Emergency Planning Necessary?

Gonna quote another article from the website and author you've no doubt grown to love so much. Keep in mind that this one is particularly seeded with hyperbole.

Quote:

http://mises.org/story/2508
A strange culture of emergency has taken over this country, and the slightest provocation triggers it. It could be an expected terrorist or just an old-fashioned weather warning. The officials are quick to swing into action, and tell you what to do.

The problem is that these demands are often based on nothing other than government plans that are not in your best interest. It behooves all of us to think carefully about genuine preparedness, which might often involve bucking the system and telling the emergency nazis to mind their own business.

A case in point is the disastrous weather emergency that befell Enterprise, Alabama, last week. The first warnings about a tornado came at 10:30am, and that's when the disastrous "preparations" began. The school could have permitted the students to leave. After all, we are talking about a High School here, and most students could drive. Those who couldn't might have gotten a ride. Parents would have been glad to pick of their kids, and many tried but were turned away.

At least some choice in the matter should have been allowed. But, if you know anything about disaster plans, you know that choice and human rights are the last things on the decision-makers minds. They treat people like cattle to be herded, bark orders, and threaten everyone in the most awful way for having the most normal impulses to seek a safe way out.

So instead of just letting the kids go, the officials herded them all in hallways, where it was said that they would be "safe." There they sat in crowded conditions for hours and hours, just waiting for the moment of death to come. It finally did: at 1:30pm. The twister slammed into the building, the walls caved in, and eight kids were killed, with many more injured. Parents who had come to pick up their kids at the earliest possible moment (the school announced that this was 1:00pm) sat helplessly by. They weren't allowed in before, and when they showed up, the police demanded that they come inside and still wouldn't let the kids go.

And did the officials in charge express regret about their stupid decision to force everyone to stay? On the contrary, they claim that if they had let the kids go, there might have been hundreds of deaths.

First, we don't know that for sure. The main spot of death was the school, and it was precisely because so many were crowded into just a small area. A point of common sense – very much lacking in emergency management – is that wherever you are hiding, you need room to move so that you can dodge falling concrete. They were given no such room.

Second, there is a big difference between dying at the hands of the Plan and dying because of your own bad choices. It is a matter of who bears the responsibility. When you die because of the decisions of the officials, your blood is on their hands.

And this brings us to the second response of the officials, and this applies to the school, the local police, and all the way up to the governor. Instead of expressing regret, they congratulated each other for adhering so closely to the plan, and for following through with the emergency preparedness. Yes, they are sorry people died, but for the emergency bureaucrat, the far more important consideration is that everyone obeyed orders and that the orders were clear and decisive.

Yes, some parents have spoken out against the decision of the school to keep the kids corralled in a trap of death. But their complaints have been shot down by the "responsible" voices of the officials in charge. Meanwhile, news has slowly leaked out that other schools in Alabama have a different policy: they shut down the school and tell the kids to get the heck out.

This is an unusual approach. The whole culture of emergency in this country seems to be predicated on the notion that people do no know what is best for them. They need authorities to tell them what to do. And whatever they do, they must do it in concert. Masses of people must be shuffled this way and that, and no one should be permitted to have any choice in the matter.

Why do we assume that the officials in charge know what is better for us than we do? It is a leap of faith. After all, everyone has access to the weather channel. Everyone can watch the radar. We don't need nazis-on-the-spot to suddenly pop up and manage our choices on whether to evacuate or stay, to hunker down where we are or find some other spot.

The best approach to an emergency is simply to let people make their own judgments about how to stay safe. Instead, we have developed a system whereby a central plan goes into effect that applies to everyone. This is why evacuations tend to be mandatory these days, and why you are not allowed to rescue your own children from danger.

This brings us to the final presupposition of emergency management in this country: officials assume that you are their property. You have no rights, no freedom of choice, and no volition of your own that should be respected. Your one job is to obey them, and at least if you are killed, they can have bragging rights that they got everyone to go along.

At some point in the coming years, you will probably face this problem. There will be some emergency in which you will be told to put your life or that of your children in the hands of experts, who pretend as if they know what is best for you. Chances are that they don't, and this emergency will be the time when you need to think seriously about fundamental values. Is obedience to authority more important than life itself?

I wouldn't necessarily call them "Emergency Nazis" but they're certainly borderline retarded. Stranger yet was the news coverage of the event as reported on CNN:

Quote:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WEATHER/03/0....ap/index.html
With no time to send students home as storms raced their way, officials herded Erin Garcia and her high school classmates into the halls.

That was reported from the Associated Press. CNN's own account was very different:

Quote:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/03/02/tor...ise/index.html
Students inside Enterprise High School huddled in the halls, joking around and waiting out what they thought was a standard tornado drill.

The school then went black as the lights dimmed and glass from a skylight shattered to the ground.

"Everyone got really quiet -- we knew it was serious. No more than five seconds later, it was just like a big explosion and everything -- debris started hitting us," said Mitchell Mock, who was injured when the tornado struck Thursday in southeastern Alabama.

Mitchell, two brothers and his mother were all inside the school. Students had been crouched with their knees to their chins for nearly two hours.

None of this stopped the apologists as Rockwell claimed:

Quote:

School officials received a warning at about 11 a.m. that a tornado could pass through Enterprise, a town west of Dothan. They moved students right away.

Alabama Gov. Bob Riley said people in the school "saved a lot of lives by doing what they did."

"There are certain things [that are] going to happen to cause a loss of life that we can't control," he said.

"Based on what they knew at the time yesterday and the decisions they made," he added, "I think they were totally right."

David Paulison, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the school "did the right thing" by moving students to the center of the building, into the basement and a safe room.

"It was just a tragedy that nobody could have predicted was going to happen," Paulison said.

Urban search and rescue teams "did a great job" getting people out who were trapped, Paulison said.

"Everything was done that was supposed to be done."

Of course, what was supposed to be done ended up killing 8 High School students.

Should the government be allowed to mandate procedures for surviving storms? Even presuming that the plan is good, why does it require that anybody adhere to it?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I was specifically wondering what the hell the officials would have done if, as a student, I would have just attempted to force my way out of the school? What, hold me down, point a gun to my head?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Possibly. You know they've got cops on every campus now. They'd more likely threaten you with reprimands.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Can you ever find an essay that isn't written by an ultra-libertarian that you agree with? It would lend a bit more credibility to what you have to say if you just weren't sitting here posting Libertarian agenda articles all day and actually had some kind of mainstream backing at least once in a while. I could really give a fuck what the Mises Institute has to say about anything (as much as I care what the Christian Collation has to say), and this one writer who you are in love with is typically wrong on multiple points in every essay that you present here, he never looks at the full picture.


For example, in this specific instance, choice is pretty silly to talk about. Let's say that the school really did feel that if the kids went out into the streets, there would be hundreds of deaths. Because these are minors, the school district/state would never be able to recover from that kind of liability exposure. We're talking millions of dollars in civil suits for every single child dead from a state that already is something like 49th in education.

See,

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Second, there is a big difference between dying at the hands of the Plan and dying because of your own bad choices. It is a matter of who bears the responsibility. When you die because of the decisions of the officials, your blood is on their hands.

the way the legal system works, minors aren't afforded choices, so if they were allowed to leave, that would have been a choice of the school officials and not the children.

Now, did the school district make wrong options? Perhaps. Would hundreds of kids died if they were let go? I dunno, I live in Arizona, I don't know jack shit about tornadoes. But both of those ideas are not very relevant: the school district needs to make sure to protect itself.

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I don't see you making any Palace threads, nigger.

I don't care much for Rockwell because he always pushes that little bit too far with his vitriol, but the stuff he writes about usually makes for good thread material.

It's useless to argue with the article on the point of liability suits when Rockwell's very stance to begin with is that the state shouldn't be liable for the safety of the minors. It shouldn't be liable for anybody's safety.

It's also not as if the tornado had just touched down and was nearing the city limits, they held the kids in the shool for 2 hours and then when 8 of them die because they were forced to huddle up in a steel and concrete deathtrap the state writes it off because they followed the plan that killed 8 of their own charges.

