IKE or Rescuing The Stupid

At our JaxCERT class Saturday morning everyone discussed Hurricane Ike which was devastating the eastern coast of the Gulf of Mexico even as we met.

Ike measured as a Category Two hurricane with sustained winds of 110 miles per hour. It measured between 500 and 800 miles wide, with a storm surge of up to 17 feet; weather forecasters warned of its approach for weeks in advance.

In a strong warning with unprecedented wording, the National Weather Service said, "Persons not heeding evacuation orders in single-family one- or two-story homes will face certain death."

Yet, authorities estimated that in the Galveston, Texas, area alone about 40 % of the residents chose to try to ride out the storm in their homes.

Bad choice.

Ike tore the hell out of everything.

In Houston, winds shattered windows in high rise buildings bringing a rain of millions of sharp glass shards; it looked like the accumulation of broken glass outside one office building was over a foot deep. Winds rained down computers, desks, file cabinets, chairs—everything down into the streets from several stories up.

Massive flooding, debris, devastation—all that was going on Saturday morning as our class studied rescue techniques.

One topic of conversation was the tv’s glorification of a bunch of drunks who chose to ride out the storm in a fishing shack on piers with an ice chest full of beer.

Even before the storm fully passed, Texas launched one of the largest rescue efforts in history. Over 1,500 military personnel, 58 helicopters, and hundreds of professional firefighters had located and brought out over 2,000 victims by Sunday afternoon—a helicopter even got the drunks from the fishing shack who called for rescue when they ran out of beer.

So far, I’ve only heard of 28 deaths but rescuers concentrate on the living and let the dead lay where they lie.

Now, I am going somewhere by recounting all this.

The Kid In The Attic will not have even heard of Hurricane Ike.

A few days ago (Sept 10^th) I wrote about disaster psychology; now I’m seeing that played out on two levels with Ike—among victims and among rescuers.

Only a day after Ike passed, the Houston Chronicle reports:

All of it -- the sweaty waits in line, the flooded interstates, the rampant mosquitoes, the desperate search for life's basic necessities -- fueled a growing sense of frustration among ordinary residents and elected officials alike.
Residents peppered radio and TV news programs with angry calls about price gouging at gasoline stations and food stores, low water pressure and a delay by emergency authorities in distributing food, water and ice.

The Los Angles Times reports:

Under drenching morning rain that submerged more roads and underscored a mood of misery and frustration, emergency officials tried to unsnarl a last-minute snag that delayed deliveries of U.S. government food, water and ice to several million people struggling to cope. Federal officials blamed state leaders for abruptly changing distribution plans Sunday morning.

Victims are beginning to blame. Even with all the warnings beforehand, even though the damage and disruption came from a natural phenomena, yet people are blaming someone else for their misery. They are turning in anger against the people trying their best to help them.

On the other hand, an Associated Press article reports:

SWAT commander Sgt. Rodney Harrison and five other members of the Port Arthur Police Department drove a 2 1/2-ton truck into the waters to search for victims in Sabine Pass near the Louisiana border Sunday morning.

The waters were so intense and the roads so blocked that a gear shift broke off in the driver's hand. After two hours of struggle, the team had little to show for their work other than sopping wet clothes and exhaust-streaked faces. They even dodged an alligator.

"You have people that have families at home who put their lives on the line to come out here and save somebody that made a bad decision," Harrison said. "I don't think that's right. I don't think that's fair to everybody."

I’m hearing that sort of sentiment echoed by many people in the rescue community—that the victims who did not heed warnings and who expect somebody else to take care of all their needs are to blame for their own dilemma.

I’m hearing value judgments about who deserves rescue, and who should be left to stew in their own decisional juices.

One nurse, who has been sued before when helping, said that in case of a traffic accident, she will not stop, or even identify herself as a nurse, nor help in any way. “They are not my patients until they are registered at my hospital. Before that, they are just people holding up traffic”.

I hear more and more firefighters question about risking their lives to rescue people whose own stupidity caused the problem in the first place.

In JaxCERT training we learn that you can’t rescue everybody. Some will die. We are volunteers and under no legal obligation to help anybody and under no moral obligation to help everybody. You a volunteer and you do what you want to in the constraints of your training to do the most good for the greatest number in the fastest time—but your own safety and the safety of your team comes first. You do not want to get hurt and add another victim to the scene.

When Ginny and I began this training, I started with the attitude that I wanted to learn how to protect ourselves first, then our family, then members of our neighborhood watch group, then finally our neighbors in general from the 57 homes in our horseshoe block.

Selfish, but that’s the order of things for me.

Of course I don’t know what I will actually do when a disaster hits our block. I may just hide under the bed whimpering.

Some people and situations I’m inclined to bypass in order to get to others. Since I can’t help everybody, then I’ll chose the ones I can help.

I contrast my own blanket and selective attitude towards rescue with the Parable of Jesus about the Ninety And Nine Sheep. The Good Shepherd left the 99 sheep safe in the fold while He sought out that one lost, endangered sheep that had gone astray.

Yes, He did seek and save the lost.

At risk of His life—and we all know how that turned out.

But He did not just abandon the 99 to their own devices; He left them locked safe in the corral.

Come right down to it, I suppose that just about the only reason I’ve ever needed rescuing myself is because of stupid, willful decisions of my own. I huddle in my own little shack on stilts and don’t even call for rescue till the keg is empty.

Fortunately, Jesus never suffers storm fatigue.

He rescues us from our sin—and often from our stupidity as well.

But, one other thing I learned in JaxCERT class: Any conscious adult victim has the legal right to refuse rescue, treatment or transport. In that case, you leave him be and move on to the next person.