I downloaded an app and was part of the Cajun Navy

Skills may, to a limited extent, be substituted by something that guides decision making. Like that chatbot that helps people file small claims against Equifax. But that works best with well documented stable situations, and can be brittle in more fluid (no pun intended) ones.

As well, when it comes to definitive local resources like phone numbers, web sites, you have to keep checking them and updating them. And if information is changing rapidly or uncertain, this may be extremely difficult.

I am a generally thoughtful individual, but I really see the benefit of a domain expert in planning any app or tool for this purpose.

I'm thinking of more of a social graph where civilians who are going to help in these sorts of situations can be organized more efficiently. For instance, instead of having a bunch of people drive their personal cars out there, going out as a group would improve the individual's abilities to help efficiently.

I am thinking more like a level below volunteer firepeople, with some regional and national coordination.

They will also be deployed domestically to repress public uprisings, etc.

If you want to help people, you're better off becoming a firefighter. Unfortunately, outside of some small community volunteer firefighter groups, this really isn't an option. The National Guard does not fill this gap.

Just to add another data point, everything up in Oregon works exactly the same. Monthly meetings, monthly trainings, optional trainings for specialty teams (rope support, trail running, ATV, mountain biking, etc) every week or so, and a call-out once every 1-2 weeks.

If you're even remotely interested in emergency preparedness I highly recommend signing up with a community search and rescue organization.

not in a badly effected area, but definitely there was flooding nearby. most of my friends/family/etc (irrespective of area) had power/phone/etc throughout, even those with flood damage. Which is not to say the flood damage was exaggerated however.

I personally only had a power outage for 4h only after the electric company blew some equipment trying to restore service for others.. (again not in a bad area)

we are pretty sprawly and most power lines, etc are above ground except in the very center of town. not sure if that helped or not, but perhaps worth mentioning - but as for trees falling etc, this storm had very low wind, etc for those in the HTX area (same def not true for those who experienced the actual hurricane)

Not a great environment to be trying to get _just_ the right level of zoom to hit the form input field on your smartphone.

You hit the nail on the head here. I've been fooling around with computer programming for over a decade now (since I was in Jr. High), and Arduinos and Raspberry Pis as long as they have been available, but I never put much thought into ham radio. Most of the makers I know go straight to pre-made WiFi or Bluetooth modules when the time comes to make their projects work wirelessly - accepting their limitations while overlooking much simpler solutions which can be achieved though RF and a little bit of know-how. In hindsight, I wish I had learned about ham radio much sooner.

There is a massive schism between the ham community and the hacker community which doesn't make much sense to me. They are both very much interested in finding novel solutions to problems and sharing them with the community, doing more with less, placing value in decentralization, and have a similar sort of independent counter-culture and grounded respect for technology.

I think it is simply a problem of awareness. Before I got into ham radio, I assumed that the FCC simply allocated a tiny bucket of useless spectrum for amateur use, and that it's practical utility was quite limited. I didn't know that amateurs had access to bands all the way across the spectrum, that they are allowed to transmit at 1500 watts, that they could talk directly to the ISS, or make use of satellite repeaters and reach across oceans with a walkie talkie. On the HF bands, ham radio makes international communication possible without any middleman, subscription fee, or infrastructure. It is also a godsend for people launching weather balloons, allows you to build some incredibly badass RC craft, and can serve as the backbone of all sorts of other fascinating endeavors.

I think the schism is generational. The maker movement is composed largely of kids who grew up with the Internet, and really took off with social media and web 2.0, while the ham community is composed of a large body of people who came of age and mastered their craft before computers became ubiquitous. For better or worse, a lot of them seem to remain set in their ways. Many ham websites, including those of active clubs, brick and mortar stores, and repeater networks, look like they're straight out of the 90s, and social media outreach remains quite limited. I suppose the fundamentals of radio, much like physics or mathematics, hasn't changed much in the past 50 years, but these communities unfortunately seem to be living in different worlds.

I think that it is essential for us to bridge the gap. The alliance of the hams and the makers really stands to bring positive outcomes for both communities.

Personally, I'm planning to take an exam in literally 28 days from now. In my country there's a group of HAM operators training regularly for emergency operations (EMCOM), and I'm interested in participating in that.