If the state can't ensure the safety of it's citizens, then it has no right to dictate what is and isn't safe for them to do.

None of those kids asked to be huddled up in that school for 2 hours just to wait for their death.

I was speaking idiomatically.

I don't see anyone making Palace threads.

Let me ask you this, though: since school attendance (short of homeschooling and private schools) is mandatory, who is liable for the safety of children when the state requires children to be there? The whole point of a minor system (or part of it anyway) is that children don't know how to make the right decisions.

So, that being the case, what is the school to do in that situation?

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

The school is supposed to act in the way it deems fit. Yet by placing the burden on the school to ensure the safety of its students, it becomes liable for the death of said students. The governor is attempting in that CNN article to absolve the school and the state of any wrongdoing, even though they're directly responsible for the death of those kids.

Mandatory attendence itself is the problem.

FELIPE NO

Quote:

The best approach to an emergency is simply to let people make their own judgments about how to stay safe.

Skimming the article, this was the point at which I realized the author had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Does he really expect your everyday average citizen to know what to do when a Tornado or Hurricane strikes? Having everyone running around trying to fend for themselves creates chaos. What is needed is centralized, orderly control of getting people prepared and safe.

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Mandatory attendence itself is the problem.

Brady, I don't know why I bother even reading your posts.

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Quote:

Skimming the article, this was the point at which I realized the author had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Does he really expect your everyday average citizen to know what to do when a Tornado or Hurricane strikes? Having everyone running around trying to fend for themselves creates chaos. What is needed is centralized, orderly control of getting people prepared and safe.

I live in fucking Tornado alley. You'd have to be borderline retarded not to know that when a tornado touches down, you're supposed to be diving in a ditch, huddled in a cellar, or waiting it out in a room with a lot of pipes like a bathroom or in a closet underneath the stairs.

As for hurricanes, I also lived along the gulf, and hurricane surival is pretty rudimentary stuff. If there's a hurricane on the way, you buy some canned goods, board up the windows, and move to higher ground if you're below sea-level or close to a body of water.

This is all the most basic stuff, and everyone is already aware of it. People don't need the government to huddle them all into "safe zones" where one unfortunate hit by the brunt of a storm could kill hundreds or thousands of people as opposed to less than ten.

Are you telling me that New Englanders don't know what they're supposed to do in the case of a blizzard? New York got an astronomical amount of snow, and how many fatalities have occurred?

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Brady, I don't know why I bother even reading your posts.

You're just afraid of the Truth™.

But seriously, if you can't resort to more than ad-hominem I'll ban you from this thread.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Quote:

Does he really expect your everyday average citizen to know what to do when a Tornado or Hurricane strikes?

And thus, with such rhetoric, a person is convinced that "someone else" needs their rights and self-determination taken away for their own benefit; and in so doing relinquish your own to the government.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

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This is all the most basic stuff, and everyone is already aware of it.

Except thanks to your beloved capitalism people go all apeshit and buy up everything in sight, creating massive shortages of food and water and leading to massive issues. Issues of this size cannot be managed at the individual level.

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But seriously, if you can't resort to more than ad-hominem I'll ban you from this thread.

Tell me one benefit of having an uneducated populace.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

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Tell me one benefit of having an uneducated populace.

Tell me why we need truancy laws to have an educated populace. If children don't enjoy going to school in order to learn, how does forcing them to participate in a system they hate encourage them to learn? How are they educated? It would seem that the opposite is true, in that it encourages passive resistance, and learning enough in the short-term simply to get by.

Take the quality of social study education, for instance. The general awareness among Americans of their own history, world history, geography, etc., is atrocious yet they were all forced to take the same classes.

If we wanted a truly educated populace, we would improve the quality of education through competitive means to the point where truancy laws are unnecessary and people would actually want to be educated. (a state which they possess naturally)

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Except thanks to your beloved capitalism people go all apeshit and buy up everything in sight, creating massive shortages of food and water and leading to massive issues. Issues of this size cannot be managed at the individual level.

Can't they? Even presuming that shortages are generated, people are still capable of managing with what they have on hand. In the event of a disaster, then, they're also capable of providing distribution for necessary goods especially to those that most desperately need them.

