Category Archives: Benefits for first responders

Robot Rodeos Conjure Up Disasters and Pancake Contests

Extreme Hazard robot essaying an obstacle course at the Robotic Vehicle Range, Kirtland AFB, Alberquerque, NM. Sandia National Labs.

Extreme Hazard robot essaying an obstacle course at the Robotic Vehicle Range, Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, NM. Sandia National Labs.

A sultry day was in the offing near Purnell OK, the seat of McCurtain County in the state’s southeast quadrant, just a dozen miles northwest from the triple point where Arkansas, Texas and Oklahoma meet. One hundred forty miles northeast, the National Weather Service Doppler radar station KSRX at Ft. Smith Arkansas, was monitoring a cold front approaching from the west, driven by a mass of cool dry air sweeping down from the northern plains. Typical for the late spring in the American prairie, this eastbound mass was colliding with a warm, wet air mass streaming north from the Gulf of Mexico, now roiling under a cool dry tongue at 700 mb. Buoyant but trapped under heavier cool air, supercells were forming in the humid 850 mb surface layer twenty miles west of Purnell.

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Presidential Candidates' positions on first responders

Popular Logistics is combing the candidates’ position papers to compare positions in the following areas:

  1. First responders – policy and funding of equipment and training for paid and unpaid, full-time and part-time first responders, and the infrastructure that supports them;
  2. Energy policy (conservation, strengthening power grids, renewable energy, emergency power)
  3. National Health Insurance. Our position is this – ideology is more or less irrelevant in the face of potential bioterror or WMD attacks; if only because of those circumstances – the entire population needs catastrophic health and disability insurance.

We’re going to do these an issue at a time. That’s for two reasons. Because we’ve got limited resources and would like to report as we have something to report. And because, based on our preliminary research, on issue #1 – it looks like the issue isn’t on anyone’s radar screen.

DOJ denies death benefit to 100% of emergency workers; pressed by Congress, denies only 80%

From Tina Kelley’s piece in Wednesday’s Times  , “Death Benefit is Elusive for Emergency Workers’ Families”:

In 2003, Congress passed the “Hometown Heroes Survivors Benefits Act,” expanded existing benefits  to deaths within 24 hours after “nonroutine  stressful or strenuous physical law enforcement fire suppression, rescue, hazardous material response,” etc. As Kelley points out, what does “routine” mean in these lines of work? Couldn’t an argument be made that the inherent dangers  are “just part of the job.” Senator Patrick Leahy – with Attorney Gonzales testifying in front of the Judiciary Committee last week – says that Congress meant “routine” to be typing, talking on the phone, washing a truck – not – as the Administration interprets the rule – strguggline with a suspect, assistant in medical treatment, putting out fies.

So: of the first 34 applications – all

of them denied. Congress gets upset – they’ve granted 10. U.S. Representative Bob Etheridge (D-North Carolina),  said in a press release that

after three years of foot dragging by the Administration, the Hometown Heroes Survivor Benefits Act, first introduced by Etheridge in 2002, will go into effect. 

– snip –

The law …. was signed by President Bush on December 15, 2003. In June, Etheridge proposed an amendment to the U.S. Justice Department’s funding bill that would have cut funding to the Attorney General’s office until they implemented the Hometown Heroes Act. [It took them three years to write the regs. – and then only on the threat of cuts to the AG’s budget. Compare the post 9/11 legislative process  – it took less than a month to write legislation which, while it had much publicized benefits to victims and their families – but also seems to have been designed to cater to aviation interests. 

Link to Etheridge’s press release.

This is as disappointing as it is unsurprising. Let’s hope the Times lets Tina Kelley keep on this story – and not only the narrow set described by this legislation – but the general question of how well we treat military veterans, emergency workers, and their families.

It seems to me that a simple rule would be parity with Congressional benefits.