Civilized?

Lest we feel too comfortable in our civility, let's remember that a Wal Mart worker was trampled to death on the day after Thanksgiving. Not in the Third World. Long Island.

An orderly process

The election is history (some say historic, but let's not go there yet) and the President-elect is busily assembling his cabinet. I've been meaning to comment on all the old-timers that have appeared in what was supposed to be an All About Change administration, but that's all been written, commented, and blogged to death. But in today's news there are a couple items that make me realize what a remarkable process we have for changing governments.

And there's not doubt we're changing governments. All talk of moderation aside, and despite the few Bush loyalists burrowing into the career ranks at their agencies, there's going to be a serious change of direction in most of the regulatory establishement. Fine. The unions, enviros, and other self-proclaimed progressives have been shut out for a while, so it's time for them to have a go at running things. That's how we do it.

Unlike, say, Thailand, where the country's constitutional court has disbanded three coalition parties and declared that the prime minister is banned from politics for five years. Think that's too far afield to be relevant? How about something closer to home, like Canada? There the three minority parties in Parliament have ganged up on the ruling Conservative Party and Prime Minister Howard, declaring that they'll force a no-confidence vote and organize a ruling coalition. No matter that none of the coalition partners got much support in the last election, or that the presumptive prime minister, Stéphane Dion, is described as the Globe and Mail as a "defeated party leader" who "has never earned the right to govern." This, by the way, is quoted from an editorial calling for Primer Minister Harper to step down.

Maybe I'm making too big a deal of this. After all, the articles in the US papers about the Thailand situation focus on whether protesters will allow the airport to reopen, and let tourists come and go. And it's hard to find anything about the Canada situation. But I thought it was worth a mention nevertheless, as a constrast to the calm and civilized transfer of power that's been the way we've done things since 1789.

Reconciliation

Those who gain from reconciliation - the losers - will be extending their hands. Business interests, thought to be predictably Republican, actually work very well with whoever is running things. But don't expect the winners to offer the handshake of reconciliation that easily. They won, after all, and you know who gets the spoils. I have scant hope for a new era of good feeling. Listening to the talkback commentary on news radio this morning, we're still divided, and the invigorated Democrats in Congress won't give a damn about bipartisanship. They don't need to.

Special interests. The labor unions and trial lawyers backed their money wagons up to the Obama camp, as they do for most Democrats. Don't tell me they're not "special interests," or that the O-campaign was entirely funded by small contributions. For all the small dollar internet contributors, there were plenty of folks who gave $70,000 each, and who will be looking for more than a hearty handshake in return. An AP article in Sunday's Washington Post reported that "individuals have been credited with giving tens of thousands of dollars to the Obama campaign, far more than the $2,300 limit. Obama has reported more than $17,000 in contributions from a donor identified as "Doodad Pro" and more than $11,000 from one identified as "Good Will." Hmmm...

But I was impressed that the Obama campaign seemed relatively free of the obvious pandering to all "progressive" groups that I think characterized the last few Democrat national campaigns. Of course, he knew he was going to have their support anyway.

Are we blue?

More than yesterday, certainly. Looking at the map, there are blue states that were red four years ago. But check out this one, that shows more subtle coloration based on the strength of party support. Or this one from the Washington Post. Be patient and let it load. Check out the blue spikes in the cities, and the sea of red across more sparsely populated areas. This suggests that we're not close to reconciliation. And despite Oprah's pronouncement, there's no purple there.

Back again

OK. Clearly I didn't know what I was doing. I started this blog but only used it for my editorials (and occasional family postings). Started with a bang after the 2004 election, but didn't add anything after Katrina and discovered today that the Web host had shut me down. Got that straightened out (it's Total Choice Hosting, and they were quick and responsive in getting me back on line) so here I am again.

Ready to start some more post-election blah blah.

Improvisation

At one of the ranges at Fort Benning, back in 1970, I remember seeing a mock tombstone with an inscription that went something like this:

Here lies private Shorthouse
The pride of the institution
He was killed one night in a firefight
Applying the school solution

It was meant to be funny, but also to get across a point to the soldiers training there to go to Vietnam: All your plans, all your training, every careful calculation of the "right" way to do something, can quickly be made meaningless by the confusion of combat. Leaders have to improvise. Those that are good at it, or lucky, get themselves and their units out alive.

As I look back over the last couple of weeks in Louisiana, it's looking more and more like a tragic confluence of unimaginative leaders. The New Orleans Mayor, the Governor, FEMA, even the President all lost chances to take bold action that might have saved some people. Instead, they went by The Book - or what they believed The Book prescribed - until things had got so out of control that extreme measures had to be taken. It's not surprising, given the immediate and brutal second-guessing that seems to follow every public decision. But it's unfortunate.