The prospect of shortages, in fact, encourages people to plan beforehand and keep canned goods on hand in the event of emergency.

This also begs the question: do people who do not plan accordingly for the event of disaster necessarily deserve to live?

How ya doing, buddy?

Fuck it, I'm done. I'm far too sick to argue, and my faith in humanity is once again gone.

How ya doing, buddy?

You catch more flies with honey than self-righteous indignation.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Originally Posted by Bradylama

Mandatory attendence itself is the problem.

Then he should have argued that in the article. There is no way to absolve the school district from massive liability issues without taking away mandatory school attendance.

They could have sent everyone home, sure. But what if it's in a poor community where not a lot of people have cars and there's no way to scramble buses? What if they can't afford the higher insurance premiums that I'm sure come with having no emergency planning?

There are too many questions left unanswered in the article when, really, the only point that he had and didn't even address is that kids shouldn't be required to go to school or, as I would almost bet he feels, that the government should provide no education at all, even by choice.

FELIPE NO

So, did the school know the tornado wasn't going to hit for two hours or was there a possibility it could hit at any time?

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

Quote:

Garcia said students had gathered in hallways around 11 a.m. as a precaution. Some were allowed to have parents pick them up, and school buses lined up to take the others around 1 p.m., she said, but the warning sirens came on.

The storm struck about 1:15 p.m., and Richardson said some students were still trapped three hours later.

That's as cited from the Associated Press. If parents could come to pick up their kids, and school busses were eventually lined up to bring most of them home (oops too late) there was no immediacy between when they were forced to comply with drill procedure for two hours and when the sirens actually went off.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Quote:

Parents would have been glad to pick of their kids, and many tried but were turned away.

So how were parents able to pick their kids up when according to your author they were turned away?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Honestly can't say. The simple answer is that Rockwell is full of shit, but then Rockwell says "many" and the article says "some." Both of which don't mean anything without figures.

This was one of the comments on the Mises blog:

Quote:

They were letting parents pick up their kids. My sister was in the same hallway where the other students lost their lives. She called my mother on her cell phone and she came and checked her out. I did hear though that they were turning the kids "emergency contacts" away, and the parents had to physically be there to pick up them up.

I'm not exactly sure exactly what the commenter meant by that, whether guardians were turned away and parents specifically had to be there or what. That doesn't really make sense, and neither does the alternative being that they'd have to be there physically to be turned away, but parents could pick up their kids.

Maybe the commenter meant that parents who called in requesting that their kids be let out of school were told no, but there's no clarity on it and no reporting of it.

Another point of consideration: The Ludwig von Mises Institute is based in Alabama, and Rockwell is its president. He probably picked up the information through hearsay.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Personally, I don't have a real problem with the school not allowing the kids to just try and drive home without their parents' permission. Since, I mean, how many teenagers are going to take the drill really seriously and are going to go straight home instead of dicking around somewhere first? Heck, whenever there's an accident here involving kids going home after being sent home early during a snow day the school always catches a boatload of flak as to why they didn't handle it differently.

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That would be besides the point, Dev. Rockwell mostly preaches to a choir that already thinks that truancy laws and state education are bullshit.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Originally Posted by Bradylama

I live in fucking Tornado alley. You'd have to be borderline retarded not to know that when a tornado touches down, you're supposed to be diving in a ditch, huddled in a cellar, or waiting it out in a room with a lot of pipes like a bathroom or in a closet underneath the stairs.

As for hurricanes, I also lived along the gulf, and hurricane surival is pretty rudimentary stuff. If there's a hurricane on the way, you buy some canned goods, board up the windows, and move to higher ground if you're below sea-level or close to a body of water.

Question: Why a room full of pipes? First time I've heard that one.

(I'll leave the questions of who takes care of retards, vacationers with no means to hoard goods, and Katrina-style people unable to vacate or protect themselves to people with more energy.)

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

Because pipe systems are rooted to the ground. If you stick in a room surrounded by pipes, then the chances of that room caving in on you are lower than anywhere else in the house.

FELIPE NO