Arresting People Who Stay to Protect Their Property During Disaster

My personal experience is the last 2 major hurricanes that have scared the area. That is all I have to go by as it has been such a long time before that that there was even a scare. Both were bad situations. One from the Government and one from nature. The one from nature, the government still made worse. I'll take my chances with nature.
I could google all day long and think I have all the answers to my questions, but at the end of the day I will rely on what I have seen with my own eyes as oppossed to what someone tells me. When you have lived it, you do not need to read someone elses opinion on it. The Rita evac was supposed to be the improved one, if you remeber. We were not gonna be like Louisiana was with Katrina. We were much worse is what we were. We didn't need a storm to kill people. The evac routes did.
You are making a mistake alot of people do.... you're using your political philosophy and applying it to every future incident, while having no personal experience to buttress your position.

 

FWIW...rimrocker deals with disaster response for a living. If I remember correctly, that is. I think that makes him a lot more credible than you.

Ike would have been a lot worse had they not been able to get those people immediately off the Bay out of the area. Keep in mind that Ike turned slightly before landfall so that the dirty side of the storm was not over the Bay. If it would have been, the surge would have been much worse.

At some point, we will not be so lucky. If people do not evacuate, there will be many needlessly dead. They would be free to stay in your world, but they wouldn't be alive to enjoy it.

 

I second Refman's post. Rimrocker is a wildland firefighter and has a lot of experience with disasters. He isn't basing his argument on political ideology but on first hand expereince.

 

Another thought. Disaster evacuation is often a damned if you do damned if don't situation. Our infrastructure isn't designed to handle a massive movement of people rapidly and there always a danger in a mass evacuation. At the sametime though the failure to evacuate also carries huge risk. For example Mayor Nagin was rightfully criticized for not using all the resources he had at his disposal to help evacuate NOLA during Katrina.

We also have to consider that disasters are inherently hard to predict and we can't always determine what path a hurricane, flood or wildfire will take. Rita ended up veering to the east away from Houston but if it had held course and hit Houston full on people's opinion about the evacuation would probably be much different.

 

I don't care what he does for a living. If he is a wildlife fire fighter, good for him and I applaud him for his efforts, but that absolutely nothing to do with this conversation. The differrence between a hurricane maybe hitting you and a forest fire blazing all around you are astronimical. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other. In a forest fire we are not talking about putting millions of people on the road all at once. If he has not been through the disasters of the last 4 years or even before, he is nowhere near as credible as I or anyone who has. He is preaching the company line. It was nice of ya'll to come to his defense in a debate he was steadily slipping on, but ya'll did him no justice. Just admit like the Chorpus judge how stupid a law it is. Nobody has the time or resources to go around arresting people in these situations. It just gives them another reason to arrest someone for no reason if they feel froggy. It also forces people who would not have left before, to leave and clog the roads for those who will eventually end up needing to when the hurricane comes their way after it misses the glamour spot the news said it was going to hit..

 

This conversation is about a law having to do with evacuating during a disaster. If you cannot see that rimrocker's profession gives him a unique perspective and more credibility on this subject than the average person, then I would assert that it is you, not him, who is talking out of his a$$.

Even so, the situations have a lot of similarities. They are both natural disasters that cause people to evacuate. People who don't evacuate can be killed or hurt and can create situations where rescuers need to risk their lives to save people who chose to stay even after being told to leave.

In that case, I am as or more credible than you are (note to rimrocker, I am entertaining him, I am aware that you are far more credible than either one of us ). I wasn't thrilled about being TOLD to leave before Ike, but I understand why and agree that many people need to be told to leave for their own good.

It gives law enforcement the ability to more easily control looting or other property crimes in a supposedly evacuated area. As was mentioned, it's not like police will be going door-to-door arresting people for staying home. However, if they see people driving around an evac area, they can take the people into custody to keep them from doing anything they shouldn't be.

I would argue that the orderly evacuation during Ike shows clearly that the changes made after the Rita debacle (self credibility proof: I spent 15 hours on the road with a 9 day old during that evacuation) made a HUGE difference. Traffic is not a reason to allow people to stay in a potentially dangerous situation when we have the ability to compel them to leave.

 

I take it you've never seen a wildfire one or had to deal with an evacuation. The disasters are different but the evacuation process is the same. I lived through the 1991 Oakland Hills fire and if anything a fire evacuation is more difficult to deal with than a hurricane evac as you have less time to prepare for it.

Rimrocker has been through far more disasters than you have. YOu are just expressing your own opinion and if anything also your own ideology, based on only two circumstances. Rimrocker is drawing upon decades of experience.

 

I wouldn't think so. Has govt been held liable for deaths because people defied a mandatory evacuation? I would think the mandatory evac would be enough of an argument in a liability case. In fact, I think the law could have the opposite effect and expose govt to liability. If someone is in an ME area, perhaps sees a cop who tells him to leave but does not arrest him, and then is killed; the family might be able to argue that the govt had the power and responisibility to save him from himself and wilfully chose not to.

