“What Jeff says all sounds pretty good, but I think what most people are afraid of here is something like Katrina, not something like riots where you'll quell the violence and go home."

I was deployed to Katrina, as well as to a variety of other events and potential events, some you never heard of. The events surrounding H. Katrina were hideously misreported, both by wild exaggeration and hysteria or lying, and by non-or-underreporting. What happened to those stacks of dead bodies reportedly at the Superdome? They didn’t exist.

Remember, the actual hurricane was pretty much a miss, and the real trouble only started later, when the levees broke. This, plus a severe instance of the usual political fumbling, led to a poor coordinated and delayed federal response. Nonetheless, within hours ( >72 hrs) assistance was flowing in full throttle. Thereafter, no one died of thirst or hunger, and the shelter fiasco was pretty quickly sorted out. My team treated over 2K patients over a period of a few days. Furthermore, we can sustain operations indefinitely by drawing on our own and other federal resources, military logistics (we cross-train directly with the military), and commercial sources. Nonetheless, we were all loaded, ready and just sitting around waiting for the go order to deploy for days before being ordered in. This was in sharp contrast to the FL series of hurricanes, where our and several other teams were staged in place or on the road before the hurricanes even made landfall.

The Feds, at the boots on the ground level, did a great job, in the face of tough interference and massive political stonewalling, grandstanding and gross incompetence at the political level. For instance, three of our logistics trucks, still loaded with much needed equipment, were pulled away for hours for an “emergency elsewhere” that turned out to be a Presidential photo-op to show him posing in front of “federal trucks full of supplies headed to those in need.” I need not further point out the infuriating irony of creating the appearance of delivering help by removing help that was already in place.

The point isn’t to defend the Feds, but to point out that disaster relief on a very large scale was delivered and disbursed fairly promptly, because the professionals are used to overcoming obstacles of both the natural and man-made (political) types.

For example, if Wal-Mart can keep the shelves stocked all over the country every day, they can certainly deliver some of the same goods to a distribution center set up on the margin of a disaster zone, even if we have to set up an armed convoy and fuel depot system for them. The same is true for the military. Even with the war in Iraq, there were enough MREs, trucks and helicopters on hand for domestic emergency use.

As for local cops going rogue, I seriously doubt that anything similar could happen within the National Disaster Medical System or related services. We have no problem saying NO to wrong or stupid ideas, and anyone who puts a toe over the line gets dealt with pretty quickly. Although a “uniformed service of the United States,” we are just civilians, like you, and are free to quit and walk away at any time, and we will. We, most of us, simply will not tolerate the quasi-totalitarian “martial law” scenario imagined and feared by some. Heck, when I was once sent into a wrecked and flooded hospital to scavenge one particular instrument that we didn’t carry but was requested by one of my doc’s, I personally rechecked consent with both my command staff and the hospital’s representative personally before I’d proceed. In another instance, we had corporate permission to retrieve some convenience items from a wrecked chain pharmacy, and ran across some “looters” inside. We just warned them not to mess with us, take only needed items, which was all they seemed to be doing, and we left each other otherwise unmolested.

Really, really, really, we are just there to help people in need, and not to screw with them, take over, or interfere with private efforts to cope and recover.

I promise we won’t be raiding your cache, putting you into camps against you will, or taking anyone’s lawfully owned firearms. Our security element probably won’t let you into our base of operations with a gun if you’re a civilian, or might arrest you if you do something criminally stupid, but they’re only there to protect us and the people we are helping. They aren’t jack-booted thugs.

There does, indeed, seem to be a lot of mythinformation and misguided fear out there about the scope and nature of disaster relief operations.

“Or lets say something like a national gas shortage or truck drivers union strike, where supplies aren't being delivered and the stores are empty. A credit card doesn't do you any good if there is no food to be purchased. What's the protocol for that?”

The country will cope. If the entire nation suffers extremely severe disruption everywhere at once, I suppose things may be quite different, as they would be in the case of civil insurrection. However, there are sufficient legal means to deal with lesser threats like trucker strikes that threaten national security, and the trucks can be made to roll enough to deliver essentials. As for the credit card, it is used to purchase immediate special needs from just outside the disaster area. Now, if it’s an “End of the Earth as we know it” scenario you posit, then that’s beyond the scope of disaster relief and into the realm of rebuilding civilization, or at least civil society.

Jeff