The Cajun Navy and the Vigilante Future of Disaster Relief
gq.com
gq.com
I've lived through a few major natural disasters around the country. These ad hoc disaster organizations materialized out of the community and were effective every single time. The government will often step aside, and just act in a supporting role if the volunteers have a good ground organization. In one case where I was volunteering, we came up with a shopping list of things we could use immediately to mitigate the major problems, and the state government rooted through warehouses, found what we needed in other parts of the state, helicoptered it in, and just gave it to us to use as we saw fit. We had a plan and an ability to execute it much more quickly than the official agencies.
(As an aside, during my first major natural disaster, I discovered that union regulations limit the hours the government workers onsite can put in, the conditions they can operate in, and the kinds of things they can do without regard for if those things need to be done given the nature of the disaster. These volunteer organizations are unhindered by such rules and will work their ass off, whatever is necessary. Letting these volunteers run a lot of the relief efforts and supporting them instead taking point is a way for the government to work around its own structural lack of urgency.)
I’ve been involved in a few disasters, including in places with strong unions. Never saw that happen.
Don't take it as anti-union, they just had a lot of rules and processes that made them relatively unproductive under the circumstances. There were 30-40 of us working together, an ad hoc organization of volunteers, working 16-hour shifts with almost no breaks that essentially did the bulk of the disaster mitigation work. It made for poor optics with the locals; they saw a bunch of ragtag out-of-towners trapped in the disaster with them working their asses off while the government employees stood around drinking coffee half the time. I understand how that happens but it wasn't a good look. And this is why communities love their volunteer disaster response. (And full credit to the local community, they took fantastic care of us the best they could.)
I’ve seen my share of work to rule bullshit, but never anything like that. I cannot fathom what a toxic shitshow that agency must be.
My first experience was as a trapped disaster victim, who volunteered because I literally had no way out so I opted to make the best of a terrible situation to the extent of my abilities. But it was such a positive experience that I've since volunteered to go into places I had no need to go. It is a very high leverage and much of the best disaster response comes from ordinary people, don't wait for the government to do something.
The nursing-home director was preventing people from reaching aid. He was just a robot following orders, and in extreme circumstances sometimes you gotta break machines to save people.
Ass-beatings are not often justified, but when they are, boy they are.
But if your residents are "knee deep in sewage" that's pretty gross.
But when the police showed up shortly afterwards, it was the nursing home director they detained.
When the police arrived they sided with the guy trying to get the people out of the poop.
Cowardice is not a civic duty, nor a virtue. Use of force by civilians in perceived service of the law is often justified. Going out looking for a fight is one thing, serving the public is another.
Ideally, the law can be upheld without force; when force is required to uphold the law, we could ideally rely on peace officers to be ready, willing, and able to take on that burden; but in the end, it is the responsibility of society as a whole to uphold the law and prevent suffering.
When force is necessary, and when peace officers aren't around, a person who uses the necessary degree of force to rescue old people from a drone who would rather watch them wade naked in their own faeces until they go hypothermic or fall ill, than violate a workplace policy is not a vigilante, but an upstanding citizen.
It's natural to scrutinize and question the motivations of somebody who has used force, but it is a disservice to us all to hold common people to a higher standard of conduct than the police.
The misspelling of a word does not destroy the sentence structure.
The legal questions which are a lot more interesting around this kind of rescue operation are property damage, unintentional harms, incompetence, liability, etc. (like, if volunteers direct people to a shelter which is itself unsafe, or if people get harmed during rescues. Government agents have a lot of immunity there, relative to private citizens.)
Apparently the cops thought it was immediate enough, since they showed up shortly afterwards and sided with the "vigilante."
This is an important discussion to have. Hopefully it doesn't wind up hampering citizen disaster response. But there needs to be better ways of coordinating these things. Especially when the politicians who are on TV claiming they have the "the greatest disaster response ever" and brushing over real problems happening on the ground.
Typically you have first responders, and a network of mutual aid for broad scope disasters. During a major disaster, state level emergency management, state police or other get involved.
The level of competence and resources varies between states when it comes time for escalation.
What's new or what's worse, is a huge "human needs" bureaucracy which fails entirely to actually meet those human needs despite soaking up a lot of money.
It varies in scale. Here in Santa Rosa, first responders actually did a good job in dealing with the fire. But in the post-fire situation, the effective emergency that those who lost their homes have at best a small chance to rebuild their lives isn't being dealt with - but then again it's just a more extreme symptom of the housing crisis, which isn't being dealt with 'cause that housing crisis is also a solution to the "how to we maintain financial markets" question.
