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I Downloaded an App. Suddenly, I was a Rescue Dispatcher. (houstonchronicle.com)
Holly Hartman, a journalism teacher for 22 years, writes an incredible story: After watching nonstop coverage of the hurricane and the incredible rescues that were taking place, I got in bed at 10:30 on Tuesday night. I had been glued to the TV for days. I read an article about the Cajun Navy and the thousands of selfless volunteers who have shown up to this city en masse. The article explained they were using a walkie-talkie-type app called Zello to communicate with each other, locate victims, get directions, etc. I downloaded the app, found the Cajun Navy channel and started listening. I was completely enthralled. Voice after voice after voice coming though my phone in the dark, some asking for help, some saying they were on their way. Most of the transmissions I was hearing when I first tuned in were from Houston, but within 30 minutes or so, calls started coming in from Port Arthur and Orange. Harvey had moved east from Houston and was pummeling East Texas. Call after call from citizens saying they were trapped in their houses and needed boat rescue. None of the volunteer rescuers had made it to that area from Houston, but as soon as the calls started coming in, they were moving out, driving as fast as they could into the middle of Harvey.
And that I can only communicate with drones or their pilots.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
Suddenly, I was a vietnamese callgirl.
Being a decent human being is challenging. So just keep practicing, you will get there.
Not always. Plenty of times people who are not prepared can make a situation worse.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
All states have some kind of good Samaritan law.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Nothing so helpful as an untrained stranger coming into an unfamiliar situation holding a lethal weapon, pumped up on the excitement of justice and at any second likely to be startled out of their wits.
Think of the big headlines where someone unsure about a situation calls the police and an innocent person gets shot as part of a misunderstanding. Amplify that by a couple orders of magnitude and you have what crowd sourced police 'help' would look like.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I can help you, since I saw Hurricane Harvey first-hand. Most people who were saved by these "cajun navy" volunteers did not know that their neighborhoods would become disaster areas. There was no precedent for 53" of rain, or the dams in the reservoirs to have to be opened unleashing millions of gallons of water into neighborhoods that had never flooded before.
Second, evacuation was simply not an option. Houston has a metro-area population of 6.5 million people. The last time they tried to evacuate ahead of a storm, many more people died trying to evacuate than died in Hurricane Harvey. Most people really can't conceive of the sheer size of Houston. It's vast, and the area affected by catastrophic flooding was huge. We moved out of Houston after the flood on the first day there were roads open leaving town (Aug 31) and there were still so many people trying to evacuate ahead of the still-rising flood waters that it took a full day of driving to get from Midtown, where we lived, to the city limits. We only got as far as College Station by late that night.
Houston is a city that has grown without planning, without human reason. The "freedom" that Texans value so highly and brag about so much for certain members of Texas society is a guarantee that when something really bad happens, a lot more people will suffer than if they'd had, you know, zoning laws.
Remember, Texas is a state where the most celebrated, the most revered, and the most re-enacted military battle is one in which every single Texan was slaughtered. Disaster is in their blood (along with toxic substances from the many chemical plants, refineries and fracking rigs).
You are welcome on my lawn.
I'd say the GP AC has demonstrated a complete lack of regard for human life by dismissing everyone who didn't evacuate as "stupid" without any attempt to understand whether they actually had the ability to evacuate.
The viral photo of the seniors at a flooded assisted living center are a good example of what's wrong with that logic. None of those people had the ability to evacuate themselves, but you and the GP are both dismissing them as "stupid" and not worthy of being rescued without any regard for the situation they found themselves in.
There is nothing decent or humane about your comments here. You should both be ashamed of yourselves.
Bad idea. Let the cops handle things. You won't be able to absorb the legal liability.
During a large scale disaster, you may as well say "Let the people die". Police and other government agencies are completely overwhelmed in such situations. San Francisco and other cities in earthquake regions realize that and train local citizens in CERT/NERT classes to take part in a neighborhood emergency response team knowing that it can be days before rescuers outside the area can make it in.
I'd say the GP AC is a "decent human being", to use your words, because of this part of the comment: "Why risk lives saving the stupid?". So clearly the GP AC is compassionate and cares about people, but just people who aren't stupid. If anyone is lacking compassion, I have to agree that it would be the people who chose to stay behind despite ample warning, and who then demand to be rescued, needlessly endangering the lives of the rescuers. Putting other people in danger out of your own negligent behavior is not "being a decent human being".
