You try this

Let’s see if I understand this.

Attorneys write contracts.

Attorneys don’t read the contracts they write.

Or how about this?

What a prospective cop writes on his application only means what the police chief says it means.

Yes, it’s a confusing world here in Zephyrhills, but then it’s a town where Chicken Little is queen and Alice in Wonderland is the other title for the city’s Operations Manual.

Let’s start at the top:

The City Attorney, one Carla Owens, has a contract that says she’ll give monthly status reports to City Council. She hasn’t done that. Neither did her predecessor Tom McAlvanah.

When called on the contract violation by Councilperson Gina King, who has no love lost on Owens, Owens said she didn't realize.

A local newspaper quoted Owens response:

"There's no excuse. It's in there in the contract. I just didn't realize," she said. "If they want me to do that, fine."

Let’s just turn that around:

You have a contract with the city that says you’ll do such-and-such for a certain sum of money. You don’t do such-and-such, but the city still pays you.

Sounds about right.

King would like to fire Owens, but she knows she won’t get any support from the other four councilpersons – they all think Owens is doing just fine.

What do you think?

Oops, unfair question, you’re just the one who pays the bills for the Asylum that the inmates are obviously running.

How about the latest cop?

Naaw, let’s not. You wouldn’t believe it anyway.
Arjay

Suspended Reality

Sometimes you just gotta suspend reality.

Aaah, you figured it out: We went to the Council Meeting tonight (Monday).

Here’s the deal: the great County of Pasco has gotten into the fire and ambulance business bigtime, and in the process has begun to starve city fire departments. Better yet, the county has pointed to municipal borders and, in essence, told the City of Zephyrhills, "inside the city limits is your territory, outside is ours." The county has a right to do that.

But here’s where reality gets suspended.

The borders aren’t all that clean. One end of a street can be in the city, the other end in the county. Same street.

So let’s say you live in the county at 2201 Anystreet and I’m your neighbor at 2200 Anystreet, but the municipal border is between us, and I live in the City. Pay taxes there too.

As luck would have it we suffer heart attacks simultaneously

We both punch the last digit of 911 simultaneously in what could be our last moves.

The dispatcher notices that you are entitled to county ambulance service so she dispatches the nearest available county ambulance, which just happens to be one town away.

Another dispatcher notices that I live in the city where there just happen to be two ambulances waiting for a call. One of them is 10 blocks away, the other 20 blocks away. She sends me the closest one. The other remains in its stall.

My ambulance gets to me in about two minutes.

You ambulance has a much longer distance to travel. You die.

I live.

The second ambulance never moves.

And, it’s all about money and power.

How do you feel about that? Oops, sorry, you can’t answer ‘cause you’re dead.

Somehow, the folks we elect to run our cities and counties and even our nation seem to have lost sight of the fact that we, the taxpayers are their customers, not their servants.

They also seem to have lost any sense of honesty. You know, a man’s word is his bond; silly old fashioned stuff like that.

The interesting thing about this is that it didn’t used to be that way.

In this country we sort of instinctively did the right thing without even being asked.

Also at the council meeting was the latest city ordinance which closes all the city’s parks at 10 p.m.

This came about after complaints that there was rowdiness and drug dealing at the city’s Lincoln Park.

Councilperson Gina King wondered out loud why all the city’s residents should be penalized because of the actions of a few. She also wondered how closing a park at 10 would help the cops deal with the drug dealing since, to her recollection, drug dealing was illegal no matter the time of day.

FEMA Ice

Got a call from a friend who is currently deployed by FEMA on Katrina duty. He’s in, of all places, Albuquerque, New Mexico. He reports that when the New Orleans contingent of evacuees arrived at that location the Native American residents looked upon them as — food.

Seriously, the evacuation/resettlement effort is proving not to be one of our nation’s finest hours. The bungling which undoubtedly led to loss of life, and which continued through the director of FEMA being sacked, continues.

Remember folks, this is not play money we’re talking about. It’s YOUR money, but I digress.

