one after that, the political risks of "not acting quickly enough" will be far too high, and we will be living under a very different system of government, at least as long as the wind blows between June and November every year. We will be living under a very different system because you, my fellow citizen, have demanded it, loudly and even viciously.

Here is my one and only disclaimer for this piece: yes, in hindsight the federal state and local authorities could have and should have done any number of things differently. If one wishes to learn lessons from painful experiences, then that is healthy and good. If one wishes to level blame borne more from personal prejudice than from reason or thought to the consequences, however, one is only asking for a different kind of pain in the future.

So what is going to happen the next time a tropical system is forecast to make landfall on the coast of the United States? The way we’ve collectively reacted to the destruction in New Orleans (the rest of the Gulf Coast has been effectively ignored) has set a new standard for what must happen the next time.

Here is the mainstream media / White House press corps / hostile politician protocol for federal action in the case of a storm warning from now on (and not one word of the following is meant to be satirical; I am being quite literal based upon what I’ve seen and heard on TV and the blogs):

1. FEMA, rather than being an agency charged with coordinating the response to a disaster (“response” is a word that has a certain temporal quality to it; you can’t “respond” before something happens), will now be expected to take firm charge of all tactical decisions on a local level, meaning that FEMA will have to become an extraordinarily large agency. It’s hard to know what form FEMA will take, but the most efficient would be if we stationed federal watchers who could make sure that the directives and will of the powerful central government and its leader were not compromised by local decisions. The best model, unfortunately, is something like the old Soviet Union’s commissars. In the future, in order to meet the expectations of today’s critics, we’d have to have FEMA officials with the job of kind of hanging out in police precincts, firehouses and mayor’s offices, ready to alert the Oval Office when a local decision is incorrect and the President has to take over. The fact that one person, the President, will be expected to take over the day-to-day and on-the-ground decisions of local leaders on a hair-trigger may be uncomfortable, particularly if the mayor is Black and of the opposite political party, and the governor is female and of the opposite political party, but this is what we now seem to be demanding.

2. When a storm approaches land, we now know that if a president simply “implores” a governor and mayor to order a mandatory evacuation when those officials have been unwilling to do so more than a day before landfall, there will be hell to pay – not for the local officials, but for the president. President Bush did, in fact, call up Governor Blanco and (this is her word) “implored” her to order the evacuation that she and the mayor had not ordered. Clearly, we’ve learned, that is not nearly enough. The only politically acceptable thing to do from now on is for mandatory evacuations be ordered, and personally by the President of the United States, at least 72 hours before landfall. In reality, under this new system there will be a lot more evacuations of a lot more areas, clogging all the roads and taxing public transportation assets, so I’m not exaggerating by saying that mandatory evacuations will likely creep to five days or more before landfall. In the cases when storms suddenly appear out of nowhere (as Katrina did just off the east coast of Florida), evacuations will be immediate and without any warning at all.

Theoretically, any named storm would trigger this (after all, Katrina killed people in Florida while it was still a category 1 storm). Also, you may have noticed, big hurricanes cover an enormous area. Sometimes one single storm in the Gulf of Mexico can have damaging winds that extend over three, four, or even five states, affecting hundreds of counties and parishes. It’s difficult to know what impact on our nation evacuating literally millions of people at least a few times every single year from now on will have, but I don’t imagine it will be a very pleasant routine. Perhaps future presidents can meet political demands but minimize the chaos by ordering the evacuation only of predominantly Black and poor neighborhoods.

Oh, and if you live in the southeast, get rid of your pets now. Most hurricane shelters don’t take them. For understandable reasons, the military helicopter crews aren’t going to let you load them on. Since the evacuations from now on will all be mandatory, and require public transportation assets for many citizens, and since you cannot take your pets with you to government-run facilities, it is simply not feasible for us who live in the southeast coastal regions to have them in the first place.

Likewise, don’t buy a gun to defend yourself from wild animals or other dangers in the aftermath of a storm. You know full well you won’t be allowed to carry your personal weapons with you on a bus or helicopter or into a shelter. Just sell the ones you’ve got. As another by-product of the deafening public demands following Katrina, it is crystal clear that taking care of oneself is unacceptable. That’s now the President’s job.

3. When the National Weather Service issues a prediction of a storm track, National Guard troops from the area and surrounding areas, and from areas surrounding the surrounding areas, will deploy immediately, in the tens of thousands over several hundred miles of coastline.

The troops will no longer wait to see what bridges and roads will be passable after the storm. They will not wait to see what areas have emergency services intact and which need their help the most. They will not wait to see what areas will have an intact infrastructure for fueling, etc. Waiting until after the storm now carries an unacceptable political cost, no matter how much it makes operational sense. Instead, the troops will be ordered on the scene before or even as the storm hits. Unfortunately, those troops will potentially become as devastated, tired, and disoriented as the other victims, but at least they will have been on the scene immediately, and that’s what is now demanded of them.

Since hurricane season lasts nearly half a year the National Guard will have to be deployed quite a bit, on standby for months on end. Odds are that this will be a problem for their civilian employers, so we’ll simply have to make the active duty component of the military larger, so that these tens of thousands, at the strength of at least two divisions, can spend half of the year on duty here in the United States as a particularly lethal police force.

As I said, none of what you’ve just read is meant as satire. I don’t know how, in the face of all the criticism of President Bush this week, a president is supposed to behave in the future other than to do exactly what I’ve mentioned in the items above. I know that many libertarians and conservatives are familiar with the “frog in the slowly heated water” theory of losing individual liberties. The week of coverage and pontificating following Hurricane Katrina has instead convinced me that we will lose the lion’s share of our liberties because we ourselves will loudly demand it.