COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to Us

The post below on logistics all but predicts this:

Five days after Susan Dewey arrived in New Orleans to celebrate her birthday, she was so desperate to get out that she banded with hundreds of other tourists to hire 10 buses for $25,000 to rescue them.

After waiting hours, they learned government officials had commandeered their buses to evacuate others.

Transportation resources are limited. You send your busses where you can fill them, and fill them quickly, and turn them around. The tourists don't get a first claim. Nobody gets a first claim. It's a numbers game. And government competes with private citizens in order to obtain scarce resources. And unless you want to have a situation in which the rich and the privileged can simply buy their way out, and damn the masses, you have to allow government the trump card.

The hotel will at least have some prestocked food. Latrine facilities exist, even if rudimentary. The hotel is not a public health hazard nearly to the extent the stadium is. The main effort, and all wheeled transportation assets, must go to clearing the stadium.

If the busses are full, then the Louisiana authorities did the right thing.

Now, if logisticians are REALLY at the top of their game, those busses will turn right around and go back. But they won't go back empty. Someone will have the wherewithal to load MREs, bottled water, toiletries, and other neccessities into the cargo areas. The police or National Guard will take firm control of the point of embarkation and debarkation, and prevent a rush on the supplies that interferes with the loading of the busses.

The goal: No truck should ever roll empty in a crisis. You can always backhaul supplies. Use trailers where available. Able bodied citizens in life support areas can help form chain gangs, although I haven't seen this done.

In Florida, the usual practice has been for Guardsmen to load ice and other supplies into cars. The citizens don't even get out of the cars. We'll put supplies directly in the trunk for them, and they drive away. If you let the citizens out of the cars, they gum up the works and cause problems.

In Hurricane Iwa, when I was a kid, you didn't always have that luxury, because many of the most severely afflicted have no vehicles. Ditto for Iniki on Kauai.

And you sure don't have it here. Citizens with cars should clear well out of the area on their own power and not rely on government help. The authorities are doing exactly right to focus on the stadium. It's a race against dysentry and cholera, and the medical infrastructure is not there to support those who begin to succumb. The main effort is the stadium.

Once the stadium is dealt with, then officials can turn their attention to other things.

It's important not to get myopia, though. While the execution must focus on the stadium, planning should be well underway for other operations. A secondary effort, for example, could begin taking people out of the Astrodome.

I've seen reports about how the head of FEMA was not aware that so many people needed to be evaced from the stadium. That's not FEMA's job. That's a job for the county Emergency Operations Center, which monitors the status of key facilities throughout the county, and coordinates and prioritizes the relief effort. The EOCs then keep the governor's office informed, and request support for missions beyond their capabilities.

The governor's office allocates and prioritizes resources among the county EOCs.

FEMA does not decide where to send the trucks. County and state officials do. FEMA just helps the state procure the resources they need from outside the state. For example, FEMA may help coordinate the arrival of portable latrine and shower trailers from all over the country. But then they're turned over to the control of the governor, who allocates them to the county EOCs and the mayor's offices.

If the head of FEMA knew every detail about what was happening in the county EOCs, it would be evidence of micromanagement, and I would wonder if FEMA were putting its full attention into doing its job.

It's important that the different agencies cover their own lanes well before getting fancy.

The key is the county EOCs.