It's instructive to look, once again, at the contrast between this event and the World Trade Center disaster of four years ago. There was official confusion about what to do. It was left to a small group of relatively low-level New York City officials, without any real authority, to take over and begin almost immediately to secure the site. They brought in contractors and heavy machinery, shored up the slurry wall, and probably prevented even greater devastation in the weeks that followed. William Langewiesche wrote about these unsung heroes in The Atlantic, and his book American Ground. Had it been left to public officials, working by The Book, they'd probably still be holding hearings to decide what to do.

Improvisation. No matter how many personality profiles you create, or training simulations you conduct, it's a quality of leadership that can't really be tested until it's needed. Too bad.

The best laid plans ...

I was flying Southwest Airlines, and the flight attendant was having fun with the preflight announcements. "In the event of the sudden loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the overhead bins. Stop screaming, try to free yourself from the grasp of the person next to you, and place the mask tightly over your nose and mouth ..."

We laughed, but also realized that this comic relief contained a grain of truth. When a true emergency strikes, things happen fast. Events overtake the most carefully laid plans, people react in unpredictable ways, and things fall apart. I've been reading the Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan, part of the state's Emergency Operations Plan. In cool and concise language, the plan notes the unique risk that a hurricane poses to the 13 parishes in that part of the state. It notes that the tidal surge of a category 3 or higher storm could create 20-foot flooding, that evacuation routes and emergency shelter facilities could be flooded, that available resources could be overwhelmed. It assumes that parishes will work together during the emergency, that many people will voluntarily evacuate high-risk areas, that public shelters will be available outside the risk zone, that state and local officials will perform their jobs according to plan. It provides step-by-step procedures for voluntary evacuation, for recommended evacuation, and ultimately for mandatory evacuation.

It's a good plan, as plans go. What happened? It doesn't consider some very human factors. It doesn't include assumptions about fear, stubborness, pride, uncertainty, ignorance, and all the other things that throw us off when the winds howl and the water rises. It predicts the effect of the storm surge, but not the surge of people to unprepared last-resort shelters or highway overpasses. It establishes that hospitals and nursing homes will have approved evacuation plans, but not whether they will implement them.

Maybe we need to add another element to our emergency planning from now on. In addition to assessing the capabilities of authority at all levels, we need to include a realistic assessment of how ordinary people will react to extradordinary risk, and build in a cushion of overprotection for those least able or likely to take care of themselves.

Who's Helping?

On the radio, I heard a story that troubled me. The host was interviewing one of the TV reporters who's been on the scene in New Orleans. She told of meeting a lively old fellow who asked her for help in getting his insulin. "I'm shutting down," he told her. She said she'd do what she could, said something to a National Guardsman, and then went to do a few stand-ups. When she checked back in a little while, the old man was dead. She reports his death as a failure of the system. But could she have done more for him, instead of going off and standing in front a camera to talk about the lack of human services?

Katrina Overload?

It's full employment days in the news business. There are a blue zillion stories available to be written or reported from the Gulf coast, and our news outlets certainly haven't disappointed. In today's Washington Post there are stories about the environmental and economic costs of Katrina, how we continue to build communities and casinos in storm-endangered areas, why overseas disaster aid to the US is being held up, how refugees were welcomed at the DC Armory and schools throughout the region, what the President is saying, what members of Congress are saying, why they are saying what they are saying, who blames whom, and on and on. All this in addition to the hard news about the rescue and recovery operations. And repeated in every city with a newspaper. The Des Moines Register reports that Iowa was ready to accept evacuees, but FEMA can't get them to leave Houston. The San Diego Union-Tribune reports on a local businessman who chartered a jet, snatched up some refugees and brought them to California. MSNBC and CNN and Fox News are dutifully fulfilling their roles as the international equivalent of the local eyewitness news (car crashes and fires! Details at 11!), cutting to the helicopters when all else fails.

Danger! Overload!

Click! There goes the mental circuit breaker, tuning out the umpteenth report on how many people have e-mailed to say Michael Brown should be replaced (Question: How many people really know what FEMA is supposed to do?), or that dogs are languishing on rooftops, or that ... you get the idea. Aside from the guilty fascination that something else awful may happen, we're reaching saturation point on the news from the Gulf. That's not good. We need to know. We need to know how a major American city could fall apart, what it is going to take to put it back together, whether we'd be ready if another one hit. We need to understand why people died in the street in New Orleans, by understanding who they are in the first place. We need to know the real cost of draining the wetlands that have provided a historic buffer against Gulf storms, of building luxury hotels and casinos where a storm surge can take them out, of concentrating our federal preparedness planning on terror threats.

