About Those Schoolbuses...

There's been a lot of talk lately about a fleet of schoolbuses in New Orleans, which could supposedly have been used to evacuate people from the city. I think this discussion is silly at best and ghoulish at worst, and I want no part of it, but that's just too bad for me; if I'm to assess the health of the body politic, I must be willing, as Hippocrates said, to "inspect the unseemly and handle the horrible."

There are a lot of assumptions involved in the evacuation-by-schoolbus scenario. You have to assume that the schoolbuses really were available, and in good working order. You have to assume that someone knew where the keys were, and, if needs be, how to open the gate of the parking lot. You have to assume that each of the buses had enough gas, and that sufficient gas was available for any that didn't. You have to assume that the buses got enough gas mileage to reach a safe destination, despite bumper-to-bumper traffic, and that if they didn't, more gas would be available along the way.

There are other considerations, too. Before you send the buses, you have to decide on the maximum number of people each bus will be allowed to pick up, and how many belongings each passenger will be allowed to carry. Can they bring one suitcase? Two? None? How do you accomodate wheelchairs, oxygen tanks, and other bulky but necessary impedimentia?

When there are more evacuees than seats, who decides who goes and who stays, and by what process of triage? Does one person make the decision for every busload, or are others deputized to do it? How are the decisions enforced, if people become violent or distraught? Do you have troops or police backing you up? How many? Suppose you make room for a woman and a child, but she refuses to leave unless her husband gets a seat, too. Can you force her to get on the bus for her child's sake? Can you take the child away from her? If so, who looks after it en route and at the destination? And how do you mantain contact with the parents? Can you tell people who get left behind where the buses are taking their loved ones, or is the destination simply "anywhere but here"?

Speaking of destinations, how many are there? Will you inundate one location with thousands of people, or scatter them across a variety of locations? Who decides who goes to which facility, and who keeps track of them? What structures are in place to house and feed the evacuees? Are there sufficient toilets, water, and bedding? Who's responsible for keeping order, answering questions, and handling communications with relief agencies and government?

My point, as you've probably guessed by now, is that responding to a disaster requires a plan. Without a plan, and enough trained personnel and equipment to implement the plan, a city in a state of crisis will almost certainly fail to allocate and use its resources properly, and lives will almost certainly be lost.

The supposed virtue of George W. Bush is that he would run government as a business. Well, the business world is full of concepts like contingency planning and risk management and supply chain management. Every business book on earth emphasizes the importance of planning, and the necessity of integrating different functions into a "seamless" whole. Supply chain experts - among whom the military is supposed to be pre-eminent, being as they invented the discipline - understand that no activity is context-independent; each activity requires supporting structures and personnel, and these must be in place when and where they're needed. If you're going to put people on buses, you need to be able to keep order while you're loading them, and you need to be able to take care of them once they get where they're going. All of this requires cooperation, communication, leadership, and infrastructure.

If you simply have some vague idea that you're going to load a bunch of people into schoolbuses, and take them to "higher ground," you're already a criminally negligent failure. We're talking about the most foreseeable disaster in the country...foreseable not just in terms of its inevitability, but in the fact that hurricanes provide advance warning. That no plan was in place reflects poorly on everybody for whom public safety was a responsibility, but the blame falls primarily on the federal government, who alone had the resources, money, and authority to put a plan in place, test it regularly, and enforce compliance.

And when you consider that this administration wrote itself a blank check for homeland security-related program activities, and arrogated to itself powers that are implicitly tyrannical, the failure to assess New Orleans' preparedness, and bring it into compliance with what are optimistically called "best practices," is, again, criminally negligent. Efficiency, after all, is supposed to be one of the consolations of fascism.

A national disaster requires federal preparedness and federal responsiveness, period. How well New Orleans managed to improvise, after having been left to sink or swim by the irreproachable defenders of "homeland security," is not worth debating. We know that in the absence of a coherent, humane plan - one that includes an accurate assessment of logistical needs - there'll be chaos and death; we also know that some decisions made under the resulting duress will be bad ones. These are not exciting new concepts.

This isn't a failure of a mayor, nor of a state, nor even of a president. This is really a betrayal of the ideals of American government, and of the social contract, and of the sense of shared destiny that ought to be as central to patriotism as it is to morality. To complain that in the midst of the greatest natural disaster this country has ever seen, an improvised "rescue" operation with schoolbuses wasn't accomplished, is to proclaim how little we expect from our government, and from ourselves as the putative legitimators of that government.