I don't know, but . . .

I've heard the stories from North Carolina about officials blocking aid workers (though nothing so far on followup), and also people saying that the authorities have to manage who gets in so as to keep out looters and other predators. It hasn't been mentioned, but they need to keep out amateurs who'll get into trouble and need rescue themselves. (I've also read testimony that they haven't seen anything like that kind of friction with authorities--I'd bet it's more a function of who the folks on the ground are instead of policy.)

We need to balance risks. Predators flock to the scene--they already have. But the risks from them seem, so far, relatively low compared to the risks of locals running out of clean water and medicine. It isn't a nice way to think about things, but in an emergency you have to triage and spend your energies efficiently, and some people are going to get murdered who wouldn't have been if you spent the time to vet everybody every time, but more will live because they got uncontaminated water to drink in time, or got shelter when their home and roads washed away.

We're not always good at evaluating risks.

Grim says the Feds haven't shown up yet in his area, but local and private assistance are helping a lot.

A recent squirrel chase through the net found me looking up naval militia, and then the naval militia(*) in Wisconsin. Wisconsin had one up until a bit after WWI, and recently proposed reviving it with centers in Milwaukee and Madison. (The proposal failed.)

Milwaukee is logical, but Madison? It has some lakes and the little Yahara River.

New York has one, and they used to assist in cargo loading when retrieving Flight 800 bodies and wreckage, and after 9/11 helped with evacuations, did logistical/clerical work, security, and first aid support. Their SeaBees put up a tent city for the emergency workers--there are a couple pages of bullet points. Now we're all grown-ups, and know the need to maximize the number of categories in a report (Assisted the Security Chief in moving his desk), but clearly there were ways to help out in a disaster that don't require that you be in a boat.

OTOH, I'm not sure what this would bring to the table that the Army National Guard wouldn't, except in oddball situations where the Reserve is stripped of one kind of skills and the Guard of another.

But we might still yet have our own naval militia.

(*) Not the same as privateers.

I'd have thought that if you want to work with biohazards like the big boys, you'd fund your facilities to operate like the big boys. But maybe you just build the facilities and check for political reliability instead. Vanity Fair has a report on the Wuhan facility and others in China. If true, they were much worse than I expected. "when Chinese officials “describe the solution to a problem, that’s how you find out what went wrong.”"

I didn't know that stainless steels were readily corroded by cleaning agents. I'd never heard of pishi before either.

I may update this list from time to time as I think of (or am instructed about) new aspects.

Yes

1. You have an identifiable enemy that is killing you.
2. You have reasonably clear and achievable objectives. To be accurate, the USA has not fought with clear and achievable objectives for several wars now, but that’s because we’ve been idiots.
3. You need collective action to achieve those objectives.
4. Some of your people are going to die, and a lot are going to suffer, and the means you devise for the “fight” will cause some suffering, lots of opportunity costs, and probably some deaths.
5. Reaching your objectives requires money. The more your economy is crippled, the harder it will be to reach your goal—and you will have additional deaths because people rely on that economy. For the USA that can mean crippled transportation systems that don’t provide cities the food/fuel/medicines they need; for a poorer country that can mean that farmers starve because the army has confiscated their crops.
6. ”The enemy gets a vote.” You have to be ready to adjust your plans.
7. You will do unhappy and unjust things: seizing goods, locking people up ("quarantine" comes from a 40-day detention)--and in war killing people.
8. Your means need to be commensurate with the threat. Scorched-earth may be an appropriate tactic when Germans are invading the USSR, but it wouldn’t be appropriate if Mexico were invading the USA.
9. Some people will get rich off the new requirements, whether drug or ammo manufacturers. You may have to intervene to keep this from getting out of hand, but you need them to benefit to keep supplies coming. “Useful profiteers.”
10. Some people will try to use emergency powers to enrich themselves or entrench themselves in control. “Evil profiteers.” The tools and restrictions intended for defeating the enemy can be turned against your own people.
11. Internecine quarrels about means and promotions and whatnot will be ugly, cause a great deal of damage, perhaps lose you your war—and are unavoidable.
12. You need accountability for the results. If marching men out of the trenches into no-mans-land just gets them machine-gunned, somebody needs to be told to stop that.
13. Wars are full of lies trying to nudge the population, cover up screwups, and prevent panic.
14. You have to make decisions without enough information.
15. You are afraid. Too much fear is bad--you lynch Germans during WW-I or fail to press on against the Confederates at Yorktown. Too little and the Barbarossa plan catches you by surprise.