Not everyone that rides out a hurricane is "stupid", some don't have the means to leave the area.
That may all be true, but it seems to me that the answer should be to increase enforcement of deescalation training and accountability among police forces since we have the authority to do so but for some reason haven't yet, rather than turning to a vigilante force that may or may not have deescalation skills but by definition has no means of enforcing those skills among those who currently lack it.
That's a good question. Fortunately, because the rescuers are volunteers, we do not have to answer it. If they feel like helping people, it is up to them — even if it can be argued, that they are rescuing fools, who'd be better off dead.
And then we can revisit the mandatory charity of providing health care to the fools, who haven't bothered procuring health insurance in advance, school-lunches for kids, whose parents can't afford them, etc. Whoever feels those people should be helped, is welcome to do that on their own — without the government confiscating money at the point of weapon from others.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Well for one, those in Houston were explicitly told 'don't evacuate', basically telling people by trying, they put themselves at risk of being stuck in their car on the road which is more dangerous than their house. In fact that is precisely what did happen in Texas before, more people died trying to evacuate than probably would have died by sitting in place.
Now one could easily say the answer would have been to do proper evacuation planning rather than giving up on evacuation altogether, but that's the government's failing and there's a lot of folks who were doing precisely what they were being told and for somewhat valid reasons.
Rescues *during* the storm are one thing in terms of risk, but by and large we are talking about post-storm rescues in the wake of the flooding. These activities were certainly challenging, contending with hazards and strong currents, but not particularly life threatening given the proper precautions all boaters should know.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
There's a middle ground here. People who genuinely could not evacuate themselves for whatever reason is a different story.
The GP's point about people who were capable of evacuating but stayed and ended up needing to be rescued and causing easily avoidable risks to the emergency responders is valid. Those people are extremely selfish and stupid.
If everyone who could evacuate did, it would have freed up a significant pool of resources that could have instead provided faster, additional aid to the people who had no choice.
In fact, I'd think that if you do indeed have a relative who could not leave for some reason, you'd be first in line to be royally pissed off at the idiots who could have evacuated but chose to stay and thus tied up resources that might have allowed your relative to be rescued sooner.
Note that we are not talking about people jumping out in the middle of a hurricane to help people. We are talking about folks puttering about in boats in flooded areas fetching people stranded in their homes. It's certainly more challenging boating than most of them are used to, but not crazy so much so that they are putting their lives in grave danger for the sake of attempting rescues.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
That is very different. Things like police auxiliaries and CERT/NERT where citizens are identified, credentialed and given training to help out with a limited range of common needs is great idea! As far as disaster preparedness and response goes.
Having people download an app to play cop for a day in the way downloading uber lets you play cab driver is a different proposition entirely and sounds a lot more problematic to me.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
>Houston is a city that has grown without planning, without human reason.
Even if Houston had sane zoning laws, there literally is no precedent for 53 inches of rain in 2 days, which is the average amount of rain that Houston gets in 365 days. The local and extended area response was still a hell of a lot better than what happened in New Orleans after Katrina (where there were mass rapes, lots of people firing on rescue boats and helicopters, and it took a large military presence to get things back under control).
>The "freedom" that Texans value so highly and brag about so much for certain members of Texas society is a guarantee that when something really bad happens, a lot more people will suffer than if they'd had, you know, zoning laws. While I'm all for shitting on Houston's lack of zoning for many different reasons, this did not contribute anything to the problem with Harvey. Harvey killed 70 people (so far), while Katrina killed closed to 2,000.
It could have been so much worse.
Wow. This article describes what I tried to do in 1995 for the Kobe earthquake, 20 years ago. But it suggests ways things go wrong as well. In the linked article the journalist put massive effort in and helped some people. But she also told everyone repeatedly that help was coming, even when she knew there were no boats in the water. I do not want to judge, since it sounds like she was doing a superhuman feat that nobody else was there to do and that was the best that was humanly possible. In the end compassion directed her to make some decisions and compassion later haunted her enough to write the article, and explain everything so that others can help in the future.