For a couple of days now there has been this story floating around about a convoy of ice-laden trucks that have been wandering about the country like a tribe of lost Israelites. Seems somebody high up in FEMA ordered too much ice and wouldn’t admit to it, so the trucks have been moved about under the pretense that they’re doing something useful.

Now, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins is asking questions. Her letter is so well put that I’ll just reprint it here. Read it.

Sen. Collins' Letter To FEMA's Acting Director

The following is the letter from U.S. Sen. Susan Collins to acting FEMA director R. David Paulison and Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
September 20, 2005

Dear Acting Undersecretary Paulison and Lt. Gen. Strock:

I am writing to request that you inquire into an apparent decision to send ice initially designated for Hurricane Katrina relief efforts to cold storage in Portland, Maine.

My office has been contacted with information that the federal government paid truck drivers $800 per day to haul bags of ice to the Gulf region for Hurricane Katrina victims, only to order them to turn around, leave the Gulf region, and drive to Portland for storage of the ice at a refrigerated storage facility.

More than 200 trucks reportedly might arrive in Portland this week to store their loads of ice. As a result, the resources spent to procure this ice and retain these truck drivers will have been diverted from Hurricane Katrina relief efforts.

If accurate, this situation raises concerns about whether the federal government is using relief resources efficiently in order to provide maximum benefits possible to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Please let me know as soon as possible: (1) how may trucks carrying ice intended for Hurricane Katrina relief have been diverted to Maine; (2) why the decision occurred; (3) who made the decision; (4) how much it is costing the federal government to transport and store ice in Maine; and (5) why substantially more ice than was needed was purchased in the first place.

Sincerely, Susan M. Collins Chairman

One Tangy Whiff of Anhydrous Ammonia

Okay, granted, responsibility for emergency planning falls to the counties under Florida law. However, nothing prevents a local municipality from putting in place its own disaster plan, even a little one that deals with disaster, whatever it might be, until the county cavalry arrives.

That’s why my modest proposal for a Zepherhills Emergency Plan has legs. And, with a little forethought it could be made to dovetail quite nicely with the country plan.

Right off the bat the city has the moral obligation to plan for its transient, elderly population which is often confused, lost and half bonkers on even a good day.

Then there are the unique problems here that the planners in Port Richie would never think about. An example: 70-ton tank cars of anhydrous ammonia, of which there are many rolling down the tracks on the east side of town. One unfortunate accident that releases that stuff has the potential to kill us all. Just one good whiff is all it takes.

Or how about the gravel mine just south of Chancey Road? They do use high explosives to make the little ones out of the big ones.

Then there’s the big phosphate processing plant that CF industries has down on the county line along Route 39. A little spill in a plant that size equals a big headache for those of us who are downwind.

Then there’s communications. Forget ‘em in a big storm, but ham radio operators operate when all else fails. One ham wants to put a crucial repeater link on the city’s water tower – free to the city – but right now he’s bogged down City Manager tape, despite there a commercial wireless internet provider getting what we’ll bet is a bargain-rate ride on that tower. What’s more important; dispatching cops and ambulances, or being able to pick up your pornographic email?


Just asking
.
Our firemen are all certified in the national NIMS system. Nice. Problem is they don’t have such a system here in town. Instead they’d be using their skills in a bunker someplace else, getting food and water to someoneselse.
In the first 24 hours of a major disaster here or near there needs to be a well thought out plan for what the cops will do, what the ems will do, what the firemen will do.

Who is going to deploy the automatic sand bag filler and keep it filled. Oh we don’t have a filler? Maybe we ought to get one, I, for one, get really tired seeing those 90 year old women shoveling that heavy sand.

The point here is that a town like Zephyrhills has its own set of unique hazards, hazards we’re aware of, that need to be addressed before the big boys get here. And we haven’t got a plan and we need one, if only to keep the cops out from under their own feet.
Arjay

Reporter's Notes

My friend, Fred Phillips, who reads this blog from the heart of Phoenixville, PA., home of picalilly and shoe-fly-pie, has some cogent thoughts on the ongoing FEMA mess.