Decentralised radio is essentially ham radio. Individual units talking directly to each other, without relying on a single point of failure (the cell company). As others have said above, ham radio is a godsend in some situations. If you use the right bands, you can talk halfway around the world while running off batteries and using a wire thrown over a tree for an antenna.

We all came away from this with the feeling that we had done some good for people that really genuinely needed and appreciated outside help. We began actively planning how we could assist the next time something like this happened. We analyzed what we had done and how we did it and identified our own deficiencies and came away resolving to be more prepared.

I think that likely benefits not only us but those who we attempt to assist if there is a next time.

I honestly wasn't trying to knock the Cajun Navy or Zello though it probably reads that way in spots. I'm a consultant in real life and a lot of my work involves identifying logical problems and other deficiencies in my client's operations so that they can focus their improvement efforts where they get the most benefit. Hopefully some of this is useful at some later point.

One thing I forgot to mention that we encountered involves rescuers entering neighborhoods where most residents do not speak English. The 'official' groups we encountered didn't have anyone who could translate English to Spanish or vice versa and thus were unable to understand what problems one potential evacuee needed resolved. Groups should get an introduction to Google Translate or other real-time translation tools so that people who may be in imminent danger can be assisted without having to wait for a translator to arrive.

Houston is a very diverse city culturally with large vibrant populations of people who do not speak or understand English. Once you get into smaller cities you are more likely to find groups where Spanish is the main language. Tools for communication with ALL affected people should be available with all trained, official first responders.

I think your idea about use of unconventional resources is spot on. Most people there with a boat and not part of an official group only wanted to know where they needed to launch or would be allowed to launch and addresses where people were requesting assistance or rescue. I believe a very effective solution to disaster response was demonstrated in Houston and the surrounding area over the last couple of weeks. There are things that could use some polish but overall it is a great model.

Great idea, but unfortunately when it gets officialized, the lawyers and the bureaucrats get involved and start talking about liability and ways to insert themselves into the situation to profit from it and things quickly gain the complexity of joining the original organization, so it ultimately fails. Maybe I'm too cynical here.

Ham operators, I hope, will always be a critical part of the infrastructure. Their ability to relay information when other options are unavailable is very important.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/volunteers-helping-harvey-victi...

The National Guard and Coast Guard are armed and did respond to rescuers being attacked. Not sure if they actually fired back in response, or only forced them to leave.

I was the one who created the Cajun Navy's crowd-sourced rescue mapping strategy, though, while helping out with the 2016 Louisiana floods, so I can give a little insight.

At first, I just saw that people were posting requests for rescue in various Facebook groups and becoming quickly buried under requests by others. So I spent a lot of time combing through the posts and adding the details to a spreadsheet, which I then posted on Batchgeo for rescuers to use.

After that, I started working with the people from one of the Facebook groups who had set up a Google Form for submitting rescue requests, and ended up periodically copying requests over from there.

We also had another form for updates regarding a specific request, and were fielding phone calls from people about it as well.

The original map is actually still up here if interested: https://batchgeo.com/map/984218ef8a04f3587f6e723561501e89

https://www.buzzfeed.com/maryanngeorgantopoulos/crowdscourin...

The maps are down now as I believe the website went dark once the main flooding danger in Houston was past.

The map appeared to show markers all over the Texas Coast color-coded based on the type of request. The user was able to select a marker and in the left pane a descriptive entry gave information about the address, the number of people requesting rescue including a breakdown of #adults versus #children or elderly. Many posts had telephone contact numbers and each one had an entry from the person requesting assistance granting permission to post their request. Something like an "I Agree" entry after their contact info in the post. I visited the website while it was up and looked at the help request submission part and it was a pretty simple dialog set collecting the needed information along with an "I Agree" or a "Yes" button at the end granting the website the permission to post.

Early problems were predictable. Some of the posts should have been expired because the people had been rescued. Handling the updating of the information required the rescuers to confirm that the people had been rescued so that marker could be cleared. We ended up following several leads that had to be from the previous day. When we arrived at the target address the streets were dry, families were walking pets and kids were riding bikes in the street in one case. A couple of others also involved places where waters had receded and one involved a non-existent address that turned out to be along the beltway between two businesses.

