My friend didn’t claim political knowledge; he/she went there to ‘triage’ and save lives in the fraught first few days. I have difficulty in accepting the descriptor “parasite”. He/she is not on the aid ‘gravy train’, has not made a career out of meddling in poor countries.

He/she went to do FIRST AID only.
A kind of ‘disaster resilience’ question.

He/she does not boast - the most modest and quiet of Australians. I salute the work they did.

merdeka !!

You may know better, but the story was first told to me by an Australian volunteer (not parasitical) who worked in Aceh uder exacting conditions, and believed that the presence of foreigners meant that ABRI units were being observed by outsiders (for the first time) and had to behave decently.

Ambi, I have followed Indonesian politics for thirty years. I have visited the country many times. I saw the fall of Suharto and the rise of democracy. I understand the difficulty of keeping together as a nation such dispersed and disparate people, and I have learned from long association to respect these people. So, yes, I do know better than your well-meaning Australian volunteer friend.

Following the restoration of democracy in Indonesia after the departure of Suharto one of the issues that the Indonesians had to address was the dismantling of the centralisation of power that had hall-marked his dictatorship and that got well under way under Gus Dur. However the Indonesian consensus is, for understandable reasons, that decentralisation must not be at the price of disintegration. This has been a most difficult issue for the Indonesians given the geographical and ethnic complexity of their country- and not helped at all by the humiliation they felt at the separation from their country of East Timor.

However under Yudhoyono it was Indonesia’s policy to seek an accommodation with GAM, Aceh’s liberation movement, subject only to GAM repudiating its claim for independence, and he was pursuing that policy when the tsunami struck. Negotiatians with GAM were under way but they were difficult and protracted as such negotiations are.

The tsunami in all sorts of ways provided a circuit breaker and because of that agreement was reached for Aceh to become an autonomous region within Indonesia much earlier than it might have. There was a huge amount of internal Indonesian political dynamics involved in this.

However the comment you quoted and to which I took objection:

“The huge contingent of foreign aid workers who became a presence in Aceh… after the tsunami catastrophe nearly 4 years ago led to an end to the bloody civil war there. Parallels to the situation in (Burma) come to mind”

is a contempibly arrogant mis-statement of the importance and influence of the foreign aid parasites in the achievement of the Aceh peace settlement. They would have been, at most, a marginal influence on what was already under way but, as is their record, because, as parasites, they will shamelessly claim the achievement of others as their own in order to get another aid dollar to live off, naturally they will make the outrageous claim that your intelligent, no doubt well-meaning but ignorant and self-serving friend made.

Your friend would never have made the comment he/she made to you if he/she had informed him/herself on the history and dynamics of Indonesia and of Aceh and of the negotiations going on between them to resolve their differences. But foreign aid parasites don’t do that. They come in knowing everything, even when they know nothing about the society into which they are coming, and dispensing their bounty and taking credit for everything that goes well, whether they had any part in it or not, and finding someone else to blame for every failure, even those for which they are responsible.

So insurance companies are trying to get out of paying and government bureaucracies are full of red tape. This is not news. WHICH government bureaucracies are the worst is – may I ask that question? Is it local, city, state or federal, and why?

My interlocutor is a disaster management and business resilience planner – and a good one. He notes the following about the response to the cyclone coming ashore:

- “Jackson activated its State emergency plan 72 hours out. Baton Rouge did not. “
Is this true? WHEN did Baton Rouge activate the state emergency response plan, and how effective was it by comparison to that Jackson ran?

- “The entire Mississippi coast to a depth of 20 miles inland was smoothly evacuated before she came in. Casualties were minimal, and ALL the pre-positioned local emergency services were up, fully booted and spurred, when Katrina roared ashore. “

Is this so? Did Mississippi manage to evacuate the affected areas ahead of the cyclone?
Were casualties there minimised as a result of this evacuation planning?
Were the local first response emergency services ‘fully booted and spurred’ as described in Mississippi?
What was their status in Louisiana?
Were they efficient at all?
Did the New Orleans city emergency plan work at all?
When was it implemented?

- “Physical damage was vastly worse than New Orleans before its levees broke, and matched that of the city even after it flooded.”

Is this true?

- “Neither Baton Rouge nor the New Orleans governments did a damn thing by comparison except whine that it was not their job/fault/responsibility but give us lots of cash, please.”

I already know that the performance of the city and state governments was, at best, hopelessly inept. Was it this bad?

- “Their indolence, corruption and incompetence killed a lot of people.”
Is this a fair assessment?