With regard to the fact that the agency seems to have stopped answering reporters' phone calls Fred says,

"It was not that long ago as young, and still stupid reporters, we faced the same problems of getting information out of agencies and people at all levels. The easiest solution they have is to blame the press. The press, on the other hand, continues to use a velvet glove when they should be saying, you were stupid enough not to comment, this is what you get.

"The public will always believe that the press "makes things up." Whoever coined the phrase, truth is stanger than fiction, was really right on the mark. I only heard one comment recently that no one at FEMA (in the top ranks) had any experience dealing with disasters.

"Next step - Avian virus. We have no vaccine, nothing prepared. FEMA is nothing more than a place to put political hacks to make a buck.

"thus endith the lesson."

Thanks, Fred.

If you think the disaster-heaped-upon-disaster which is Katrina was bad, how about this -- Murphy Oil refused to take cash today. How's that for a lack of confidence in the government? Its money is no good any more.

The kid stopped me as I was pulling in, informing me that only credit cards or Wal-Mart cards were being accepted -- no cash.

Come to think of it, it's not all that surprising when we learn that Wal-Mart had a better disaster plan than did the U.S. government.

Wal-Mart.

-------

Now that the mea culpas are coming thick and fast (it seems that everyone from the Governor of Louisiana to ol' W. himself is fighting to take blame for the supreme Katrina screw up) it will be interesting to see how George manages to cover himself with both blame and glory at the same time when he addresses the Nation tonight?

Why do I also think this administration would dearly love to prevent people like me from making comments like this?

Consider this; it's the same administration which has trampled on your Fourth Amendment rights. Fourth Amendment? Yep, the one that gaurantees you to be free from unreasonable search and seizure.

Don't believe me?

Just go to an airport and watch the T.S.A. slugs feeling up the women and confiscating nail clippers.

This is America?

Arjay

Signs of Disarray

In the FEMA of old it was an article of faith that the Public Information Officers always returned reporter’s phone calls or emails.

Always.

Even if the question was difficult or unpleasant, you always returned it.
The reason you sometimes waited a bit was to seek higher authority for the answer, or to formulate your thoughts so you could give a good answer that, at the very least, put the agency in a somewhat favorable light.
That’s why it’s so disturbing to this former FEMA PIO to see more and more news stories saying, “FEMA did not return calls.”

That, folks, is a clear signal that the agency is in disarray.

Bad enough that the head of FEMA, Mike Brown, was sacked in the wake of Katrina.

Bad enough that the president has to do public penance for the government’s failure in this disaster.

Bad enough that the confidence of a nation is in the trash barrel.

All because of a hurricane that hit a city that should never have been built, and the inability of a central government to respond because it has had its collective eye on the wrong target.

And now the spinmasters aren’t even returning phone calls. What’s with that?

And, if you don't believe me, there's this insider look from Stephen Barr of the Washington Post.
Arjay

Disaster Lessons

If ever there is a lesson to be learned by Zephyrhills it’s right now, and the place to learn it is the town of Wiggins, Mississippi.

For all intents and purposes what happened to Wiggins during Katrina is a blueprint for what can happen to Zephyrhills should a major storm come ashore on the Pasco coast.

This is not fiction. Wiggins sits almost exactly as far inland in Mississippi as Zephyrhills sits in Florida. The topography is much the same – flat. The town demographics are different, Wiggins is smaller, but the things that make up a town are the same – roads, churches, sewers, water systems, electrical power systems and, of course, people.

What you are about to read has been culled from news reports from and about Wiggins. All you have to do is put ‘Zephyrhills’ every place you see ‘Wiggins’ and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what’s in store.

First, a bare fact: Winds in Wiggins, just east of where the eye of Katrina passed through, approached speeds of 130 miles per hour while Katrina pounded the county for about eight hours.

“There isn’t a power line in this city that is not on the ground. I remember Camille in 1969, but this is the worst I’ve ever seen. You take everything for granted until it’s not here,” said a survivor.

Brick walls were ripped from storefronts in downtown Wiggins, windows are blown out and metal traffic signs are bent over on sidewalks like plastic straws. The storm shaved off roofs, sliced mobile homes in half, turned barns into splinters and snapped the steeples from churches.

