Photo Credit:Hurricane Helene damage in North Carolina
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Here's what emergency management done right looks like -- which is the opposite of what's happening now.This is more of a think piece than an article, so please stay with me here. It’s based on decades of public health and disaster management work I’ve been involved with during my career.
I first got involved in this while working as an executive at Lexington County Hospital, across the river from the state Capital of Columbia in South Carolina. I’ve had similar positions at other county and city hospitals, including such disaster areas as Flint, Michigan’s city hospital. In all cases, those hospitals were responsible for public health in the counties and cities they served.
At Lexington County Hospital, we were hit by Hurricane David – not just hit, but for roughly eight hours, the eye of the storm seemed to hover right on top of our hospital, which was in itself frightening.
Nowhere near as big as Helene, even a relatively mild hurricane like David is a monster storm. Until you’ve seen water blown into the hospital through the brick wall, you have no idea what a deluge coming at you at 85 miles per hour can do – let alone Helene’s 140 miles per hour winds – you really can’t appreciate the damage it can do. I do know that when David was approaching, I evacuated my family – my wife and infant son, but not our pet Sheltie, “Pumpkin” – into the hospital. This protected them – hospitals are built to withstand such winds and environmental violence – so I could focus on doing my job without worrying about their safety.
In this South Carolina community, the Army at nearby Fort Jackson provided helicopter emergency medivac – medical and evacuation services. This was great, real-life training for the Army helicopter and air-rescue crews, and it provided excellent med-evac services for our five-county region.
This got me involved in what the military have to offer in the realm of support services during a natural disaster. Later, I worked with a hospital in Jacksonville, on the North Carolina coast, and immediately adjacent to Marine Corps Camp LeJeune. During my time with them, both Hurricane Fran and Hurricane Floyd slammed into the North Carolina coast with winds of up to 137 and 122 miles per hour, respectively. The disaster rivaled Helene’s impact, but in a much smaller scale.
My point (and I do have one) is I’ve seen what’s involved in hurricane recovery, both short-term and long-term. Added to that, my father-in-law, John Lines, was the senior Civil Service employee at what is now the Department of Health and Human Services. This was before FEMA, when his agency responded to natural disasters. His job was to get on site fast and coordinate disaster recovery. I learned a lot from his after-action discussions over the family dinner table, lessons I later put into use when I had similar responsibilities, but on a city or county level. He was a rare breed – a career civil servant who actually cared about what he did and the lives he impacted, for good or ill. We need more like him.
But how does this impact Helene? Well, first, we just learned that the Biden-Harris administration diverted funds intended for hurricane disaster relief to help illegal aliens. Since we can count on having hurricanes each year, this was a Capital B “Bad” decision. Not because of mythical “global warming,” but because hurricanes are how the Atlantic interacts with large land masses. In the Pacific, most tropical cyclones are called “typhoons,” but in the Atlantic, they’re “hurricanes.”
The worst one on record – at least in terms of lost human life – is the monster that clobbered Galveston, Texas more than a century ago. They didn’t have cute names back then – it has gone down in history as the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900. This monster took between 8,000 and 12,000 lives – a more massive disaster than the San Francisco earthquake half a decade later, and far worse than Helene or even Katrina.
However, because there is so much more population in coastal areas today, and so much built-up cities to be destroyed, Katrina is odds-on the king of the monsters, the Godzilla of American hurricanes. But Helene is far and away the worst hurricane to do so much inland damage in the 21st Century.
We can count on these murderous Atlantic mega-storms occurring every year, and if diverting funds from American disaster relief to support in high style millions of people who don’t belong here isn’t a crime, it should be. This makes diversion of funds on a massive scale away from hurricane relief an even bigger crime.
Which brings us back to FEMA and Helene. FEMA exists to help American citizens and legal residents survive and recover from emergencies, natural or man-made. FEMA was called into action after 9/11, just as they were called into action after each hurricane since the agency’s inception. Overall, with a few exceptions, they have botched each disaster recovery effort, caring more about bureaucratic red tape than they do for the human lives they are saving … or losing. Certainly, after both hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, they should have been ready.
Between disasters, FEMA is mocked, the fodder of stand-up comedians. But there is a parallel between FEMA and another, far more effective, disaster-relief agency.
Soldiers, sailors, airmen, spacemen and Marines joke about their modern replacement for the venerable C-Ration known as the MRE – three lies in one: Meals, Ready, to Eat. In the same way, FEMA is several lies in one: Federal – no lie there; Emergency – that’s what they are called on to handle, not to deal with a manageable tidal wave of illegal immigrants; Management, an oxymoron when it comes to almost anything “federal,” and agency, a neutral term that means everything and nothing. FEMA doesn’t exist to help the influx of illegals. It exists to help Americans recover from natural and man-made disasters. In a perfect world, FEMA and its bureaucrats would be essential, efficient and effective. But there’s nothing perfect in Washington, and this agency is worse than most.