The website did clear many of the older posts and altered the color-coding so it would be clear what you were heading for - medical problem needing assistance, people trapped needing rescue, etc.

It was quite handy. I know there were other maps including one maintained by the Cajun Navy that was similar to the one we used.

There is room for improvement in the maps and in how they coordinate with rescue assets. Timeliness is important and older posts in neighborhoods known to be heavily visited by rescuers should be cross-checked using contact info provided. A lot of traffic on the Cajun Navy channels was people confirming that a rescue needed to happen or that one had already occurred for a particular address.

I believe that the actual requests for assistance on the map I used came from those needing the help since many of them were from someone who was posting for a person needing help who had no access to phone or other communication network. I don't know who had the ability to remove the markers once they were placed but I know that feature by itself needed improvement in tracking rescues that had already occurred.

I was thinking 150Mhz~ MURS like Gotenna for a few miles range.

Or the Civil Air Patrol? Or (less military, not non-military) US Coast Guard?

You're basically describing the Coast Guard. I believe they do hire reservists.

Not entirely non-military, but typically IIRC military aspects are almost entirely defense only.. so for example barring a USA invasion, or perhaps a complete depletion of the entire national guard system, you're not going to war.

https://tmd.texas.gov/news

clearly involved in this case.

Try to direct development to less vulnerable areas, require flood control planning ahead of building construction, stuff like that.

I'm on a volunteer fire department, and have had the same concerns, although on a more local level.

Likewise in London, a waiter held a door to keep terrorists out [2] and people again opened their doors to let visitors to the city stay [3]. The US does not have a monopoly on "the people" looking after themselves.

1: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/attack-in-par...

2: http://metro.co.uk/2017/06/06/waiter-blocks-door-to-stop-ter...

3: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/04/sofaforlondo...

I'm always amazed at how willing some Americans are to attribute basic human traits to "American Exceptionalism" and then deny those traits to peoples from other countries.

Hundreds of people opened their home on July 14 2016 after the terrorist attack in Nice. Same in Paris before that. And same in Barcelona this summer.

While it's true that American people jump into action, it's just wrong, and immensely disrespectful of the people who helped, to say the same doesn't happen in France or in other countries.

as for 'the south':

see also sandy recovery efforts

see also people getting shot when they shouldn't have in nola for being in the wrong neighborhood and having the wrong skin color..

that said, we do have more boats, monster trucks, jetskis, and guns, and arent afraid to use them (even to rescue national guard trucks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAvNd7eH9MA)

My question is, what would have happened if the author hadn't stepped up to do dispatch? You would have had people searching blindly street by street, not knowing where they were needed. I am not for one second advocating that neighbors (or strangers) don't step up to help when needed, even at great personal risk.

By all reports the disorganized response ended up working well in difficult circumstances. But when (not if) there is an earthquake in a major city, this level of response is going to cost many lives. You will have a million people in need of food, water, and medical attention. There will be no power (let alone cellular service or Internet needed to run an app). There will be no gasoline because the pipelines will be out of service and a good number of the refineries are near fault lines. And you will have no warning.

We spend a trillion dollars a year on the Defense Department (and before anyone asks, I support that, too) that can, as noted elsewhere, project military force almost anywhere in the world, within hours. It's justifiably marveled at for its capability. Why can't we make it a national goal to get 911 up and running in a disaster zone in our own country within a similar time period?

I used the word heroes to describe the volunteers, your interpretation that I could possibly have been opposed them contributing is uncharitable at best.

There's no conscription anymore though, and given the short serving time of 9 months at the end of "civil-service" (the alternative to conscription), that shouldn't play a role anymore.

Not that the pros are necessarily in good shape themselves. On 9/11 the NYC emergency command center was located in the towers and there was extensive compatibility problems with radio communication. Or the firefighters after the Loma Prieta quake who rushed to help only to find they couldn't use the hydrants. But shouldn't we, as a country, resolve that in a major disaster we'll at least have enough people and communications infrastructure on the ground to coordinate the local resources? Especially one like Harvey where you have a 48-hour forecast with a small error.