popular logistics

Subtopia reports on effective Red Cross/Red Crescent efforts to provide shelter to earthquake victims in Indonesia. Subtopia’s account is based on this report from Reliefweb:

“As part of the International Federation’s early recovery programme, more than 4,000 bamboo shelters have already been completed in the areas of Gantiwarno and Dlingo, and the programme is expanding into other districts, where up to 6,000 of the homes are expected to soon be built.”
After consulting survivors and enabling them to take direct responsibility for the distribution of funds and reconstruction materials, the program has resulted in a coordinated community activism to help survivors build shelters themselves out of local materials. [emphasis supplied]

And the shelters cost about $150 USD each.

This essay, “Prepare for Disaster,” by Tom LaTourrette and Ed Chan of the RAND Corporation, was written in 2005 following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. But it could have been written yesterday or ten years ago. Weighing in at 812 words, it’s a concise statement of a reasonable framework for discussing disaster planning and response. With Stuart Brand’s account of the San Francisco earthquake, this essay would be an ideal starting point.

Reducing risk entails long-term investment in planning, prevention, and protection. Emergency response is the last resort and should never be relied on as a primary strategy for preventing disasters.

- snip -

As with local response, there is a point beyond which the cost of maintaining standby resources exceeds their benefit. Although it is not clear where this point is, if we accept that this point exists we need to look to alternative approaches. The better prepared a community is to deal with a disaster, the lower the emergency response needs.

Popular Logistics thanks everyone for their words of praise about our predictions - on line and in the neighborhood - about trouble with New York’s petroleum fuel pipelines. Which run, incidentally, more or less directly underneath our editorial offices (and bedroom). Those messages were occasioned by news reports of arrests in a terrorist plot to blow up Kennedy Airport (JFK), its fuel depots, and the Buckeye Pipelines.

In any case, our concern is that we don’t need terrorists for these pipelines to be an alarming risk. Negligence and accident will do just fine.

Plus there’s  the question of what appears to be an alarming incidence of premenopausal breast cancer cases along the pipeline. More as we learn it.

The San Francisco Chronicle has reported, in a piece by James Sterngold, Â that

a high-level group of government and military officials has been quietly preparing an emergency survival program that would include the building of bomb shelters, steps to prevent panicked evacuations and the possible suspension of some civil liberties.

We’ve just learned about The Albany Project, a blog which “seeks to return New York State Government to its rightful owners - the people.” Its very existence implicitly makes the point that we can’t write off state politics as a lost cause. And the Albany Project looks like a useful resource for understanding what’s happening up there.

We’ve read - but haven’t yet posted about - New York’s new emergency response bill - but we’re hoping to do so soon, along with a backlog of other posts that have been simmering. There’s a lot that needs to happen in this state to make us reasonably ready to address emergency preparedness and public health. State government can make it easier, or harder. In the end, of course, it’s up to the population - citizens and non-citizens alike - to address preparedness issues. With or without government help.