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No

1. There is nobody who can surrender. You can kill enough human enemies to make them stop whatever they were doing. You can’t kill all the viruses. Smallpox was an exception—it was easy. Ebola is hard.
2. As a consequence of the above, either the infectious agent or the treatment will keep on killing some number of your people forever. If you can reduce the rate to something small, your emergency is over. 0 deaths is not possible with dangerous disease.
3. Everybody dies. You can defeat one foreign enemy, but one of the domestic ones (cancer, heart disease, murder) is going to get you sooner or later. The temptation for mission creep and battling the next disease ("it's almost as dangerous!") will probably be overwhelming.
4. In a war, if you didn’t have a dedicated enemy when you started, you do now—you can’t just say “Oopsies” and stop. If you find a pandemic to be less of a problem than you thought, you can “just stop.” The hard problem will be getting the powers-that-be to admit they were wrong.
5. Against an epidemic, your tactics will always partake of "scorched earth," damaging your economy and future. In wars, that's only sometimes true.

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Yes and No

1. It depends on the intensity. A mild disease is more like the random Muhammadans going on solo jihads in London. You can let the existing systems (police in one case, medical in the other) take care of the problem. A more dangerous disease is comparable to them being organized and funded, as with 9/11. You need to bring new tools to bear on the problem. Ebola would be like an invasion.

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Obviously the tools differ: chemicals, quarantines, research, crash programs to redo HVAC (for airborne pathogens) vs the familiar trucks, bullets, and bombs. But they’re both expensive and have huge opportunity costs.

As a thought experiment, imagine a disease spread by contact, with a week-long incubation period during the last three days of which the victim is contagious, with a 40% death rate.

The disease appears in Sao Paulo, spreads quickly, and is quickly identified.

You’re the director of Epidemic Security. Congress has just voted a (possibly merely the first) 30-day state of emergency. The country is going to be “invaded.” What do you do?

Just a few quick ideas: shut down the borders and all international travel until quarantine centers are built. Plan for 2+ week quarantines—1-week is the average incubation period, not an exact one. Unauthorized border crossing is an existential threat, and met with deadly force. Ration bleach, alcohol, peroxide, etc. Begin construction on inter-“zone” quarantine stations designed for isolation and disinfection. With luck you won’t need them, but you probably won’t have any luck.

Does that sound Chinese to you? It should also sound Italian, and French, and so on—people take deadly epidemics deadly seriously.

Once the disease appears inside the country, you have to become radical—otherwise 40% means a lot of people die. Isolate infected zones. Within the zones, nobody goes outside for a week or so. (This will kill some people—not enough food, not enough meds, uncooperative.)

The economy takes a huge hit. Even after it’s all over, lots of jobs will be gone forever, and you’ll have more poverty. But then, 40% death rate would do even worse.

Now modify the situation. (Parallel extreme cases sometimes help illustrate principles.) Suppose the death rate is 99%.

Borders close. No admittance, whether or not you’re a citizen. Civilian monitors augment the Coast Guard watching the coast. Preemptive inter-“zone” traffic stops at boundaries for 20-day quarantines. Civilian monitors watch back roads. People starve. Measures get even harsher if the disease gets a foothold in the country.

Now modify the situation to its opposite. Suppose the plague will only kill everyone over 100 with heart disease.

Would you do anything at all? Maybe invite the likely victims to live in bubbles, if that. This doesn’t qualify as a public emergency.

The typical year's annual flus don't meet the threshold for an emergency. We're fortunate that the medical system has vaccines that help, but even without them it hadn't been a disaster-level problem. That's not comforting to my friend's wife--he died from the flu a few years ago.

A new immersive performance will allow audience members to experience a plane crash.

Better sign up quickly: "The show will run from 15-23 February throughout the day; tickets £8."

It isn't at an airport.

I once opined that airports should setup a mock-up cabin (at least one size) and give passengers who go through an escape drill a voucher for a few bucks off their next flight.

I'd go for that. And make sure the rest of the family did too. I'm not so sure about a simulated crash, though--if only because the "many worlds" spiel would drive me nuts.

Other people have already said everything reasonable to say (and a lot of unreasonable things as well), and all I can add is that I hope they can rebuild it. The amount of volunteered money is encouraging, but a few noises suggest that jockeying for control has already started. The usual winners of these artistic contests seem not to have any great interest in beauty, much less Christianity.