By the way, does anyone else think that today, with all our emergency apparatus fixated on the Gulf, is a prime opportunity for a terror incident? Just asking.

New Orleans

New Orleans. While it's not the only place affected by the enormous Katrina disaster, it's certainly the most visible. Without having sustained the apocalyptic damage of Gulf-front communities where everything is leveled, it's got the most attention for its very public human suffering, and because it's, well, New Orleans.

Ken Ringle described it in a fine article in Saturday's Post as a city of "European airs, Haitian superstition, Catholic fatalism and raw human greed." Read this one while you're at it. It's the place we like to go to walk a little on the wild side, where the bars never close and you get a roadie cup so you can drink walking down the street. There's an atmosphere of naughty pleasures, great music and the world's most unhealthily delicious cuisine. But underneath is a faint realization, shunted off to the back of the brain, that it's a dangerous place, a damp, hot place occupied by an underclass that surfaces in the street hustlers of Canal Street and the sad drunks nodding in the Quarter. It's almost like there's a thin veneer somehow keeping us visitors from slipping into some kind of ugly mess, a precarious situation that adds a little excitement to the city's charm.

That veneer broke last week. Those of us who know New Orleans only as visitors saw the familiar surround of the Convention Center and Riverwalk looking like something out of the third world, a suffering mass of people who appeared to be frozen in despair and need. Why? What happened?

And there's another, even more troubling aspect of the human disaster in New Orleans. It has to do with the city's historical strategic importance. The country goes to market through New Orleans, to an extent that I never realized until I read this thought-provoking piece from Strategic Forecasting, Inc. Our agricultural wealth flows downstream on the Mississippi; raw materials for our industries flow upstream. Oil is produced, refined, distributed. Damage to the ports can be repaired, but without people to run them - people who live in New Orleans - they are crippled, and along with them a good part of our economy.

Playing the Blame Game

The e-mails have been filled with angry messages, excoriating the federal response. A friend wrote this, advising calm:

"There is a lot of blame to go around - the mayor who took a cavalier approach before the storm and did not evacuate his city or have his emergency management crises team (most major cities have this) provide for water and bare essentials to the emergency shelter at the Superdome; the governor who did not have the national guard immediately descend on the city to prevent the looting and lawlessness; FEMA who appears to have taken its sweet time to get into place."

New Orleans has no safe shelter. I remember the news stories last September - if the big one hits, the city is going to be under water and there is no place to go. It's the only city in the country where the Red Cross doesn't expect its people to stay. When we were trying to get to the airport to leave New Orleans as Ivan approached, there were National Guard and emergency vehicles on the road, outbound like us.

So the only alternative in the face of a flooding storm is to evacuate the city. Sadly, going on the TV and ordering everyone to leave doesn't quite get it. You have to quickly mobilize transportation, figure out a way to get people out street by street, make some decisions about how much force to apply to the thousands who won't want to go, clear the roads, and put the plan in motion. Oh, and find some high ground. Can't exactly truck them out and dump them in a field somewhere. You have to essentially build a satellite city - with shelter, food and water, sanitation and medical care, and civil order - and have at least the framework of it in place before you start moving people. And you have to do this in, what, two days?

Add to this the complicating factor of New Orleans. Many poor people with no transportation. And a "we'll get by" attitude born of always having got by.

Without being there, it's difficult to say how much of the city leadership infrastructure was intact. It was apparently left to television camera crews to find lots of the people who were stranded on highways or at the Convention Center. The physical infrastructure was certainly gone. Much of what was not taken out by the storm has been severely damaged by people. Want to make a comparison to 9-11 in New York, where we're told how things were quickly restored to order? Sure. The trains ran, the power was on, the toilets worked and the hospitals were open. Next.

Beyond the city government, there appeared to be no local leadership among the people staying behind. When disaster strikes, the community organizations, churches, fire departments, etc spring into action, setting up temporary food and shelter, taking care of basic needs. The very obvious absence of that type of support leads me to think the community leaders heeded the call and evacuated, leaving behind people least able to deal with their lives day to day, much less cope with the sudden disappearance of all support systems, including the most basic - food, water, medicine, sanitation. So people left their homes, herded together into places like the Convention Center where they expected something to be working, found no one but thousands of other helpless people and TV camera crews, and squatted in despair. Never having had to deal with this kind of deprivation, they clogged the toilets, let the dead lie in place, waited ...

