When Rubber Misses Road

Behold a tale of when the rubber hits the road...and runs right off it! Witness the angst surprise of emergency planning professionals and sociology professors when common sense trumps their prognostication.

FEMA was shocked--shocked!--to discover that the ignorance and desperation of extremely poor survivors would facilitate the morally vulnerable among them to become violent. None of their disaster relief simulations predicted that:

Emergency management plans are for the most part based on the assumption that the people involved will be a relatively cooperative. "In most cases they are very prompt about having police or national guardsmen deployed in force," said Jay Baker. "So it doesn't become an issue."

The eruption of violence, disorder and confusion caught many by surprise. A simulation that emergency management officials ran last year of a catastrophic flood and hurricane hitting New Orleans did not address the possibility of widespread violence and disorder, said Madhu Beriwal, the president of IEM Inc., the Baton Rouge-based company that ran the exercise. Beriwal said that the violence issue was to be addressed at a later meeting.

"There is a truism among sociologists who study disasters that panic is not a problem," said Rutherford Platt, a disaster expert at the University of Massachusetts. "People are too well informed about what to do and expect - even low income people get a lot of information. There are Red Cross shelters, all these things we expect to take up the slack."

Yes, thank you, Captain Ivory Tower. Now, had any one with a modicum of common sense--from either the professoriat or the EMO bureaucracy--thought to ask the man on the street what extremely impoverished New Orleaneans might actually know, Oswald Sobrino could have told them:

My friends, there has always been, as far as I can remember, a very large, poverty-stricken, and extremely uneducated population in New Orleans. I bet that some who are being evacuated today were not even aware that a very dangerous hurricane was on the way. I bet some of those being evacuated today did not even have a clear grasp of the meaning of the word "evacuation" prior to the disaster. No level of ignorance would surprise me.

Now, how could Mr. Sobrino so accurately predict the behavior of New Orlean's poorest survivors when all the professionals and "experts" could not? Simple: Mr. Sobrino trusts his genuine experiences of people that he grew up seeing in NO. He trusts his common sense. The "experts" trusted neither.

They're analysis suffered from such deficits of understanding. Their planning proved inadequate because of their deficient analysis. How much misery could they have spared the survivors of Katrina had they just talked to New Orleaneans and considered their practical wisdom?

When "Experts" huddle around their precious facts and figures, arcane research and solipsistic professional dialogues, they miss a little thing we unenlightened folk call reality! Take a breather from the stale air of the Ivory tower, ladies and gentlemen. Step into the real world. The people there count on your counsel. Make sure that it's wise enough to consider what many on the street already understand. Lives depend on it.