Michael Swickard

What is best – planing for disasters before they happen or dealing with them afterward? We have seen the results of the latter in Haiti and New Orleans.

How could New Orleans happen? It was not a matter of if a hurricane would devastate New Orleans, only when. The national, state and local disaster preparedness for just such a hurricane was itself a disaster.

The Haiti aftermath makes me think of the Y2K worldwide disaster planning 10 years ago. Some people stocked up on food, water, power generators and toilet paper. Most did not.

To those stockpiling I asked, “If your house has the only heat and lights, you can expect those who did not plan for the disaster to visit you. Do you have enough for everyone or will you shoot the neighbors to protect your supplies? And, how will you ‘fit’ in your neighborhood when the crisis is over?”

There was no disaster and most Americans, even those with years of toilet paper stored, said, “I told you so.”

Those were the good old days because the threat was imaginary.

Terrorists and nukes

Americans appear to not take a real threat seriously – that of terrorists exploding a nuclear device in the United States. A nuclear device could be smuggled into our country in a load of illegal drugs, since the United States is powerless to stop most drug smuggling.

Do our enemies wish to kill millions of Americans? Is there material for nuclear bombs available to terrorists? Does our government see this threat as credible? Yes to all of the above.

When I was young we had nuclear attack drills where we crouched under our school desks. The first time I saw a nuclear blast flatten a house on television I realized that crouching under my desk was useless.

What if we were not in the blast zone but must deal with the ensuing chaos? Two questions: How should citizens prepare? And, should our government compel us to be prepared?

I have been told that some of my columns are depressing. That does not mean we are not in danger. Some people ask if I could just write columns about puppies and good stuff. Nope.

So, what do we individual citizens do if one of our cities goes up in a nuclear flash and our country grinds to a halt for a while? Do many of us have emergency stores of food, water, protective tape and plastic liners to seal up a survival room?

Gosh, writing about that is not as much fun as writing about my dog, Conrad, who is fun to be around and does not worry in the least about nuclear explosions. Does Conrad’s carefree attitude protect him from terrorists? No.

Four questions

There are four main survival questions:

• Do you have several weeks of food and water?

• Do you have rudimentary medicine for you and your family if the authorities are unable to respond?

• Can you survive the cold or heat?

• How do you deal with attempts to take by force your supplies? A huge problem in both Haiti and New Orleans involved looters and lawlessness.

Quite possibly we may not be faced with these hard questions since we may be vaporized instantly. Pleasant thought.

But we should be asking ourselves these questions and not just assuming our various government agencies will provide for us. Maybe neighborhoods must prepare with neighborhood leadership for a couple of weeks of being cut off from national or state disaster intervention. Perhaps there would be teams within neighborhood associations to deal with food, security, etc. rather than each family trying to go it alone.

But what if families or even neighborhoods do not want to prepare? If they do not take good advice should we make them? That is the stickiest part: Should the government require us to be prepared for disaster? Should they force us all to buy survival kits and have inspectors check their viability every month?

Let’s make a plan

We cannot actually force people to do proper things such as live a more healthy life or prepare for a disaster that we know has a very good chance of happening. That is human free will, but it is not the nature of our nation to stand by when people are hurting. Even if they have been warned, can we sit in our houses with our survival supplies and not help our neighbors who ignored every request to prepare?

Some people can, but most of us cannot. If we know many will not heed good advice, can and should we prepare for that? Having survival kits at a central location might be problematic if there is a real breakdown of societal control such as New Orleans experienced. If there is New Orleans-style chaos, then each family or neighborhood might be on its own, so the supplies storage would need to be there.

At the very least we should pull our heads out of the sand and talk. We need to put our best minds on the human nature that causes people to not be prepared and come up with some plans to address this before a disaster, not after.

After the nuclear flash is the wrong time to start planning. We need continuous real planning so we have no more disasters like New Orleans and Haiti. What do we do with the people who make no plans and only want to talk about puppies?

Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.

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