If you haven't seen the robot Colossus, watch it. It could go where people couldn't, and keep watching, and keep the water flowing. And the Paris Fire Brigade borrowed some drones, and got the "geofencing functions" bypassed so the drones could fly within the city limits. Apparently the French bureaucracy can move quickly when it wants to.

The cathedral has been modified before. I think this time maybe they shouldn't go with oak timbers. Steel. And since the upper stone is probably weakened, maybe some additional framework on the outside. It won't look the same--but then it didn't look quite the same after each earlier remodeling.

But first and foremost, if they want to rebuild it with any meaning, it must be a church.

Footage(*) of the gas line explosion was released.

No criminal culpability was found. The widow is suing the firms involved.

Followup to an Earlier note

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(*) I'm showing my age with the word "footage."

I mentioned an explosion in town here and here

The latest word is that the gas line was improperly marked. "failed to correctly mark the gas line in the street, where it was actually located, and instead marked a spot on a sidewalk about 25 feet away where there was no gas line."

That would do it. Documentation is vital.

The explosion downtown came from a gas leak that started about about 6:20. The gas wasn't completely shut off until 9:30. Why?

The first response gas fitter (presumably tasked with turning it off) was caught in the explosion. Word on the street is that he has a severe concussion and no hearing. The explosion damaged a network of pipes and required a dozen valves be shut off.

2500 attended fireman Barr's funeral. That's over 7% of the population of the town. Our next door neighbor's son is in the volunteer fire department, and was on the scene. Barr had initially asked him to walk with him over near the intersection, and then changed his mind and told him to stay by the truck while Barr went on alone.

I wonder how seriously the powers-that-be are taking EMP risks.

We hear how EMP would fry computers, sensitive electronics, fancy auto ignition systems I wonder about how likely that is if you're not at ground 0, and mess up the power grid. Bye bye water supply, communications, etc.

Despite the CNN rant we were subjected to this morning(*) about Puerto Rico, you can't pre-position enough supplies with only a couple of day's notice, and when the storm takes out everything you can't wave a magic wand and have a hundred thousand generators instantly materialize. And figuring out what to do in what order isn't trivial.

If we wanted less exposure to EMP, how would we design things? The national power grid needs work; some robustness might be designed into it. (Please?!) Do we have ways to hack and slash local chunks back together again (chucking out all the smart power stuff, and maybe not even hanging power lines high in the air the first month)?

Lightning strikes cause bad transients--can we look at how to isolate buildings from them? That might carry over into EMP hardening too.

We're doing a lot of alternative energy stuff: there's no way that wind could replace coal, but the tie-ins that make wind's variable supply feed into the grid might be extended to pre-positioned backup generators.

We can't move as much stuff as efficiently without fast computer communication. Do we still have fall-back approaches?

Are backup generators standard for water towers?

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(*) The admin spokesman didn't seem to understand the situation either.

How the mighty have fallen.

Memorial Hospital in New Orleans used to be Baptist Hospital until a conglomerate bought it. My mother worked there; I was born there. It had a good name in the city.

Nobody prepared very well for a hurricane, either before the conglomerate or afterwards. Not just generators but the whole electrical plant needs to be above the high-tide flood level, especially in a city like New Orleans. Nobody had evacuation plans, and the two businesses sharing the facilities didn't coordinate. Disaster, here we come. Once the lake came through the levees (after Katrina had mostly passed the city), water rose too high for ambulances, and the hospital was out of power and crowded with refugees. Ventilators tend not to work very well without electricity, nor do monitors or oxygen pumps or automated drug infusion systems. There were quite a few very sick and frail there; some couldn't take the strain and died.

The city itself was not as violent during the flooding as the infamous first reports claimed, but neither was it as peaceful as later stories made out. Everyone was worried about attacks, and the gunfire at all hours didn't ease tensions.

It got worse. In ad hoc triage DNR orders translated to DoNotEvacuate (or Evacuate Last) regardless of patient condition. The left hand didn't know what the right was doing. Even after the generators failed there was some power in another wing, and at least one caregiver took refuge from the heat in the AC by running the car AC in the parking garage--nobody realized this might be useful for frail patients who were suffering badly in the heat. Communications with the Coast Guard were confused--at one point the hospital stopped evacuating patients because they were afraid it was too dark to fly (guardsmen were using night vision goggles). (And it turned out that nobody had thought through the next step after transporting city patients to evacuation points--many sick stayed there for days.)

