<One of the more useful things he said: ...we're all binary... What they miss is the problem in the middle, which is where the real problem is.>
Could you please explain to me how this is "useful".
<Perhaps the reason we read his words differently was due to a different perspective of what is involved with "having a minimum 3 days supply of food and water for the weekend." It doesn't mean backing up the truck to the grocery store.
Huh? I have NO idea what you're talking about. It takes one shopping trip to stock up for 3-days. Who said anything about backing up a truck?
I personally believe that 3-days is inadequate. And, apparently, so does Koskinen. It just depends on where you live. Unfortunately, IMHO, people are falsely re-assured by this "3-day" soundbite, and will wait until the very end to get provisions. After all, buying for 3-days only requires one shopping trip. Why make a big deal about it?
What Koskinen apparently thinks is OK as as "minimum" recommendation: [From interview.]
"Three- or four-day supply ..."
"2-3 days worth ..."
Miami: "7-10 days"
LA: "week"
"What we've said beyond that is that each community ... needs to take a look at what their own experience is, in terms of natural disasters generally and in terms of confidence in their own readiness for the Year 2000, and make their own judgements."> John Koskinen
y2ktoday.com
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Koskinen: If we have more outages than any evidence now suggest, the problem at that point won't be overreaction by the public. The problem then will be, in fact, dealing with whatever the emergency is, because the nature of the failure will be obvious.
The problem with overreaction is the problem before you get to that time, where you can aggravate or create problems. You can create spot shortages or other difficulties in advance, as people get more anxious.
We don't expect national failures. It will stun any number of experts in the world, or in the United States anyway, if anything national falls apart for this reason.
BUT LOCALLY, if there are those problems, people will not in fact be overreacting; they'll in fact have a real problem that they'll be reacting to.
And what we're trying to get state and local emergency managers to be prepared for is, they need to be prepared to deal with those problems on their own.
Our analysis is that we don't expect national failures; we don't expect catastrophic failures anywhere.
But our scenario is that there may be a number of communities that have otherwise manageable problems, but their normal response is to call the county. And the county's normal response is to call the state.
And we've told them, you should NOT have that as your normal response, BECAUSE if there are ten or twenty communities in the state [having problems], the state may not be able to show up everywhere.
And certainly FEMA is not going to be able to show up in 200 or 300 communities.
So, we're telling people that they need to be able to handle these problems, at the local level, on their own. Because they should not assume that the resources they normally depend on are automatically going to be there.
Now, in a lot of cases, and in a lot of states, they will be in the process they'd run normally.
But it's a lot like people having no food, and just assuming, that, it's a Saturday, it's a blizzard, they can find food somewhere. And we're saying, no, you shouldn't do that anyway.
Communities need to be prepared for whatever's going to happen in that timeframe.
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What timeframe? No one has any idea where breakdowns will occur, and for how long.
What "guarantee" is there that this will last only 3 days? If someone runs out of that 3 days supply of food and/or water ... who do they go to??
I believe that people should try and be self-sufficient. And 3-days to a week of food/water, etc. just doesn't cut it. IMHO
Cheryl
139 Days until 2000 |
