Making sure you die . . . next time

Dissatisfied that it was unable to kill enough Americans through rank incompetence in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is taking steps to make sure disaster victims it wasn't able to mismanage into an early grave last time almost surely will croak next time.

And there's always a next time, just like there's always another way for the Bush Administration to screw over the American people.

From The Associated Press:

NEW YORK (AP) -- After the terror attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11th, regular people rushed down to the site to volunteer any way they could.

It might not be so easy the next time disaster strikes.

In an effort to provide better control and coordination, the federal government is launching an ID program for rescue workers to keep everyday people from swarming to a disaster scene.

A prototype identification card has already being issued to fire and police personnel in the Washington, D.C. area.

Proponents say the system will get professionals on scene quicker and keep untrained volunteers from making tough work more difficult.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency came up with the idea after the World Trade Center attack and Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when countless Americans rushed to help - unasked, undirected, and sometimes unwanted.

THAT'S RIGHT, BOYS AND GIRLS, in Katrina's watery wake -- after the New Orleans cops had hauled ass, the Army never showed up, FEMA couldn't find its ass with both hands and half the National Guard was in Iraq -- the only people left to save desperate New Orleanians were . . . fellow Louisianians.

Many of those fellow Louisianians belonged to an ad-hoc civilian outfit that came to be known as the "Cajun Navy," hundreds upon hundreds of ordinary folk who hitched up their trailers and hauled their bass boats and bateaus to the flooded city and started pulling people off rooftops. People who probably would have died because of the "heckuva job" Brownie was doing at the time.

In fact the journal Homeland Security Affairs (a publication of the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security) called the Cajun Navy an astonishing example of what it terms "swarm intelligence":

Three characteristics of “swarm intelligence” particularly relevant to emergency management are flexibility, robustness, and self-organization. Most people would agree that all three of those characteristics were missing from the governmental response to Katrina.

The single noteworthy agency exempted from the criticism of governmental response was the U.S. Coast Guard, whose Gulf Coast units did not wait for express authorization to begin search and rescue operations. According to a Government Accountability Office report, “… underpinning these efforts were factors such as the [Coast Guard’s] operational principles. These principles promote leadership, accountability, and enable personnel to take responsibility and action, based on relevant authorities and guidance.”
Similarly, on 9/11 the only effective response was a classic example of swarm intelligence. A group of total strangers on Flight 93 coalesced (in circumstances when no one would have blamed them for instead dissolving into hysterics) to thwart the hijackers’ plan to crash the plane into the Capitol or White House. They exhibited all three characteristics of swarm intelligence in abundance.

Another example is how individuals came together via the Internet to provide a variety of invaluable and reliable information to victims of the tsunami, and, more recently, of Hurricane Katrina. In particular, some of these people took it upon themselves to create the tsunamihelp blog and wiki. Later, a core group of those people took the lead in creating the Katrinahelp wiki. As one of the tsunamihelp volunteers, Dina Mehta, wrote:

We experienced a near-magical interdependence as we were setting up and establishing this blog. It’s not just about the people who were blogging; there [were] a whole lot of volunteers who fed us with links, sent us letters from affected people reaching out for help, others who took on the mantle of editing, sub-groups working on design and template issues, still others quietly contributing by buying up bandwidth and applications and offering up mirror servers, that made the blog more effective.

Mehta accurately describes how individuals participating in a situation that evokes swarm intelligence produce results that are far greater than the sum of their parts. In the case of Katrina, still others spontaneously came together to craft imaginative Google Map mashups (applications combining information from multiple sources) to allow identification of homes in New Orleans and to create unified databases of those needing assistance.

Perhaps the most astonishing examples of swarm intelligence in a recent disaster response situation were the variety of ad hoc rescue efforts in New Orleans that Douglas Brinkley described in The Great Deluge. Spurred by word of mouth, hundreds of Cajuns spontaneously navigated their small boats to New Orleans in an ad hoc citizens’ flotilla, the “Cajun Navy,” which rescued nearly 4,000 survivors. Reggae singer Michael Knight and his wife Deonne saved approximately 250 people by themselves. Richard Zuschlag, co-founder of Acadian Ambulance Service, used his 200 ambulances, plus medivac helicopters, to evacuate 7,000, while also providing the only reliable emergency communications system.

IN OTHER WORDS, FEMA wants to take the only thing that went right in Katrina's aftermath and squash it like a bug next time.

But I have a better idea. Let's, by all means, rigorously check IDs in disaster zones when next the unspeakable happens.

And if an ordinary citizen trying to actually help his fellow man were to find someone with FEMA identification, they would be empowered to shoot that individual immediately to prevent hindrance of ongoing rescue operations.