There were deaths, but the storm itself is just the tip of the iceberg. The really nasty stuff comes after the winds die down and the rains stop. Usually, the weather is quite nice after a hurricane, but the peace and tranquility is deceiving. Storms bring human misery almost beyond endurance.

Wiggins resident Cassandra McDonald said she lost all her possessions and the home she rented five days ago, as Hurricane Katrina ripped through her life. An insulin-dependent diabetic, she and her two daughters, ages 3 and 16, now have no place to call home.

If it weren’t for the food and water available at the Stone County fairgrounds Saturday, “we would die,” McDonald said.
“It’s hard and it’s sad,” said McDonald, crying. “We have no water, no lights, no phone. We don’t have nowhere to go.”

Sitting at a makeshift table in front of the drug store in Wiggins she owns with her husband, Vickie Parker doled out blood-pressure medication and anti-seizure pills to some of her regular customers Saturday.

Parker, 58, issued hand-written receipts while her husband, Wes, filled prescriptions inside the darkened store with a flashlight. But while the Parkers were able to provide dozens of people with a 10-day supply of crucial medications, they said they weren't able to address what they said is one of the most pressing problems across Stone County in the wake of Hurricane Katrina: sick people in rural areas who need oxygen tanks to breathe.

"They're running out and asking us what to do," Parker said, adding that "hundreds" of people have come to her store, County Discount Drug, seeking oxygen.

Several dozen hurricane victims were eating fried chicken and corn Saturday afternoon at an emergency shelter at Stone High School.
Dianne Massey, who runs the shelter, said she has been staying there since last Sunday.

Her Ford Taurus was parked outside the school gym, crushed under a pile of bricks that flew off the building during the storm.

Massey, who lives in Wiggins, said the city normally has no homeless shelter. Some of the residents at the makeshift shelter were there simply because they couldn't find gas, she said.

Some were from Louisiana, while others came from Gulfport or Bay St. Louis.

In Wiggins, the county seat and home to about a third of the county's estimated 14,000 residents, Mayor Jerry Alexander said the first outside help didn't arrive until Wednesday.

Several dozen hurricane victims were eating fried chicken and corn Saturday afternoon at an emergency shelter at Stone High School.

The stories go on and on, but by now you’re probably depressed enough.

In the emergency management business there’s a saying, “The best disaster is the one you don’t have, second best is the one you’ve planned for.

Does Zephyrhills have a plan?
Arjay
Copyright © 2005, Arjay Morgan, All rights reserved.

Zephyrhills prepared???

With the Katrina disaster and the ensuing rescue foul ups clearly in mind it’s time to think about just how well or ill prepared Zephyrhills is.

First, a few major-storm assumptions:

No power
No water
Lots of debris in the streets
If it’s late in the hurricane season lots of dead Yankees who didn’t leave their mobile homes. Those who didn’t die will be confused, stumbling, homeless elderly folks who now have no roofs, no cars and little understanding of what it’s like to be hit by a hurricane.
Some flooding, but nothing like New Orleans.
No cellphones or land line phones.
No help from outside for at least 72 hours.

The first thing the city needs is a plan. Who is going to do what with whom.

What role will the police have? It can’t be business as usual because there will be no central dispatch capability, the Nextels won’t work. Is there a car-to-car radio function? Does anybody know how it works? Is there an alternate communications plan in place using, say, ham radio operators and their equipment to dispatch and coordinate police operations? No? Has anybody been tasked to put such a plan together? What will be the police priorities? Safeguarding WalMart, or protecting its citizens houses from looters? Where will arrestees be detained?

Pretty much the same goes for fire and ambulance services, but fire may have no working hydrants and ambulance may have no local hospitals in operation. Has anyone planned for those contingencies? (Yes, there are ways to work around those problems.)

Does the city have tents, portable flood lights, generators to set up a central disaster center? A place to meet the needs of the residents for food, water, clothing? If not, has anyone been tasked with gathering and storing the assets and developing a plan?