But there you have a private-public complex everywhere that's taking up a lot of resources without giving backing enough or sometimes anything.
If you've got the appetite, learn about ICS/NIMS. They are built on a history of mistakes & missteps due to weak organization. NIMS in particular was commissioned after preventable errors in interagency operations trapped & killed firefighters in the towers in 2001.
(The other thing I'd like to see, which is done in some areas, is turning gas stations into disaster fortified base stations -- they have fuel tankage already, add generators to pump when the grid is down, and maybe store a connex or two full of bottled water and other disaster supplies on property, or in an underground tank type thing (which they already need to have installed for fuel, so whenever they upgrade from single to double wall or whatever, dig one extra vault). Putting a cell tower onsite, and maybe some kind of satcom backhaul, and some kind of data network which could work even in isolated mode, would help in situations like Puerto Rico. The incremental cost of funding this with tax money would be far lower than building up other community response sites.
But such a system is open to very easy abuse. Let's say I fancy a nice 4x4 "so that I can tow people stuck in the snow in winter". Do I get to write off the cost of my 4x4 just because I tow people in snow two days a year?
Further, FEMA has failed Louisiana too many times, and we're fed up with it. That name has become a "swear" in this part of the country.
While it appears there's room for improvement in US disaster response services, we should keep in mind that any major emergency is basically Nature pulling a DoS attack on us; it would be unreasonable to expect the government to be everywhere immediately. (Which, basically,is why they should reimburse private citizens coming in to help.)
Saw the fires cresting the hills from home this week. But what do people expect if they build a long string of homes into chaparral? The long urban-wildland boundary denies access to nature, until it is reclaimed by the fire.
It sucks having lots of friends lose their homes, but those homes never should have been built in the first place. When Venturans got a chance to vote on new houses in the hills, 85% of us rejected it. And thank goodness, because 100% of those homes would be ashes by now.
"Will there be an organized response to a disaster?" is right up there with "Do murders get routinely and professionally investigated?" in terms of whether or not we are living in a civilization.
Aiming no higher than reimbursing the ad-hoc vigilante efforts is such a dark worldview.
Not Normal: https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2016/08/16/louisiana-f...
Video of devastation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZSXGin-zNA
Law enforcement would have been prepared to handle normal-scale hurricanes, flooding, etc. (They do) but were not prepared to handle this kind of uncommon disaster. And even though the disaster was unforeseen, the government still helped some - my parents were removed from their house via Coast Guard. (But many more in the same area were removed by locals with boats)
I do agree that it makes sense to reimburse cajun navy participants in some way but I'm not sure how
eh, it really hinges on how much we want to pay. i'm not saying you can just throw money at problems to make them go away, but there are quite a few things we could do.
An obvious government organization that feed and clothe tens of thousands of people half way around the world at a moment's notice is the military. That of course costs ~$600 billion a year.
It's feasible to have caches of food and water and generators and mobile cell stations that can be trucked or airlifted with no notice. Mobile emergency rooms, kitchens and shelters aren't really that hard to put together. It would cost billions, but it's totally doable.
The other half is about people. Partly getting high skill people from around the country to where they're needed, when they're needed. Electricians for example. really important for recovery. Also, volunteer organization. There are effectively a ton of unskilled people that need to be fed and sheltered. And there's a ton of unskilled work that can be done. I'm not saying we should force people to work to get fed after a disaster. I'm saying lots of those people want to fix things, and we're not great at using their labor.
FEMA is what it is. it could be very good. but that ain't cheap.
Apart from official hiring issues, why do you think they're free from the other ones? They're all natural things you have to deal with one more than one person is involved.
But if someone joins the Cajun Navy with faulty equipment and they die because of it, you wouldn't expect the Cajun Navy to be liable for that - if indeed the Cajun Navy is even an identifiable legal entity with any assets.
When your town looks like this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZSXGin-zNA , and the fire department is fully underwater, the locals with boats win on quick response time. (Followed by disaster-specific response teams like the coast guard, etc.)
I've shown up at car accidents as a private individual and expended wool blankets (not taking one back after it's covered in blood), first aid supplies, water, etc. Maybe $300-500 lifetime total, which isn't a big deal for me, but it'd be nice to be able to get reimbursed/replaced.