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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.
Suddenly, I was a vietnamese callgirl.
Being a decent human being is challenging. So just keep practicing, you will get there.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.