Posted on 08/09/2007 8:06:56 AM PDT by Contentions
Three-and-a-half inches of rain fell here yesterday, causing immense chaos and raising once again the question of whether the city is prepared for the possibility of something worse, like six inches of rain, not to mention a major terrorist attack.
One of the critical issues raised by yesterday’s episode is the way information is distributed in a crisis. As I noted after a steam pipe burst in Manhattan on June 18, New Yorkers were left in the dark about the nature of the blast whose plume was visible for miles. The news media did not get on the story for at least an hour, and the city did not have any means of its own by which to address the public.
(Excerpt) Read more at commentarymagazine.com ...
Few if any cities are so prepared as to respond that quick. The Feds sure aren’t. The Fire Department is probably the best for response and that’s the way it will be for the foreseeable future.
For such a small place, it is sure in the news a lot with whiners and people incapable of being responsible for themselves.
And the media thinks we should pick our next President from two of them while 300 million Americans live elsewhere.
Gotta be Bush's fault.
That’s a terrible headline.
The Tornado in Brooklyn is Bush’s fault.
in any spontaneous city wide emergency
YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN
period
A classical Peak Load Problem. Utility companies, for example, must decide how much idle capacity to build into the system to handle those "unusual days" when demand skyrockets. Too much idle capacity and costs are higher than they should be and too little means some form of rationing (e.g., rolling blackouts) or delays (e.g., holidays when there aren't enough planes) when demand soars.
MTA and Bloomberg's office could build in dozens of more trunk lines for information purposes to handle situations like those described here. But my guess is that this bozo would be the first to bitch that there is too much idle capacity in this or that department.
It must have been a slow news day, or perhaps this jerk didn't want to comment on how the Surge seems to be working.
Only a liberal could look at a rainstorm, and think ‘we’re not ready for a terrorist attack!’.
It displays a shallowness rarely witnessed in public, let alone used as a central theme to a column.
3/12 inches? Give me a break.
This is just plain negligent on Bloomberg’s part.
“The Media” should never, ever be considered a primary instrument of a municipal alerting system.
The counties surrounding DC all belong to the “National Capital Region Text Based Emergency Alert and Notification System”, which is based on the RoamSecure alerting system.
http://www.roamsecure.net/ncr.php
Each county’s emergency personnel update their own jurisdictional section of the system, and anyone (including citizens) in any county can subscribe to their and/or other jurisdiction’s alerts. Alerts are automatically sent to all subscribers via email, SMS, wireless, pager, etc., or a combination of those, and even to multiple accounts.
Also most of the counties surrounding DC have other dedicated alerting vehicles, such as an AM radio station (Arlington, 1700 AM), cable TV (Fairfax, 16), and emergency web sites.
Anyway, since I’ve had it AlertNet has sent alerts on road closures, traffic jams, weather advisories, electrical outages, and in one memorable case a road closure because the police were dealing with a felon barricaded inside a home near a main traffic route.
Anyway, it’s not difficult to fix NYC’s problem. They just need someone who will actually earn their salary and do it.
Gabriel Schoenfeld is a complete idiot for writing such a title to the article that starts out thusly.
To be fair, Brooklyn had its first ever tornado.
It made you open the thread, didn’t it?
But was it an Al Qaeda tornado?
It is not. This was a malfunction of Karl Rove's weather machine.
Is it under water yet?
Actually, first since at least 1950. Prior to that it’s anyone’s guess, I suppose. There was a waterspout in New York Harbor in 1976, not at all far from Brooklyn.
There may have been other tornados that recorded as high winds.
Gee, it rained about 3" last night in Lee's Summit, MO. I guess it's a good thing that New Yorkers (and I'm a former NY'er) don't live here... We would have needed to have a crisis!
Mark
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