A member of the Cajun navy would be quite justified in taking the cost of boat, gas, safety equipment, etc out of any taxes owed to the government. Seeing as how he is doing their job and all.
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.)
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.
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?
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.