Carrol
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Marxism] U.S. emergency plans: a disaster waiting to happen Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 09:10:49 -0400 From: Joaquín Bustelo <jbustelo at bellsouth.net>
A couple of days ago there was an exchange onlist about how Bush this time (Rita) would make sure the disaster preps went okay given what happened last time (Katrina).
I spent much of yesterday looking at feeds of helicopter cams focused on highways turned into parking lots. I don't need to wait for tomorrow morning's hurricane strike to declare the emergency plans by the authorities to have been themselves a disaster.
If there is one thing to avoid in running an evacuation of THIS type, it is a traffic jam.
You tell everyone to just get out of town, now, and the result is inevitable -- a huge traffic jam which *clogs the process of evacuation* slowing it down to a crawl.
Imagine that, if instead of slightly weakening and slowing down, Katrina at full intensity had just speeded up. Tens, probably hundreds of thousands of people would have been caught, vulnerable and exposed, by the full fury of the hurricane while stuck in traffic on the road.
This result was easily foreseeable. Traffic engineers will tell you that a highway with so many lanes only has so much capacity at a given speed, a number of vehicles per hour.
Traffic jams can happen because the carrying capacity of the road is exceeded. This leads to a slowing down of traffic, and once that happens then the problem cascades. Because if you originally had a road that could take, say, 10,000 vehicles/hour at 60 MPH, all of a sudden your average velocity drops, and it becomes several thousand less. And what began as a slowdown becomes gridlock, as the carrying capacity of the highway becomes just how many cars can physically park there and the vehicles/hour flow approaches zero as a limit.
In the case of major American cities, the Interstate Highways are typically many lanes, 4, 6 or more in each direction. But a few miles from the city, it starts dropping, eventually becoming just two lanes in each direction.
In these sorts of emergencies, "counterflow" is instituted, so that the four total lanes all become outbound lanes, no incoming traffic is allowed in those lanes. Even then, this becomes a bottleneck as part of the traffic in the normal lanes is diverted to the counterflow lanes.
The obvious thing to do is to ration the use of the highway. There are many possible ways to do this. One would be even-odd, depending on the tag number. Another would be by neighborhood. You have a series of rolling roadblocks in access to the highway to limit the number of cars getting on it, knowing that, if you let the highway become full with 4 or 6 lanes of outbound traffic, when the highway narrows you'll get cascading gridlock all the way back to city streets and as a result much less throughput. Ideally, at least a rough schedule of which neighborhood is evacuated when would be published and continuously updated over the radio and television.
Because of the United States's individualist capitalist ideology, it seems like the authorities are unable to take such steps.
To be effective, an evacuation plan needs to have not just when a neighborhood evacuates, but where those people wind up. Because otherwise without a safe destination, there will be a mad scramble anyways to get on the highway as quickly as possible so that you beat everyone else to some sort of lodging at the other end.
This means at a certain point in putting into motion disaster plans, schools and churches need to be opened to accept refugees and there must be provisioning on those destinations and personnel assigned to operate them. This in theory would be the job of the national guard, except, of course, its hard to run a school as a refugee center if the local guard unit is instead taking incoming from the mujahedin in a desert camp somewhere outside Tal Afar in Iraq.
The individualistic, "everyone for themselves" U.S.-style free-for-all evacuation has, in the case of the Gulf Coast, another perfectly foreseeable result. Which is a HUGE spike in the consumption of gasoline. The highway-as-parking-lot phenomenon tremendously compounds this issue. There have been reports of hundreds of cars that have run out of gas in the huge traffic jams out of Galveston and Houston.
Moreover, the traffic jam itself keeps gas stations from being resupplied, so they run out of gas, so even more people run out of gas on the highway.
This will have downstream repercussions, because what you're tending to do is deplete the local stocks of gasoline. And although the entire coast is covered by refineries, so you'd think there would be little concern about anything more than spot shortages, all those refineries in the path of the storm shut down. So you've gone ahead and maximized consumption, way above the extraordinary demand just for the road travel, by a huge amount of unnecessary, wasteful consumption sitting in traffic. So you're setting up a post-storm situation where there will tend to be shortages of gasoline, and this will be felt everywhere from Texas to New York, since the entire area is tied together by huge pipelines for refined petroleum products.
Atlanta is the place to watch after the storm. Typically, Atlanta gasoline is one of the cheapest in the country because this is a major nexus in the gas distribution pipelines, and extra supplies from the gulf that aren't immediately needed further north tend to get sold here on the spot market. So a significant percentage of local gas here tends to be surplus remaindered gas. But with operations disrupted, that source of supply dries up immediately. Local gasoline wholesalers and even many retailers understand this, which is why post-Katrina some of the most outrageous gouging was going on in the Atlanta area, with prices in some gas stations above $5/gallon, and prices generally at $4 or more a gallon at the peak of the panic.
It is not (or not just) that U.S. emergency planners are idiots, but that their whole ideological and political outlook has them focus on the idea of helping hundreds of thousands of atomized individuals or families cope with the emergency, rather than planning emergency operations on a community basis, viewing it as a community as a whole coming together to cope with this situation, and the government as the organized expression of the community as a whole. In reality, the government officials in the U.S. view themselves not as guardians of the welfare of the community and each one of its members, but rather as referees in the free-for-all war of everyone against everyone else that is capitalism.
Moreover, whether they are conscious of it or not, they are completely one-sided in the refereeing, always favoring the capitalists and their interests.
Thus when, for example, $2.29 a gallon gas all of a sudden becomes $4.59 a gallon gas, they tend not to send a swat squad to arrest the miscreant gas station owner or wholesale supplier, and organize the line of cars to get gasoline at its normal price, but instead have press conferences explaining that it was a "shortage" or a "panic" that raised the price of gasoline -- ghosts that haunt the capitalist economy at such times and do all sorts of things that otherwise people would tend to blame the capitalists for.
It is important to understand this, that disastrous "disaster planning" by U.S. authorities is, at bottom, not just and not even mainly a result of incompetence, but of ideological bloody-mindedness, of the free-market religion. It isn't that for such contingencies a capitalist government couldn't plan rationally, for handling the thing collectively, because there are example of this in history in dealing with wars and other catastrophes. But the plain fact is that at least the ones in the United States today have an outlook that makes their emergency plans a disaster waiting to happen.
Joaquín
________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text before replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism
This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm