45* Fading Away

It's a tough gig. And I promise I'm not just sitting around taking shots, but General, don't you guys have - you know - helicopters and stuff?

The people who know something about disaster planning know there's no such thing as normal.

And they know that a good Hurricane Response and Recovery Plan can survive anything except an actual hurricane.

One of the reasons they know that one really important concept comes partly from the truly shitty lessons they had to learn on the fly after Mt St Helens blew up in 1980.

They had a good long run-up; they spent weeks working out all the little details; they had National Guard troopers ready to roll with all the gear and goodies they could imagine.

Then the mountain covered the area with a cubic kilometer of dirt and rocks and vegetation and critter parts, plus the first installments of almost a million tons of ash. Suddenly all the maps are wrong, and nobody knows where anything is or how to get there even if they did.

So I'm not counseling patience in the face of people suffering and dying. This thing has been a clusterfuck of the highest order; there's no excuse for it; and if the guy in charge is worth a shit, he stands up and he takes the heat.

But we don't have that guy in charge.

Now, I hope I'm just being a little paranoid here, but I've been wondering for a while - is 45* really the president?

I have a bad sick feeling that he heads for the golf resort every weekend because he's being told to stay out of the way.