FEMA and the feds certainly failed in numerous ways. Last week I saw first-hand some of the official chaos in Washington, masked by cool pronouncements of competent authority. But we need to be careful of criticizing without understanding the dynamic that exists between different levels of authority. State and local officials often resent and resist federal incursion until their situation is untenable, at which time they make desparate calls for the cavalry, usually on TV.
Louisiana, for example, called for federal aid early, and got it. The governor requested $130 million in assistance from the feds:

• Financial assistance for individuals and businesses affected;
• crisis counseling;
• SBA disaster loans;
• direct federal assistance (i.e., funding without the requirement for a 25% local match);
• hazard mitigation for approved applicants (this is basically federal assistance in preparing for the next flood), and
• debris removal.

It's not exactly a call to arms. Activating this type of support requires a presidential declaration of an "expedited major disaster." I'm pretty sure Louisiana got that designation right away.

The Feds don't take over until there's another presidential declaration, basically saying that state resources are overwhelmed and unable to cope. Even then, FEMA's principal role is managing the federal funding of recovery, and seeing that federal, state, local and private agencies have adequate funding with a minimum of red tape. People should not think of FEMA as some federal Ranger company ready to rappel in to the danger zone. The agency only has 2500 employees, many of whom are probably investigators, trainers and accountants. And spin doctors, of course.

Remember, this disaster affected several states and major cities, and the destruction covers an area the size of Minnesota. FEMA and others would probably look a whole lot better in the press if Michael Brown had flown in and given windblown news briefings on the roof of the Monteleone Hotel, but I seriously question whether that would have made things happen any faster.

Fly the Scary Skies

Years ago, I was on a Southern Airlines flight from Columbus, GA to New Orleans that made an intermediate stop in the Florida panhandle. It was a plane where everyone boarded through a ramp at the rear, and this was a crew change point. A he was walking down the aisle to the exit - past every seat on the plant - the pilot was muttering "Worst goddamned plane I ever flew. Never getting in another one." Made us all feel confident about the rest of the trip.

I thought of that when NASA's administrator announced that the Shuttle would be grounded indefinitely, while a crew in a Shuttle in orbit and getting ready to dock at the space station. That's not a station where you can change planes. Seems like he could have delayed the announcement at least until they got back on the ground.

Interestingly there's no mention of the grounding on NASA's Shuttle site, aside from a link to a brief statement about "foam shedding." Maybe they haven't told the crew.

I want to see us back in space. I once worked for a NASA contractor, and spent some time at the Cape. But I also heard a detailed briefing a year or so ago about the safety review in the wake of the Shuttle reentry disaster. Yes, space flight is risky. All flying is risky. But there was a "damn the torpedoes, launch the thing" culture at the agency that caused them not only to overlook potential hazards, but to continue to deny their possibility even when confronted with evidence to the contrary.

Now, after millions of dollars in studies and redesigns, there's still foam flying off the solid fuel tank. Maybe it's time to retire the Shuttle, and accelerate the development of the next generation space vehicle.

Farewell to Jarman's Gap

I apologize to Dr. Chewbakka for failing to publish these posts until now. - Ed

For the past month or so I've been bartending and waiting tables at a restaurant right down the street from my beautiful home at the toe of the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Fine dining for fine folks, I guess. There's a smoker out back that's big enough to fit half a hog in. There are two, maybe three back rooms that are full-up with enough sutff - I don't know what the hell it is, and I'm always coming straight from work so I don't have time to poke around - that it'll take the owner a week to get it all out. Unless, of course, he subscribes to the zen theory of "leave all your shit when you move."

Oh yeah - On Monday, May 22nd Jarman's Gap Restaurant in Crozet will be no more.

I was first brought to the joint for a Sunday brunch - the greatest meal of all times - about a year or two ago by my associate The Bear. I was living in Belmont at the time, and my girl was nobly carrying me to work 5 days a week, albeit on a pretty heavy bar tab. I am unaware at the current of the transpirings of the night before the morning(ish) in question, but I am certain that every old lady in town had someone to help her across the street and that I was out very late making sure of this. Also, it may have been in season. I'm not sure.

Finally, I was convinced to leave the neighborhood to seek repast in the country. Unassumingly located in the heart of Crozet, and with only a thin white line and about 4 feet seperating parking lot from state road, my nose began trolling for pancakes. Or piles of scrambled eggs. Greasy, soul-less food that fills the need of the white man.

The duck with figs and parchment-wrapped red potatoes with gorgonzola is a dish with few peers. Probably a little too much butter and garlic on the vegetables, but they're certaily not corn in a can.