Arresting People Who Stay to Protect Their Property During Disaster

The problem is that your answers make no sense.

No, it is because your questions are nonsensical.

Yes, anyone who has spent time working in the field of emergency management is FAR more qualified to talk about emergency management than someone whose sole "experience" in the field is running from or hunkering down during a hurricane.

They rescue before the storm and after the storm, times when it is still dangerous to be out and about. Rescues leading up to landfall are still dangerous, as are the ones carried out immediately after the storm passes. Rescuers don't really have much choice, they are going to go out and attempt to rescue people because that is their job. The people who didn't evacuate had a choice that, in an area prone to flooding, they should not have had. They should have been compelled to leave.

If you saw the relatively orderly evacuation during Ike, you will have seen that there were a lot of lessons learned during Rita, lessons like staggered evacuations, mandatory evacuations only for areas with high potential for flooding, and reversing the highways to allow more traffic to flow.

These are actions that are taken by people who deal with emergencies for a living (you know, people like rimrocker, the guy you have been deriding through this thread) because they want to protect as many lives as they can. This law will make it easier to protect lives.

No, you have answered the arguments with the opinion that your anecdotal evidence trumps the experience of emergency workers.

This proves exactly nothing. The point is that the rescue workers should not be forced to risk their lives when the danger is likely enough to happen to cause a mandatory evacuation. Since the rescue workers themselves will not refuse to attempt a rescue, the only way to affect that equation is to compel the people to leave in any way we can.

And in most parts of Houston, it is. In places where they have mandatory evacuations, it should not be.

In that case, my anecdotal evidence holds just as much water as yours, given that I evacuated for both Rita and Ike, so your opinion (that this law is unnecessary) is wrong.

 

They probably didn't go out during the worst part of the storm but the surge and rain bands are considered as part of the storm. Also while the video doesn't show it from what I recall rescues were ran when the eye passed over.

Anyway if you watch the video you get a sense of how bad the rain, wind and flooding still was while they are running the rescue. Also they point out that thousands are going to be need to be rescued because they didn't evacuate. Those are people who have put their lives at risk and put the safety and resources of rescue and recovery people at risk too because they didn't evacuate.

 

Don't arrest people that want to stay.

Don't rescue them.

Works for me.

 

Its not that simple. Rescuers are obligated professionally and ethically to try to save people. You can't just ignore cries for help even from people who have voluntarily chosen to remain in a hazardous situation.

 

I'm now pro-death on pretty much everything.

It makes things simple.

Change the regulations so that the rescue teams cannot unnecessarily endanger their or their crew's life for the sake of those voluntarily remaining in an evacuation zone.
The rescuers that excessively put their lives in danger for those that ignored official evacuation orders can die too. Only now they don't get pension for disability/death.

Let's see what they think about their ethics when confronted with the possibility of a widow with 3 children receiving 0 benefits/income, because they'll be fired posthumously for breaking regulations.


It'll never happen, but it would make things simple.

(I'm pro - right to choose to die in my home if I want to.)

 

That's not true. People can be denied rescue.

The people who stayed on the fishing pier they own during Ike were denied help when they called. I saw a special about them on the weather channel.

I drove by it a few weeks ago. The truck is still there. (They survived in that room)

 

That's your wealth of experience in dealing with disasters. 2 hurricanes?!

Guess your qualified to manage these disaster situations then...

 

Again, Ike evavs went smoothly because just about everybody stayed. Nobody was leaving again after Rita.

Is this topic about hurricanes and hurricane evacs? Wouldn't that make someone who has been through both somewhat qualified to have an opinion on the subject? Yet, people who have not done such, ridicule me and my 2 experiences while telling me thier opinion is right based on their political beliefs.

Gladiatorowdy, I honestly don't know where to start after reading your dribble. You posted nothing of substance under each of my quotes. You posted nothing, but your opinions under my "opinions" and did nothing to dispute them. Just retreaded your parties talking points.

We should all just end it this debate now and call it what it is. It is not a law to save rescue workers as we have proved the evacs are much more harmful to the people than any hurricane has been to rescue workers. They are never gonna get a county cleared for a hurricane. They know this. We know this. It is just a new law to give them authority to arrest people for whatever reason they feel after the hurricane, without having just cause. Now they will say this law gives them that. It is a way to basically have martial law, where everyone must hunker down in their houses and hide from the big bad bullies or go down for sitting in their house/yard when the hurricane did not even hit them, but mand evac was called because they thought it was going to.