At that time I was at a new Internet provider that opened for business just before the quake, and I hoped to get Tokyo University to act as a call center to pick up calls for help. There was no news coming out of the area and no phones, but Internet lines were working. We would put it together on a web page and coordinate grassroots disaster relief, sharing people's needs and who could bring help there. In the end we couldn't do it for two main reasons. News organizations refused to cooperate by sharing what they saw from a helicopter, and Tokyo U. said there were too many bureaucratic problems with cooperating. In the end while I was able to provide some support on my own, mostly by relaying information and helping people who were in the area to upload pictures, there was a limit to what was possible. And then the most amazing site was created by a Stanford student if I remember correctly. Nowadays there are lots more systems. I believe the phone company or was it Yahoo made one that lets you say if you are safe.
Since data connections are usually more resilient than voice service (and even voice over data apps degrade) there will likely continue to be a need for data-based systems in emergency situations. I don't know why the emergency support dropped to such a horrifying extent that nobody else could help. I hope the article stimulates more people to recognize the need for better support of communities in disaster areas. If 911 gets overloaded or ignores a key communications channel like this app, then perhaps there should be a way to bring more people on board from different walks of life in an emergency and coordinate online. In fact anyone online even far away from the disaster area could have done so. This journalist took up the challenge but it shouldn't have to happen that way ever again.
Amateur radio operators provide life-saving emergency communications (EMCOMM) during a natural disaster. But the first rule that is emphasized to hams who participate in EMCOMM is this:
"Don't become part of the problem. You are there to assist, not become a victim or act as a first responder."
Typically, it's Fire that does rescues, more than Police. I've done both jobs and have had little issue with the public doing stuff in parallel because , well, in our country the state and its organs should be under the jurisdiction of the people, not the other way around. Having said that, I think '2 minutes of training' isn't enough. Having said THAT, given that the Cajun Navy rescues folks where others don't, I think it's incredible and awesome.
With the exception of a few unAmerican places like New York, we do NOT have 'gun registration' in the USA.
To a great extent this is why ham radio is still around. I applaud folks good intentions to jump in and help, but counting on cell towers to stay up is courting a bigger disaster. There will be storms/earthquakes, etc that will take down the cell towers, the fiber that connects it, the electricity the supports it,and the diesel supply chain that keeps back-up generators running. Ham radio frequencies can reach hundreds and even thousands of miles to areas outside of an impacted area and are often the only line of communication in a disaster. We also need to enable the FM receivers that are built into modern cell to support broadcast of "critical, need to know information."
It's easy to say that when you're wealthy enough that you can afford to fill your car with gas (and you have a car) to take your valuables and get out of town, but when you're faced with leaving everything you value in life back in your home so you can wait for a bus that never comes to take you to a shelter of unknown safety/supplies to be packed in a room with 1000 other people who, like you , are also too poor to evacuate.... you might reconsider.
And exactly what "arrangements" is someone supposed to make when they have no money or family elsewhere to take them in?
Yep, just take that $5 you managed to save up last year and buy a $1000 train ticket to some random place where you'll have no connections, food, or source of income to get back on your feet.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Ham radio operators have a similar type thing we can use called echo-link. You can't download it unless you have a Ham radio license though. Sometimes I don't have my mobile radio with me, so instead of carrying a walkie-talkie around, I can punch up a repeater using echo-link and use it similar to a walkie-talkie. 99% of the time, I'm just copying the mail on the weather spotters repeater.
Houston is a city that has grown without planning, without human reason.
To be fair to Houston, and while I'm sure it is pretty bad, I don't think you'll find any large or even small city in the world which took "get entire population to go somewhere else on the same day" into account when they designed the transport system.
Most cities can't handle workers going home in the afternoon. "Well planned" cities only just scrape past this barrier.
The self reliance was always a myth. Unless you moved straight into the heart of completely untamed "Indian Country" and built a cabin and livelihood with your own two hands. In which case you were probably killed or chased of very quickly by the natives as an illegal invader, as word had already spread from the East Coast as to exactly what sort of demons the Europeans always proved themselves to be.
In reality that much-loved independence was always backed by a network of friends, family, neighbors, etc. that pulled together as a community to help out those who fell on hard times. Or you just died when bad luck hit. That happened too. But as populations grew, those personal bonds broke down - there's no such think as a tight-knit community of millions. Or even tens of thousands. And so the support that community provided must now be provided by larger, more faceless mechanisms (which certainly have their own problems).