And it got worse. Whether the problem was doctors who didn't want to be bothered (the author didn't think so) or a combination of the spirit of the age and exhausted and mis-communicating doctors, at least 9 patients were deliberately killed, by at least 2 doctors and 2 nurses--and probably nearer 20 patients.

The latter half of the book is the story of an attempt to charge Dr Pou with homicide. It failed. Her attorney did a marvelous job of smokescreen and PR misrepresentation, and (since Dr Pou was a state employee) the taxpayers coughed up over 400ドルK for the privilege of being lied to.

I've opposed lethal injection as a method of execution because it involves doctors or nurses in killing (I don't mean killing in self-defense), and having amateurs do it seems cruel. The spirit of the age loves "euthanasia," and it looks like doctors were buying into it that day, even as the evacuation vehicles were coming. It is a very ugly change in medicine.

At Fukushima when their radiation detectors pegged at 100 mS/hour they kept on going.

From the BBC story

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) had originally said the radiation emitted by the leaking water was around 100 millisieverts an hour.

However, the company said the equipment used to make that recording could only read measurements of up to 100 millisieverts.

The new recording, using a more sensitive device, showed a level of 1,800 millisieverts an hour.

(BTW, that should read "less sensitive device", not "more." BBC science editor strikes again.)

To be fair, most of the readings were undoubtedly lower than 100 mS/hour, and unless they really are hiring "ne'er do wells and petty criminals" to do the cleanup the people should all be well versed in ALARA and the hot spots won't have seriously hurt anybody.

But seriously, if my radiation detector ever pegs, I'm out of there to look for something with a little more range. At Fermilab they had two sets of detectors for hoi polloi, and the simple scanner was switchable to different sensitivities. In theory, if something registered hot we could get a half-way decent estimate for how hot using just the equipment on hand. In practice we were told to just label it, toss it in the bin, and let the techs deal with it later--but at Fukushima the users are the radiation techs.

The hotspots they found may be new, and they may be transient. When you're dealing with reactor-waste levels of radiation, keeping track matters a lot. The 1.8S/hour hotspot would be lethal in about 4 hours, while 100mS for 4 hours would just increase your likelihood of cancer by a couple of percent. And if a crack opens in a tank, an area downstream that used to be tolerable might hit levels lethal in minutes.

As could have been readily predicted, Italian scientists on their disaster body are quitting. That was an easier prediction than earthquakes.

An Italian court had found the six scientists and government official guilty of manslaughter for saying there was little risk.

The devil is in the details. The situation was that there'd been some minor quakes, and an amateur whose earlier predictions had all failed had managed to get attention and was warning everybody that disaster was at hand. By tradition people lived outdoors for a while to avoid aftershocks or the big tremor the small ones were leading up to. The panel assessed the risks and found them small, and apparently insisted on this extra hard because of the amateur. Some people who usually camped in the streets at such times decided to stay home, and got crushed when the quake hit after all.

Nature reports in considerable detail, and describes the famous evaluation meeting. Even Boschi now says that "the point of the meeting was to calm the population. We [scientists] didn't understand that until later on."

In press interviews before and after the meeting that were broadcast on Italian television, immortalized on YouTube and form detailed parts of the prosecution case, De Bernardinis said that the seismic situation in L'Aquila was "certainly normal" and posed "no danger", adding that "the scientific community continues to assure me that, to the contrary, it's a favourable situation because of the continuous discharge of energy". When prompted by a journalist who said, "So we should have a nice glass of wine," De Bernardinis replied "Absolutely", and urged locals to have a glass of Montepulciano.

and

Two of the committee members — Selvaggi and Eva — later told prosecutors that they "strongly dissented" from such an assertion, and Jordan later characterized it as "not a correct view of things". (De Bernardinis declined a request for an interview through his lawyer, Dinacci, who insisted that De Bernardinis's public comments reflected only what the commission scientists had told him. There is no mention of the discharge idea in the official minutes, Picuti says, and several of the indicted scientists point out that De Bernardinis made these remarks before the actual meeting.)

It sounds to me as though scapegoats were sought. And found. And convicted. There's an automatic appeal, but at this point I would not offer the Italian government my expert opinion on the time of day. Too risky.