- “The coastal area from Gulfport to Pascagoula area is now mostly rebuilt, on about 30% of the Federal aid money per capita that Louisiana got.”

I assume (please note the term) that this was per capita. Is this so?
(My contact is out of the country right now – guess where)

- “They have also used the lessons learned to upgrade their state and coastal strip, county and city emergency plans. The new coastal wetland scheme to absorb storm surge is really great.”

Is this so? Have they actively absorbed the lessons in Mississippi and updated their emergency planning?
Has a new scheme to use coastal wetlands to absorb storm surge been developed in Mississippi?

- “Biloxi held a series of exercises to test parts of the revamped plans BEFORE they allowed people to come back (they wanted to exercise their storm surge wreckage clearance planning in real storm surge wreckage, for example). They have better integrated their plans up from excellent to better-than-excellent.”

Is this true?

- “Louisiana still has not upgraded their state emergency system despite being paid to do so (someone apparently stole the money anyway from what I hear). New Orleans still has the old plan and still has not exercised it anyway. Nothing there has changed.”

Is this true?
Precisely what has Louisiana done in terms of upgrading its state emergency plans?
What about New Orleans?
What exercises, if any, have been done?

…

- “Louisiana has never bothered. Having been over to see why their plans failed, I know why. The state is filthy rotten with corruption from top to bottom and run by a mafia-Democrat machine. They make NSW’s government look like angels of rectitude and professional competence.”

Now, here in Australia the New South Wales state government presently in office is notoriously inept and corrupt. The state is bankrupt, which is why its government is trying to sell off the electricity system, it needs the money to funds current expenditure.

Is Louisiana as corrupt as described?
Has this affected essential activities like emergency planning?

MarkL
Canberra

I am not ‘proud’ of anything - I live on the other side of the planet and have no coal in that fire.

Please take note of the quotation marks.

MarkL
Canberra

You may know better, but the story was first told to me by an Australian volunteer (not parasitical) who worked in Aceh uder exacting conditions, and believed that the presence of foreigners meant that ABRI units were being observed by outsiders (for the first time) and had to behave decently.

Now he/she may have been mistaken about this, but he/she was there and is intelligent, so I’d take the story as plausible, prima facie.

Of course there were many other internal factors at work. Perhaps some of the donor nations exerted pressure too?

Then he needs to talk to Attorney General’s about the TISN. I have been powerfully impressed by the food iaag’s work and (asking around the traps), the others are also doing very impressive things. One interlocutor said that the infrastructure modelling program is so far out in front of the rest of the world that it’s amazing. To my mind, that would be the central core of something like this. If you can map the interdependencies both upstream and downstream and then across sectors - ye gods and little fishes.

I have also noticed the risible comments in this thread about New Orleans and Katrina. One of my interlocutors noted this about this type of ignorant and idiotic comment:

“It is regrettable that people do not bother with the actual facts of that cyclone and still spout the stupid and wrong media narrative. The Mississippi coast received the worst of that storm, not New Orleans. Gulfport, Biloxi, and to a lesser extent Pascagoula (it is partially sheltered by the offshore islands) were destroyed - literally wiped out like Darwin was. And I was at Darwin in ‘74 doing the new building standards work by examining the ruins.

Jackson activated its State emergency plan 72 hours out. Baton Rouge did not. The entire Mississippi coast to a depth of 20 miles inland was smoothly evacuated before she came in. Casualties were minimal, and ALL the pre-positioned local emergency services were up, fully booted and spurred, when Katrina roared ashore. Physical damage was vastly worse than New Orleans before its levees broke, and matched that of the city even after it flooded. Neither Baton Rouge nor the New Orleans governments did a damn thing by comparison except whine that it was not their job/fault/responsibility but give us lots of cash, please. Their indolence, corruption and incompetence killed a lot of people.

The coastal area from Gulfport to Pascagoula area is now mostly rebuilt, on about 30% of the Federal aid money per capita that Louisiana got. They have also used the lessons learned to upgrade their state and coastal strip, county and city emergency plans. The new coastal wetland scheme to absorb storm surge is really great. Biloxi held a series of exercises to test parts of the revamped plans BEFORE they allowed people to come back (they wanted to exercise their storm surge wreckage clearance planning in real storm surge wreckage, for example). They have better integrated their plans up from excellent to better-than-excellent.

Louisiana still has not upgraded their state emergency system despite being paid to do so (someone apparently stole the money anyway from what I hear). New Orleans still has the old plan and still has not exercised it anyway. Nothing there has changed.