As for intelligence - America has had a strong anti-intellectual bent from its inception "nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." " -- Isaac Asimov
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It all depends on the situation, I suppose. One of my hobbies is sailing (I have a 27' sloop), and the basic rule on the water is that if someone is in distress, you respond to it if you are able, and it is safe to do so. This is a tradition that is almost as old as history itself. The last one I responded to was a guy in a power vessel with a dead engine, and slowly drifting towards rocks. I passed within a few feet of him, tossed him a line, and took him under tow.
That said, in the modern era, this is usually done in coordination with the coast guard. When a distress call comes in, they're up on the radio asking for any available vessel to respond. In some cases, they just want to have additional eyes on the scene, and in other cases to search and/or perform what rescue is possible until they arrive on scene.
One of the more interesting calls I ever heard, though, was the Coast Guard looking for someone who would be willing/able to take command of a 35' sailboat in one of the local bays. From what I could gather, what was going on is that a husband and wife had been out, he got injured and subsequently evacuated, and she wasn't comfortable single-handing the boat to get herself and it to the nearby town so she could join her husband. I was already 3 hours away at that point, but otherwise I'd have offered my services.
Is this the same as a disaster area? No, but it is a situation where "civilians" are performing rescue/safety type tasks, at the direction and usually in coordination with the authorities.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
"evacuate themselves" - Fun trivia note, when a person evacuates themselves, it means they soiled themselves, not that they transported to a different location. I am pretty sure all of these people had the ability to evacuate themselves, but they probably didn't have the ability to travel.
I'm pretty sure some of the people who didn't evacuate themselves to another location ended up evacuating themselves your way.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
That is why groups like the: III%, Cajun Navy, American Freedom Keepers, Highwaymen, Riders of the Confederacy -- go out in groups, set up a base of operations with a logistical support network, and generally have some training. Many of them are also ex military, ex police, ex medics, worked in logistics, and many of them are techs as well. They also usually have human intelligence on the ground before they get there, tend to make contact with law enforcement when they arrive so they know who they are so they don't freak out with a mess of guys in gear show up. You don't want people to mistake you for an armed group of looters! They try to connect with businesses and church people ahead of going. They tend to take multiple forms of communications gear, extra fuel, and whatever other resource they can with them that might not be available that they can carry.
That does not mean its always perfectly organized, pretty, free from chaos, nor that it is free from danger. If your area of operations is bacteria infested water, that alone is a danger. It does not mean you cannot end up a part of the problem even after successfully being a part of the solution. Especially if there is no logistical support available to you easily beyond what you can carry. Situations can change rapidly. A levee breaks or a river crests or a road is completely washed out after you get in. Stuff happens. I've seen some of these groups do some pretty amazing things with what they have to work with. Sometimes that is the only support that will exist.
An example of that danger from Hurricane Harvey is where several people took the only good option available when effecting a rescue or bringing in supplies would otherwise have to be brought in by air -- the monster truck or 5 tons with very high intakes and exhausts. These could get into areas that boats could not, and other vehicles definitely could not. They were even in areas that helicopters would be useless in. However, wheels have wheel bearings. They don't perfectly seal. At best they can be packed with grease to keep some of the mud and cruddy water out. After a few days of operating these in that water while sometimes carrying in heavy loads of supplies and ferrying people out, they literally drove them until the wheels came off. The issue of logistical support being unavailable put at least one of them in a bad situation. They did way more good than bad, but not having that support when the rest of society is washing away down the river is never a good thing, especially when the waters are rising all around you and you cannot effect a roadside repair.
All of that being said: A lot of rescue, national guard and support organizations simply bypassed the smaller towns leaving them to fend on their own. The militias and other groups saved a lot of people, coordinated their own usually completely free of your tax dollars support of communities, ran and helped organize the only distribution points available, coordinated with other charities, trucking companies (which is what I did on this end) to get supplies in and help stabilize things. They also did it faster than government response and resources could allow in a great many cases. Many of them are sticking around for as long as they are financially able to to continue providing support during the clean up phase. Or at least sticking around until that mission can be handed off to someone else.
People having downloaded zello provided a way to communicate where people had little else. It also led to a fair amount of duplicate calls for assistance because not everyone is on the same networks. Its still a great resource to have. The more options you give yourself ahead of a crisis the better.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
Then I would slowly start to question 'what is wrong' with "your system".
Politics.
"Freedom" is why the government cannot order people to leave their homes. This is not a wrong in the system. "Politics" comes in when people exercise their freedom not to evacuate and then expect the government to make good their losses. That's the wrong part.