Has the city stockpiled any MREs, bottled water, emergency fuel supplies?

Does the city have a sand bag filling machine, or do the elderly have to shovel their own bags full and then lug them around just like last time?

Has anyone been detailed to be in charge of emergency operations? No, not the city manager or the police chief, but somebody who has actually managed a disaster.

When the storm clears what’s the plan of action? Will the streets department have the city divided into quadrants so that debris removal is an orderly thing, or will there be certain thoroughfares that have priority?

Is there a plan to keep the sewage system operating, or at least the lift stations? How about the water plant? There won’t be electricity. Is there a fall back operations plan?

If the nursing homes decide to shelter-in-place is there a plan and the means to evacuate the residents should that plan fail? Are there means to resupply them in case it doesn’t fail?

What sort of identification criteria will be required to ensure that those who are here belong here?

Is there a shelter of last resort? Is it capable of withstanding 140 mile an hour winds? How will its location be communicated to those who should go to it (all those trailer parks again)?

This is by no means a complete disaster plan for a small city, it’s just the top of the list of things an emergency manager thinks about.

Although we like to think that our geography is our floodwall, it’s really not prudent to look to our history and say we have nothing to worry about since there hasn’t been serious, really serious damage to Zephyrhills for lo these many years.

It’s equally foolhardy to believe the cavalry will come galloping over the hill at the last moment. The Federal government has certainly proved it’s a very weak reed, and certainly not to be relied upon. The county emergency managers have a bunker in New Port Richie, 39 miles from here. It might be easy to rely on a timely county response, but it’s not realistic. The state folks are waay up there in Tallahassee. They won’t be along to help for quite a while, if ever.

Clearly, basic self reliance in a time of increased hurricane activity, not to mention terrorist attack, is the only prudent path.

What I don’t want to have to do is sometime down the road to have to print out this blog and stuff it in the face of Spina, Moore, Burgess, Barnes, Hartwig, Sellers as I stand in the middle of the rubble and ask them where they’ve been. I’ll have the same message for the councilpersons and the mayor just as soon as they show up.
Copyright Sept. 2005, Arjay Morgan All rights reserved.
Arjay

Can you spell....?

President George W. Bush has just announced he's going to head an investigation into, "what went right and what went wrong" with the Katrina disaster response.

Can you spell W H I T E W A S H ?

The Bureaucratic Menace

Why do we have to fear the bureaucrats, the government ‘officials,’ the people in charge?

It’s because they aren’t like us. Their priorities are different and even when they cast themselves in the role of rescuers or emergency managers their real priorities are to themselves and their status in the hive they have created. Let me give you an example.

The person occupying the slot of Regional Public Information Officer in FEMA’s Region IV is entitled to an ‘executive’ office chair. It says so right there in the General Services Administration catalog. It’s a perk – an $800 office chair.

In our little example the occupant of the PIO slot is one Mary Hudak. Her office is in Atlanta and she has such a chair.

The scene shifts to a Disaster Field Office set up in a former supermarket in Raleigh, N.C. The disaster is a hurricane – Betsy I believe. All of the worker bees are toiling in their folding chairs and folding tables, set up in a PIO ‘pod.’

Mary arrives. She says she’s there to help, but in fact her agenda is to exercise her authority. Translation: throw her weight around. But first things first.

Upon arrival, she gets on the phone and begins to browbeat a GSA employee for her executive chair. Yes, her perk, her chair. Remember, this is in the middle of a disaster, but Mary will have her chair, she’s entitled to it, the regs. say so.

And, yes, the chair was delivered and Mary sat in it for the next two months, threatening to fire folks who displeased her and basically taking over and disrupting what had been a smooth operation. Also on hand was the Lead PIO, a person she’d appointed. His role during this fiasco was, at full pay, to sit quietly and do nothing. Mary, after all, outranked him.

What did this do for the hurricane victims? It caused them to be fed conflicting and sometimes inaccurate information.

Now, look at the Katrina situation.

In Louisiana the governor’s press secretary is quoted in The New York Times as saying, "We wanted soldiers, helicopters, food and water, they wanted to negotiate an organizational chart."