Mississippi sent people over [Australian state capital and date deleted] and we have worked with all the other US cyclone states except one as we have common problems. [sentence deleted]
Louisiana has never bothered. Having been over to see why their plans failed, I know why. The state is filthy rotten with corruption from top to bottom and run by a mafia-Democrat machine. They make NSW’s government look like angels of rectitude and professional competence.”

That’s out of the horse’s mouth. This interlocutor is in that game.

Yet, various idiots blame the US Federal govt for a record response in record time. Amazing. What can any federal/central government do when the local response system in the disaster area fails completely? Initial response is a LOCAL responsibility because they live in the affected area.

Louisiana had not created a real state emergency plan. They had a city plan, but it was unfunded and had never practised it. Not once. That was why we all saw those pictures of the entire city’s school bus fleet drowned in their bus parks. The state and city governments did not coordinate. There was no decision to implement the plan. The city and state leaders got themselves out of the way, and abandoned their responsibilities. Federal aid was cut off at $400,000 PER PERSON in pre-flood New Orleans (something like $15 billion). The city and local/state officials have squandered or stolen most of the aid money.

MarkL
Canberra

“The huge contingent of foreign aid workers who became a presence in Aceh… after the tsunami catastrophe nearly 4 years ago led to an end to the bloody civil war there. Parallels to the situation in (Burma) come to mind”

Utter nonsense. The Indonesian government was looking for a way to end the impasse in Aceh. The Acehnese separatists were looking for an end to the stand-off as well.
The tsunami gave them an opportunity and they both took it.

The presence of a huge contingent of foreign parasites had no effect on the course of events except perhaps that the Indonesian government and the Acehnese were united in wanting to see the back of them.

auf wiedersehen

So we are already shooting ourselves in the foot due to under-resourced forecasting (even hours can make a difference as Darwin proved). Then add in the shortfall in hospital services and/or medical staff and things could get really exciting.
It is well and good to state that our supermarkets have contingency plans but other transportation issues come into it as well - evacuating thousands at one time would be a struggle even for Sydney.
If something occurs near a mine site then we should be OK for heavy equipment (if that kind of thing is needed) but it’s more the healthcare/evac capabilities that would cause a bottleneck (my $0.05 worth).

That said, I spent some time talking to somebody doing academic research into pandemic preparedness, particularly the human factors (would medical practitioners continue to work in such circumstances) and their conclusion was that there was still a hell of a lot of work left undone.

And I do know that, at least in country Victoria, radio communications for the emergency services are still a dog’s breakfast.

Apart from a couple of pre-war bushfires (1939?) and the 1954 Maitland Floods can’t think of anything comparable here.

Darwin in 1974, surely?

Paul: not even the 1939 bushfires comes close to what Katrina did - we’re talking about the near-total destruction of a medium-size city and several smaller ones.

If you build a city below sea level and do not maintain the levees that keep the sea out then you must expect near-total destruction when a cyclone in a cyclone-prone area strikes that city. Nothing compared to what happened to Galveston in 1900 though.

One of the quiet but brilliantly successful initiatives of the Howard government was a thing called the ‘Trusted Information Sharing network’ or TISN, a program run by the Attorney-General’s Dept.

Go see their website and get some details, it is fascinating stuff. The TISN itself was set up five years ago. it specifically builds data sharing and contingency planning between government and the private sector through a range of ‘information assurance advisory groups’. They deal with all sectors of industry/economy and some non industry sectors (like emergency services). The whole thing is supported by a second massive project that maps national infrastructure so interdependencies, upstream and downstream effects, and disaster effects can all be worked out in advance. The iaggs also work across sectors where cross sector interdependencies are identified.

The amount of work already achieved is simply amazing. The Food Supply iaag, for example, has built not only systems to be able to keep distributing food in case of pandemic. That’s in a cut-throat industry employing nearly 300,000 people with 1500 supermarkets and 3000 small supermarkets, and all the players a ruthlessly competitive. They cannot even talk to each other directly! Yet, they have cooperated in a national system to distribute food in pandemic, including hygeine stations at each store remaining open (and a couple of thousand will), and a triage centre at each, with a mask distribution centre at each. Over $20 million in masks have been ordered or stockpiled. Just the training task in training 300,000 employees is staggering. I understand that they have also designed a national rationing system too. There are electrical energy iaags, water, transport fuel, etc etc etc

That’s one small example. Here is hoping that Krudd and his mob do not shut it down to save ten bucks.

MarkL
canberra