But if not FEMA, then who? What civilian, volunteer or military service is more capable of handling disasters than FEMA?
Well, how about the U.S. military – the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Space Force? They have the resources to deal with invasions of other countries, of helping the locals to rebuild after the war has moved on. They also have a long and noble history of disaster relief here in the United States. For example: In late 1929, the coastal city of Tacoma, Washington had a massive power failure. Hospitals were blacked out, lives were at stake. The naval aircraft carrier USS Lexington (CV-2) – at that time the largest warship on earth – tied up at Baker Dock and, for a month, the ship’s turbines were used to create electricity that was piped into Tacoma.
There are books written about how the military has helped civilians survive and recover from disasters, in the U.S. and abroad.
While not a war-fighting skill per se, this is a skill set that the military has continued to keep razor-sharp. Because the military can never predict when or where it will need to deploy a half-million troops from America to the Persian Gulf, as it did in Desert Shield, it maintains stocks of in-good-condition gear needed to support such a force. They have tons of MREs – those much-maligned but rather tasty and certainly convenient Meals, Ready to Eat. They have tents, clothing for all climates, medical supplies, fuel storage blivets and everything else needed for half a million or more personnel to deploy, ready to kick ass and take names. Plus they have massive cargo planes and tactical heavy-lift helicopters, all ready to fly this gear – and the men and women who operate that gear – half-way around the world on a moment’s notice.
Surely, they can muster huge amounts of survival supplies within the United States on little more than a moment’s notice, especially given the advance warning any hurricane provides.
Imagine if, instead of sunning it on the beach in Delaware, President Biden – or his alter ego, Vice President Harris – had convened a national security meeting in the White House, then ordered the military to execute Plan Delta Bravo (they have contingency plans for everything, including this). Within hours, the first flights of heavy-lift C-5M Galaxy and C-17 Globemaster IIIs could be ferrying supplies and experts to staging fields, where C-130J Hercules tactical transports would be winging their way toward the disaster areas most in need. Those massive planes would then disgorge the relief supplies and the troops assigned to getting the food, potable water, shelter, fuel and other necessities to suffering Americans.
Along with the mounds of supplies and skilled operators who know how to deploy them to maximum benefit, a group of logistics wizards with incredibly sophisticated computer systems would be setting up to direct each pallet of supplies from each plane to where it is most needed.
I cannot overstate this – these men and women are wizards who routinely work miracles. A supply sergeant from the Second World War – or even the Korea or Vietnam era – would be stunned at how efficient and effective these would be.
In each locale, the National Guard could be federalized and delegated to the regular troops on the ground to get them where they need to go. While all of this is happening, both fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters would be using sophisticated FLIR – Forward-Looking Infrared – scanners, which can spot the warmth of a living human being even buried in mud and muck, and start identifying survivors in need of rescue, which can be done by the Army’s, Navy’s and Air Force’s fleet of para-rescue helicopters.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg they could deliver. Almost every ground-pounder and every aviator will have a role to play, rescuing Americans and helping to restore essential services, from clean water to electricity. The military must do all this when the tip of the spear goes into battle, and for them, a Helene-level hurricane is just a useful “live-fire” training exercise. It’s all for real, except the part about fighting and defeating the enemy. Here the enemy is Mother Nature herself.
Once all the lives have been saved, once essential services have been restored, once life is poised toward getting back to some measure of normalcy, then FEMA can come in. Even if most of their funds have been diverted to helping illegal aliens instead of American citizens and legal residents, by the time they take over, all they’ll really need is a good broom, and maybe a mop.
Of course, all of this is too obvious for the Biden/Harris administration. They believe that anything worth doing is worth mucking up beyond human belief. But once the lives are saved and the clean-up has begun, there will be little else for them to do – which is about all they’re capable of.
Ned Barnett, in addition to a long career in primarily entrepreneurial public health – and who testified twice before Congress on National Health Policy – is the author of 40 published books, soon to be 41. Many of these focused on the business side of healthcare – or the business side of writing and publishing books. However, 17 were ghost-written for others and more than a dozen are novels. Barnett has worked on three Presidential campaigns, beginning with Ford in 1976. Working at the state level, he managed news media relations and campaign strategy. Currently, Barnett helps other writers to get their books out of their heads and onto bookstore shelves. His wife, Lynn, is a gifted book editor.
He can be reached at Ned Barnett, Not Ed Press, 420 N. Nellis Blvd., A3-289, Las Vegas, NV 89110 – [email protected] – 702-561-1167
