inotherwords wrote: ...I'm appalled at how bureaucratic things are even at such low levels. It takes forever to get even the smallest things done....
Many of the people .... They are paid less and really get used to a very unrealistic and slow way of working. ...
I'm going to overgeneralize here--there are exceptions--but I'm always amazed at how many times the "it's not my job" concept applies and how little sense of urgency there is--even with people who work in areas where they deal with "emergencies."
There comes a time when the answer to a problem is to "just do it." But it seems that there are so many rules and regulations and so much fear of doing something that will result in jeopardizing a promotion, angering a co-worker, etc. that people are paralyzed. Also, because the jobs are generally poorly paid, etc. they usually do not attract the "brightest bulbs in the chandelier." There also seems to be an overreliance on "scientific study" of things that don't need any scientific study at all in order to make a decision.
What do I mean? When my daughter was in elementary school, major construction on I-95 meant rerouting traffic off an exit near the school and trailer trucks were coming up a very shortened exit ramp to an unguarded school crossing for kindergarten children who would be picking their way through the construction. Instead of calling instantly for temporary bussing of the kids the town was going to conduct a "safety study" about how kindergarten students and 18 wheelers would interact at that intersection. The state driver's manual said that at 40 mph the trucks needed more distance to stop than the length of the exit ramp--simple arithmetic gave the answer to that problem--no $10K safety study was necessary! How many kids needed to get squashed before they would figure out that they needed a safer alternative? It took 6 hours to get the required signatures on a petition to the governor and a few calls to local TV stations and we got our schoolbus and some "Jersey Barriers" to separate the trucks from the little kids. The safety study would have taken a year! But the instant solution was mothers with flags and flares out there stopping the first few trucks! Then those truckers stopped the other trucks.
In another thread I posted a comments about our local Emergency Plan. I think it was written by bureaucrats who plagarized huge chunks of it from some other location's emergency plan. It does not take into account any of the local conditions, local geography, etc. The people who wrote it have no notion of how practical/impractical it is. I suspect some of the people involved have never actually driven the routes they think people will use in emergency! If they did they would know they are driving through several feet of water on a normal "rainy day" for example...
Bureaucrats also are not encouraged to take "field trips." So they sit in their offices and write stupid stuff. And no one wants to tell them that The Emperor Has No Clothes On!!! There are dedicated police officers, fire fighters, EMS technicians, etc. but from what I can see, they are stretched pretty thin under normal conditions and besides, the people who write plans don't ask those men and women to read the plans and offer a reality check! Rather I think idiots write the plans and then hand them off to police, firefighters, hospital workers, etc. and say, "here's your plan. Implement it in emergency." But the whole thing is "creative writing" and won't work in actuality.
I also think there is too much "preplanning" and too much "chain of command" and too much "butt out--it's not your job" with disasters. The irony is that our stories of heroism in our folklore are all about individuals who DID something in emergency--often something unusual or creative. Watching the NOLA situation on TV, I sort of waited for some maverick with a helicopter to drop juice boxes and little packages of vending machine crackers/cookies/candy bars on the Superdome and at the Convention Center. Of course the reality is that Homeland Secuity would have shot them out of the sky... But it would have worked in terms of staving off misery and allowing people to hang on a lot better. In fact, it sounds like some of the most effective "relief" runs and some of the "rescues" were done by individuals with no authority whatsoever.
At some point on TV they showed a woman doctor who was treating victims and the newscaster asked her who was "behind" her and who was "financing" her--and she said she was financing herself and held up her American Express card (like in the ad) and I still hope that American Express steps up to the plate and donates to her because it was some of the best advertising they could have ever gotten. But while she was out there treating people, the official medical teams were being held up by bureaucratic red tape and after days and days in the area had only treated ONE patient--someone with a minor cut.
The Iditarod dogsled race in Alaska commemorates the people who got the medicine through in Alaska to forestall an epidemic--today those people would have died because FEMA would have determined that dog sleds were not approved vehicles or that the team drivers could not work more than 6 hour shifts or something....
I think we need, as Americans, to take a long hard look at what is going on and perhaps put a bunch of relief efforts back into the hands of small groups and individuals--or at least not tie their hands. And I think all emergency plans, etc. need to be written from the "bottom up." I don't think they should be allowed to be published, etc. until the people who have to implement them--the nurses, the orderlies, the firefighters, the police officers, the EMTs, the truck drivers, etc. get to read them, correct them, edit them, etc. They have a lot better chance of being workable if the implementers write them than if they are written by someone in an office.