 

Incidentally, when I lived in AZ I was part of a group that looked at how the state would respond to natural disasters. We quickly figured out that the largest incident to stress AZ would be a massive SoCal earthquake and spent much of our time planning on how to deal with a bunch of refugees from another state that would be arriving en masse with little ability to care for themselves. Think Rita+, but with people strung out across the sparsely populated Mojave Desert.

 

{channeling T-man}
Sorry, dude, working for agencies that plan for disasters is nothing like actually running from one yourself.

NO CRED
{/channeling}

 

So I assume the cops etc. who disagree with the law also have no "cred".

The total population of the Harris County evacuation zone for Ike was about 245,000 people. That doesn't include Galveston and Chambers counties that had hundreds of thousands more. Have fun with that law. But of course there is no possible way it is will be abused.

POLICE STATE.

 

Safeway Select, which of our current laws have "no possible way" of being abused.

POLICE STATE.

 

The one that doesn't exist. That's the point, Statist Slime.

 

Wrong. I remember watching the news when Ike was about to hit us last year and they interviewed this one lady who refused to leave her home in Galveston while carrying her little baby in her arms. Her reason was that God will come and save the day and nothing will happen. I don't know what happen to her after ike but people like that are not just harming themselves, they harm others too.

 

Ouch.

Weren't you defending the arrest of a sovereign citizen, on their own property no less, for mouthing off to the cops?

Why yes, yes you were.

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=172311&page=10&pp=20

You're really bad at the whole libertarian thing.

 

The police investigating a call of burglary is not quite the same as hundreds of thousands under threat of arrest for not following orders. Deep inside, you know that to be true.

 

The police should poke them with a stick and then arrest them for disorderly conduct.

 

Again, I now realize Rimrocker is your god on this subject. I could go into what I do now and what I used to do, but it has absolutely no effect on the debate at hand. He said he planned for a disaster in another state on how to deal with another states refugee's. A plan that was never tested. Besides that, How is that anything like evacuating from where your at? We took on the Katrina refugee's just fine. That has not been a problem for us to figure out how to handle. The problem came from trying to evacuate our own people.
Are you really trying to compare evacuating a forest fire to a heavy populated city? There is a reason it is a forest fire. It is because it is full of tree's, grass, brush, and few houses. As opposed to a heavy populated area which has houses almost touching each other in the midst of the concrete jungle.


{channeling GladiatoRowdy}
Sorry dude, Actually being in the situations is nothing like planning for something else that has absolutely nothing to do with what we are talking about.

No cred
{/channeling}

Rocketsjudoka, There is a reason they are called forest fires. Are you insuating that a forest fire springs up and the whole forest blazes up and everyone and everything in that forest is killed instantainiously if they do not get the millions of forest dwellars out at the precise moment the blaze starts? Or could it be that there are far fewer people and the fires spread over weeks, and they have time to get the much smaller population out with relatively no problems? How many times do they give you weeks to get out with a hurricane? It doesn't happen. As a matter of fact, the mayor of Galveston was saying we don't need to go anywhere 2 days before the hurricane. Then called for mandatory evac the day before.
Ike evacs did not go smoothly either. Nobody left after the Rita debacle. So of course the roads and their plans seemed to work better. Now you are gonna try to make everyone leave and create the Rita effect all over again.
A better law would be to arrest people who leave and clog up roads who live on the north side of Houston. They are the ones who are putting peoples lives at risk. Hell for that matter anyone in Houston who is not on the ship channel.
What if every animal in the blazing forest and all the surrounding overpopulated forest that were nowhere near the fire had to get on one little path to get to another place? The ones from the surrounding places felt no need to leave and were in no danger, but the lions made them leave. The ones from below who were in no danger were now forced to walk through the blazing woods and the ones in the blazing woods couldn't get out, because the forest above them had already clogged the path. There were other paths that were available with no animals at all on them, but the lions made them stay on this one path. They could have all stayed home and been safe and the ones in the blazing woods could have safely exited down the path of their choice if the lions would have never gotten involved. Instead, it was a major Lion created disaster, that could have been avoided all together if the animals were left to make their own safety choices.
I thought this would be a much better analogy for ya'll to maybe understand since the only thing you comprehend here is forest fires. How is that any differrent than our Hurricane Evac plans?

 

If you're saying it's safer, or more orderly to not require manditory evacuations -- I'm afraid you're off your rocker.

If you want to make a libertarian argument about one's rights to remain on his property, that has a lot more credibility.

The guy working or coordinating the disaster relief would, naturally, prefer everyone was out. But that doesn't mean the civil libertarians agree. Though, they'd frame their opposition on very different terms then what's the most effective means to address the disaster.

 

Maybe I missed that part of the thread. What cop disagreed with the law?