It’s not just governmental incompetence we’re talking about here. It’s criminal incompetency. For example:

When Wal-Mart sent three trailer trucks loaded with water, FEMA officials turned them away. Agency workers prevented the Coast Guard from delivering 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel, and on Saturday they cut the parish's emergency communications line, leading the sheriff to restore it and post armed guards to protect it from FEMA.

Let’s look at that assertion again, “on Saturday they cut the parish's emergency communications line, leading the sheriff to restore it and post armed guards to protect it from FEMA.”

What’s sad is that it’s not surprising. It’s simply the lion protecting its turf.

If you’re not a government insider it makes no sense, but to one who has been there it’s perfectly logical, and that’s what we have to fear in Zephyrhills or just about anywhere else when the ‘rescuers’ ride into town.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Arjay

FEMA Shame

Let me say up front that I’m ashamed to admit that I ever was part of FEMA.

Let me also say up front that the FEMA I was part of is not the FEMA of today.

Under the command of James Lee Witt the agency had Cabinet stature and Witt had the ear of President Bill Clinton.

It’s not that way now.

FEMA is a poor stepchild inside the cobbled together Dept. of Homeland Security, its head, Michael Brown is a political appointee whose only disaster credentials are his own – trying to save a career after being asked to leave the International Arabian Horse Association.

Now, why am I writing this in a blog that ostensibly is about Zephyrhills, Florida?

Simple, the same government that abandoned its poorest and most helpless citizens in Katrina’s wake, no matter how lawless they became, can be depended upon to do the same to the citizens of this usually quiet community.

Here’s the deal, folks: Don’t put your hopes in your government when the chips are down. As long as we keep electing politicians who are beholden to themselves first and big business second, those of us who pay the bills will be left to suck hind tit.

A governmental failure of the magnitude we are witnessing and enduring often causes the knee jerk reaction of ‘throw the rascals out.’ Not a bad idea, but it fails to take account of the fact that one set of rascals has to be replaced by another set. Hopefully, a better bunch of rascals.

What does this mean to us here in Zephyrhills? It should be a clarion call for self reliance. We need to put in place, right now, the support infrastructure we’ll need to survive disaster when it hits us – and believe me, there IS a disaster with our name on it.
Arjay

Katrina Fiasco

I spent a number of years working as a Public Information Officer for FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. I might just know a few things about disasters, having worked some of the biggies and a lot of the little ones. I also still keep in touch with the emergency management community. Today (Thursday) was especially disturbing. But first a bit of history.

A Katrina-like storm was the stuff of innumerable training scenarios. It was truly the cataclysmic event that we all gamed and pre-planned, and we all knew it could happen. We also hoped it wouldn't be in our lifetimes. But it did happen. Then things went from really bad to awful. Expected responses weren't there. People like me began to think something was really wrong when we realized we were busily rebuilding Iraq, but when our own citizens were devastated we offer them 'low interest' SBA loans. Wonder what kind of interest Ali Mohammed pays on his new, courtesy of the U.S.A., home in a lovely Baghdad suburb? But that's another whole posting.

Then came the really bad news. It reads like this:

<http://www.disasternews.net/news/news.php?articleid=2802>

"Hurricane Katrina has obliterated so many homes, churches,
communications systems, fuel supply lines that the normal channels of disaster response have simply ground to a halt...

"With gas supplies faltering, communication disrupted, and an
unprecedented number of homeless people in the U.S., government and faith-based responders alike are being forced to rethink plans they've used in other disasters."

That's from the publication of the folks who make disasters their business. It isn't network hype, nor is it soothing words from a bureaucrat. It's the assessment of the people who know their business. It's also a terrible commentary on what can happen when the central government loses sight of its primary function: the well being of its citizens. It's also scary as hell.

Even moreso it is scary when you live in a place like West-Central Florida. Yes, folks, it can happen here, not quite on the scale of New Orleans, but certainly on the scale of Biloxi.

Think of that when you vote next election day, or, worse yet, when you don't vote.

Arjay

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