 

You are totally discounting the extraordinary amount of work done by emergency management personnel between Rita and Ike. I give them the credit they are due for things like:

Educating the public about staggered evacuations
Running ads to convince people who didn't NEED to evacuate to wait
Putting plans in place to effectively manage evacuations and communicating those plans to local officials

The Ike evac went smoothly because a lot was done between the hurricanes to ensure the smooth evacuation.

No, this topic is about mandatory evacuations and the law regarding such evacuations. You are the one who has pigeonholed it as simply hurricane evacuations.

You are certainly qualified to have an opinion, but you are not qualified to judge evacuation plans, emergency procedures, and disaster rescues. This disqualification is partly due to your not having been involved in these actions, but also because anecdotal evidence is a load of hogwash. You can't base emergency plans on anecdotal evidence, you base them on best practices, the observations of emergency personnel, and the evidence gathered over the course of dozens of disasters.

First off, I don't have a party. I am an independant.

Second, you are trying to pass off your own personal anecdotal observations as having more value with regards to disaster management than someone who has worked in disaster management for decades. The fact that you cannot understand why rimrocker's opinions carry a lot of weight in this area is simply staggering.

There is a lot more than just rescue workers in the discussion, but you would have to be able to comprehend the written word to understand that. This law would also help to deter looters in an evacuation zone. If simply driving through an area was grounds for arrest, people with no good reason to be in the area would be more likely to avoid it.

In the article posted pages ago, a law enforcement officer said flat out that they would not be going out looking for people to arrest under this law. The point is that they could use the mere threat of arrest to compel people to leave. They could also use the arrests to lock up undesirables (looters, vandals) even if they had no proof of their bad behavior.

 

There are judgement calls made but rescuers in general are obligated to try to save people. Only in the most dire of circumstances is it denied, for instance a building that is in the process of collapsing. Otherwise rescuers are obligated.

 

In principle I agree with you that people who wish to stay in a dangerous situation should be allowed to, which is why I said I had mixed feelings about this law. Practically though its not going to work that way. There isn't a lot of money in being in a rescuer so I doubt most do it for the money. For that matter being a volunteer rescuer you're not going to get a pension anyway. I doubt that what you are suggesting would work.

For that matter in a situation where many are trapped it would be a national scandal if they rescue wasn't at least attempted even if it was their own decision to stay.

 

I'm not familiar with the case but I am wondering what circumstances that was ruled on. Obviously there are situations that are so dangerous that a rescuer cannot respond or else they are tied up responding to another situation. My own understanding is barring those situations a rescuer is obligated to respond.

Following the second point of your post I don't think this clearly violates property rights as the government isn't seizing your property. The government can already deprive you of use of your property and limit how you use your property, ie zoning laws and condemnation laws.

 

Yeah, just like my friend. I'm very familiar with hurricanes. I grew up in Southeast Houston and went through Carla. A tree ended up in my bedroom window. My grandmother was old enough to remember the Great Galveston Disaster, the storm of 1900, which floated her parents house off its blocks and down the street. She had a book which I inherited that was filled with photographs of the 1900 storm. The barges overflowing with bodies. They quit taking them out to sea and dumping them because the bodies tended to float back. Thousands were killed. They really don't know exactly how many, but it remains, easily, the worst natural disaster in this nation's history.

The storm that struck the Gulf Coast just north of Galveston could have been so much worse. We were lucky. You saw the photos of Bolivar. Anyone who stayed behind to ride it out was a fool. A fool. There is no ego in death and injury. Just a battered body, alive if the person is that lucky. And yes, you should probably be on that planet I mentioned. There are no oceans.

 

Actually, the death estimates from the 1900 storm is between 8,000 and 12,000. On the high end, that would be 9/11 times 4. That is the reason why we have the Houston Rockets instead of the Galveston Rockets. Prior to the 1900 storm, Galveston was the large city in the area and Houston was a suburb.

You have to understand that T-man is talking out of his butt at this point. It is like he stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night so tonight he can perform brain surgery.

 

From what I've read and the photographs taken right after the storm, my bet would be on the high end of that estimate. The city looked like a small nuke hit it. Just incredible devastation and death. And that is so true that Galveston would be a far different city today, as would Houston, had that storm not hit the island.

 

tell that to the emergency/rescue team that comes to save your ass when you decide to call 911

 

You can be denied, as the law states. We have covered that already.

 

Actually, it's not illegal when citizens are firing at relief workers from the roof tops of businesses and homes.

They had every right to do what they did to protect innocent lives.

And plus, people were being shot for nothing after home owners thought people were trying to loot them.

 

Even Bush thinks he is an idiot in that picture. lmfao, priceless.