Being the occasionally interesting ramblings of a major-league technophile.
Emergency
Several major disasters in recent years have pointed out some pretty severe problems with the way we respond to such emergencies. Please note the phrasing, there. Around the world, some of the problems with the poor response to hurricanes, tsunamis, the various floods and volcanoes and drought were due to bureaucratic bungling and sometimes outright sabotage. (In one storm disaster a high-ranking official had his people confiscate relief supplies so they could be repackaged in containers bearing the official's name. Meanwhile, the citizens he was supposedly helping went hungry.)
However! I suspect that the basic problem is that the approach of most governments and NGOs to dealing with emergencies is wrong.
Please understand that I am not criticizing people who go into disaster-stricken areas to help. I am proposing a new methodology to better apply their efforts. While most of the benefit would come from better organization and preparedness, this is a column on high technology, so that's what it will focus on.
First and foremost, relief agencies need information on the details of the emergency. Currently, in situations where roads may be impassable, bridges collapsed and airports closed, that usually means flying over, and maybe landing in a helicopter or tiltrotor. If those have to fly any distance to get there - perhaps even from an aircraft carrier which takes days to get close enough - the delay can cost lives. So, we need something which can travel quickly over possibly great distances, land vertically or in a very short distance, and carry enough people and equipment to survey the area and set up a command post.
Now, here is where the reorganization mentioned above is important. As an example, much of the cause of the delay in getting relief to people in New Orleans and some other areas hit by Katrina was due to officials - many of whom had no business or authority to do so - giving bad orders. Some because they had bad or no information. Others because they simply disbelieved the reports coming in. The Red Cross complained repeatedly about being directed to go to the wrong place, sometimes even being turned back from areas which desperately needed their help to go sit where they had little to do.
So, during an emergency a clear chain of command needs to be set up, and quickly. As one suggestion, the first relief people in the area should be the ones who tell the next arrivals what to do, and where. Now, you might think that the locals would have a better idea of what's going on and what is needed, but emergencies tend to disrupt not only the established local lines of communication, they tend to disrupt the thought processes of locals. Especially locals who are dealing with something not part of their usual duties. Officials in a city hit by an earthquake or tornado may react irrationally or not at all, overwhelmed by the emotional impact of having people and places they know destroyed. Police Chiefs, Mayors and Governors have occasionally actively worked against their own emergency personnel, through some mistaken perception of the situation, or through acting on priorities which are not appropriate to the emergency. There have even been shameful instances of local officials acting in a partisan manner, protecting those they see as their own when other, more desperate citizens they represent were neglected.
Emergency personnel - both from inside and outside the affected area - are better equipped through training and experience to take a look around, see what needs to be done and start doing it. Things would go much better than we have seen in several recent disasters if there were a way to quickly bring in people experienced with handling large emergencies, which may be outside the experience of local first responders. People who then coordinate both local and outside relief work.
How to provide this? I propose a variation on the repeatedly put forward idea of the military sortie vehicle. This is a suborbital or high-hypersonic aircraft, capable of taking off from its base and being anywhere on Earth in under two hours, bringing a command center and people to use it. It would be S/VTOL, of course. However, having two or three would help with overlapping disasters.
Next, you need something larger than the sortie vehicle, but which like it is also capable of S/VTOL performance. It wouldn't need to be as fast as the sortie vehicle, but it should still be capable of traveling long distances at supersonic speeds and landing in unprepared areas - fields, stadiums, highways - while carrying significant amounts of supplies and people. This would be a big brute of a machine, capable of hauling massive amounts of whatever is needed to wherever it is needed. Several of these could shuttle in and out of a single area, or cover an affected region. Their cargo space should be modular, and the vehicle capable of loading or unloading the appropriate module in minutes. Modules would include several preloaded with general relief materials (food, water and basic medical and hygiene supplies and basic shelters - similar to what the Shelter Box organization provides - with the module itself serving as housing once emptied) tailored to the type of emergency, season and local culture; a complete field hospital; a complete field kitchen; and so on. There would also be modules containing rescue and repair equipment tailored to specific types of problems, water purification plants, maybe even sewage processing plants. Some modules would be loaded to deal with disease outbreaks (including bioterrorism), chemical spills and so forth. Finally, there would be modules carrying specialized vehicles.
The equipment and vehicles would range from upgraded versions of commercial and military gear (imagine a super core drill capable of reaching trapped miners in days instead of months) to such things as a wide variety of remotely operated drones. These would be designed for such tasks as exploring collapsed structures and performing necessary tasks in places which are too hazardous for humans, such as damaged nuclear reactors.
Is this starting to sound familiar? I'm certainly not the first person to think of something like this. As just one example, a certain puppeteer created a cult favorite TV show based on the concept, back in the Sixties.
No, I am not saying we need to create the Thunderbirds. (Though International Rescue is a real relief agency, decades older than the show and still doing good work.) For one thing, to handle actual large disasters we'd need a much larger organization, with more people and vehicles. Having a single Thunderbird Two isn't much help when you've got millions displaced by record floods.
One of the least realistic things about the Thunderbirds show was how local, regional and even national officials would just step aside for the Tracys. In truth, if someone with no national or international authority backing them showed up with that attitude at an emergency they'd be at best ignored, and at worst shot. Perhaps out of the air.
One remedy to the "authority" problem could be something like a mutual aid society. Members contribute money, technology and personnel, and agree to let the agency coordinate international, regional and local aid efforts. NATO works as a rough example, but this new group would be customized for dealing specifically with non-military emergencies.
As
usual, then, technology can provide the tools, but it's up to people
to apply them.
This document is Copyright 2019 Rodford Edmiston Smith. Anyone wishing to repost it must have permission from the author, who can be reached at: stickmaker@usa.net