popular logistics

What do we do next? Solar? Wind? Nuclear? Coal? Oil? Negawatts?

Burning coal and oil create greenhouse gases and other pollutants. Nuclear power produces radioactive waste and a prodigious amount of heat pollution. Nuclear and fossil fuels require mines, mills or wells, and they are really bad for the environment, causing everything from pollution to global warming.

Negawatts makes sense. Hybrid cars get great gas mileage and offer a smooth, quiet, comfort. Every barrel of oil we don’t burn is better for our economy. Every barrel of oil we don’t buy from Iran, Saudi Arabia, or Venezuela is $80 or $90 or $100 that doesn’t go into the hands of people like Achmadinejad, Bandar, or Chavez. That’s good for us and bad for the terrorists.

Solar and Wind are not perfect. People complain that they don’t look pretty. But they create jobs not pollution. They help our national security infrastructure. And they look fine to me. I’d rather see solar panels on my roof and wind turbines on my horizon then global warming and my money going to thugs like Achmadinejad.

Hospitals have the Joint Commission on Accreditation on Hospital Organizations; and there are many othes that certify other things: MAGNET certification, which means that the nurses are well-cared for, well-trained and well-equipped (inside tip: if nurse moral is bad - that’s not a hospital you want to be in.

NB: as of this writing, the JCAHO (Joint Commission) website is entirely down. Not even a 404 error. 

So who sets standards for evaluating preparedness? Nobody. But, as the NIUSR has pointed out -last year, Reader’s Digest took a shot. From the NIUSR Blog:

Jamie Imus, writing on the NIUSR blog, makes this case:

How is Reader’s Digest qualified to measure the preparedness of our urban areas?

The answer is simple. They aren’t, but no one else was doing it, so they took it upon themselves.

This reveals three opportunities for NIUSR:

1. Support RD for their initiative and recognition of the issues, and use this as an opportunity to critically review their work, offer our expertise, endorse the study (if appropriate) and potentially join them in this effort (they may want us to lead, as experts).
2. RD is about to give this issue a spotlight and I think NIUSR should take advantage of that to talk about our “imperatives” and our progress, to date.
3. Standards! What are they? Where are they? RD suggests that they don’t exist, so they did their best to come up with some. This is a gap that NIUSR needs to fill, until someone with more authority, expertise or resources wants to fill it.

Not only is this critical for the general public - and for professionals - but exceptionally important for the planners in citizen-response groups and NGO’s - especially those with less money - because accurately knowing weaknesses and strengths will make for better resource-allocation decisions.

David Stephenson , who has done outstanding work on the issues which concern Popular Logistics, has noticed that in a report using 23 criterai to evaluate the Department of Homeland Security, GAO entirely omits the promotion and recruitment of citizen responders.

Here’s Stephenson’s post.  I’m now not sure if reading this particular GAO report is worth the candle.

I regret not earlier posting about Stephenson’s important piece, written with Eric Bonabeau, Expecting the Unexpected: : The Need for a Networked Terrorism and Disaster Response Strategy, published in the Homeland Security Affairs Journal.

Our position on citizen response is this - any plan that doesn’t regard citizen response as central might contain useful tactics - but we submit that no such plan conceivably constitutes a useful strategy. 

Our ambitions include profiling individual organizations across and outside the country - and to try to develop some comparative measures of risk and readiness. Our principal, and selfish reason, is so that New York area - and particularly Brooklyn emergency responders, can learn from each other. But we’re detemined to do it so cleverly that it looks like we’re providing information useful anywhere. For the moment - we’ll do this in an ad hoc way. Since the Barbecue Recipe heiress is, at the moment, visiting her folks in Lawrence, Kansas, I thought I’d look a bit at emergency response teams in that neck of the woods. (It’s my understanding of the terms of my marriage, and family tradition, that, once I’ve mentioned Lawrence, I’ve also got to say “Go Jay Hawks!” So there it is). Following is the logo of Rampart Search and Rescue - a/k/a Kansas-Missouri Light Rescue Team.