Arresting People Who Stay to Protect Their Property During Disaster

Wow.

 

If it's a mandatory evacuation and they've provided adequate facilities and/or transit routing, I have no problem with this.

 

I have mixed feelings about this. While I think people should be able to risk their own lives in this kind of situation, should they chose to do so, the fact remains that our emergency people... EMS, the local police, county and state emergency folks, the fire departments, they all end up risking their lives trying to get some truly idiotic people out of the fix they put themselves in. Seems like there should be a way to prevent that.

 

I do not like this law. If people want to die in their house, let them.

 

they stopped going out to galveston at a certain point. Just tell them to not take risks.

making you leave means you cannot get back in, which is BS.

 

Who will do the arresting?

The men in white coats??

 

Agreed. There is so much room for abuse of power in this law. On the other hand, I get sick of watching morons on TV getting rescued for trying to drive through 10 foot flood waters in a Honda Civic or thinking they can wait out 20 foot floods on their roof.

This reminds me of the videos I saw of the authorities in New Orleans forcefully entering homes and taking law-abiding citizens' firearms.

 

Which was illegal. But under this law it could be legal.

 

I like this law because a lot of people show bad judgment and stay.

 

They won't let people back in because it is not safe to do so. A few facts:

1. Often after a storm is more dangerous than during. Lots of downed power lines, debris, etc etc. There is no way that we should have people wading through that stuff.

2. Anybody on the scene will impede, and often endanger, those working to make the area safe.

Common sense. Since people will not exercise it themselves, we must compel them to.

This will cause a safer and quicker recovery from a storm.

 

It may be bad judgement but it is their judgement to make. If you stay behind, you are not hurting anyone but yourself. I think you should be able to stay behind if you wish to, as long as you forfeit your ability to be rescued temporarily. If you stay behind, be prepared to be in it by yourself, but they should not be arrested.

 

See point 2 in my previous post. We do not need a couple hundred idiots getting in the way of those trying to restore essential services to the area. It is dangerous for those trying to effectuate the recovery.

 

like I said, they need to be willing to be on their own temporarily, until everything is restored. If they disrupt the process, I don't mind them being arrested

 

At the end humans are humans and we will try to help someone when they are in need. I think rescuers put their lives on the line too often to save people who refused to leave. I think as long as help is available we should not turn anyone away even if they made a bad decision. Forcing people out perhaps is a better way of dealing with this.

 

If you wait until they do something disruptive, it will likely also be dangerous to those around them in that environment. It is a little late to be concerned about it then.

Besides, what is the point of having a mandatory evacuation if it isn't...you know...mandatory?

 

all of your theories go to crap when you remember that most ME places are rural where people have livestock that need attention

These people can take care of themselves without a 24 hour grocery or electricity. We had a generator and plenty of diesel in a ME area. If we left and were not able to come back for days, with fences down or stranded cows/horses, they would have been dead or long gone.

 

Having all the livestock in the world isn't going to help people when the people are dead and/or stranded. You got lucky. There were many on the peninsula that weren't.

Most are rural? Your argument goes to crap when you take into account ME areas like Galveston Island, Texas City and all the ZIP codes in Harris County that are low lying and adjacent to Galveston Bay. Lives were lost and needless other injuries sustained by people staying on the Island saying things like "we have stayed for storms before, we aren't leaving." When some of these people got hurt after the storm, there was not a functional hospital for them to go to.

It is a logistical nightmare. It is a nightmare for the recovery.

Maybe there needs to be an agricultural/rural exception, but there is no way in hell that people should have been allowed to stay on Galveston Island. It makes a bad situation even worse for all involved.

 

Good. The theory that people are responsible for themselves flies out the window as soon as they realize they are in over their heads. I can't tell you how many times people opt to stay in their homes and then come crying desperately for help when the doo doo hits the fan. No firefighter I know is going to turn down a request for help. No firefighter I know would refuse help to a family with kids just because the parents were idiots and thought it would be a lark to stay. I was on a fire once where the flames were going to be in the middle of town in less than 30 minutes. A cop friend was making sure everyone was gone and sees a couple pushing a stroller down the sidewalk with an infant inside. The cop tells them to leave immediately and they responded with something like, "Fires never get here, they'll catch it." The stupidity infuriated my friend who pulled his gun and made them get in a car and leave. He could have been doing other stuff as there were still a few elderly left, but he had to deal with these morons, who became an energy sink to him at a critical time and caused him to get angry when he should have been focused on thinking clearly about the situation. (The fire burned a few hundred homes and the entire street these people lived on.)

Another time, I saw a guy interviewed after a fire had swept through his neighborhood. He claimed to have protected his home with a garden hose and a bandana over his mouth. The TV folks were awed by his story. What neither knew was that a Hot Shot crew was about 30 yards away from his back fence burning out the fuels to push the fire around his house. Additionally, several engines were patrolling his street and assigned to his group of houses. The Hot Shot Superintendent knew the guy was there, had talked to him earlier and had plans to make sure two of his guys would drag him out if they felt they needed to leave. As it was, if they hadn't been there, his house would have been gone and the hot air/radiant heat would have fried his lungs and killed him... but he didn't have a clue and unbelievably took credit for protecting his house.

I have countless other stories, some quite personal.

Obviously, when stuff like that happens, it takes away from the ability of emergency personnel to protect lives and property. When you add people who don't know what they're doing (and you don't know what they will do), it adds a huge amount of complexity to the situation, whether they are in your face or not. Just the simple knowledge of their presence may affect the decisions and actions to the detriment of the larger incident objectives.

There have been numerous studies that show people can only imagine a disaster as bad as they've had some kind of emotional or physical experience with. Even seeing stuff on the news does not register unless it happened to them. Consequently, a large part of out PR battle when we have to evac people is convincing them that this is real and not like the fire 20 years ago that stayed on the other side of the mountain.

It also puts us in a bad spot politically. It's one thing to say people are responsible for themselves should they chose to stay. It would be another entirely to deal with the political fallout of having left some family to burn up. We take enough grief by marking houses we will and won't defend because they are too dangerous... I can't imagine what we'd go through with lives instead of just property.

Again, all that affects how you think and act on an incident. If you can clear people from the equation and just have to deal with the incident, that is often complex enough and stressful enough to demand all your energy and concentration.

Also, the posters who pointed out the immediate aftermath of an incident is dangerous as well are correct. We do everything we can to get people back in their homes as quickly as possible, but if we are sketchy about walking around, we will not let them in until we are comfortable nobody's going to get hurt by having a dead tree fall on them or something. We also try to keep people out to protect ourselves. If we're working on clean-up and a bunch of lookie-loos or people stressed about their property or pets or something are driving around, they may not be paying attention to the firefighter working alongside the road.

 

During Katrina? I don't recall that happening but am not ruling it out. Could you provide a link?