Article 88. Preparing for disaster and getting the Public on Board
National Identification Cards
The requirement for instant on the spot identification of all Americans should be a national priority. We need a national identity card that is counterfeit proof that works in conjunction with your eye or by thumb print. Fifty years ago most people who came to this country came seeking work. Now we also have gangs of killers and terrorists crossing our borders both legally and illegally and once they are in the country they have nearly complete anonymity.
There are many benefits from a national identity card. Stolen identities can be significantly reduced. It hampers the ability of those without ID cards from roaming freely within our society using false IDs to get jobs, barrow money, and collect welfare and Medicaid. Ex-convicts and sex offenders become visible. The benefits far outweigh the big brother arguments against universal IDs. The savings to business alone in the billions. Crime will also be significantly reduced. But for disaster relief with positive ID the mountains of Red Tape simply go away. Resulting in a significant reduction in fraud and speeds relief to legitimate victims. This can happen if modern communications and computer RDBM (Relational Database Management) systems using SQL (Structured Query Language) are also implemented for quickly processing the need for resources. See Article 101. The Hampton Virginia Innovation Story.
Border Security
Our Coast Guard and our Boarder Guard should be beefed-up to stop all illegal immigration. We should setup employment offices on the border for American employers who want to hire aliens legally. They should have temporary IDs, work permits and a job before entering the US. There is no reason to have Mexican illegal aliens dieing in our southwest desserts year after year. Our Mexican and Canadian borders could also be better patrolled using unmanned aircraft which can stay aloft for many hours with monitoring cameras both day and night.
Aliens should not have US state drivers licenses. They should use the licenses from their own country which is common practice in Europe. Having a US state drivers license defeats the reason for the National ID card and opens the way for terrorists to drive tanker trucks.
Planning for Disaster
All disaster planning should begin at the county level by determining the threats and the “needs” for the county. There should be several plans that are based on threat level for hurricanes. The force level of the hurricane should determine who is to be evacuated and how to respond to the emergency. Environmental disasters, tornadoes, wild fires should each have its own unique disaster evacuation plan.
The local county “needs” for resources and services are then coordinated directly with the state plan and finally with the Federal government for their resources thus completing the plan. Note that there are three parties to emergency planning. Local county governments drive the plan and are ultimately responsible for the plan they are the stakeholders. They bring their demographics and resource needs to the state for assistance in planning how the resources of the state should be made available. Then the combined local and state plan is merged with the required federal resources and the county plans are completed. The final step is publicizing the plan so that the public knows what resources will be available and how they are to be evacuated. The key is bottom up planning, where top down planning is either wasteful or inadequate. When an impending disaster is seen all that is needed is agreement by state, local and Federal governments on which plan to use. The particulars of the plan are then immediately broadcasted to the public.
Getting the Public on Board
This is not an easy step convincing the public to prepare for a disaster when much of the population will not even wear their car seat belts. Be careful about lumping all Americans under the label of “the public”. The fact is that we are a mix of socioeconomic and ethnic groups. Each of these groups will require a unique approach to get them to “buy in” on preparing for a disaster. How ever its done it is important that people living in hurricane zones should be made aware of evacuations plans and know how they personally are to get out of the danger zone.
There is a right approach and wrong approach for getting the public on board for evolutionary change. I offer this example, in the 1960’s the city of London converted all their street lamps to orange halogen lamps, which were better for seeing in the fog. They had one other advantage the cost of operating them was significantly less than regular street lamps. When they were first installed on the East Coast they were touted as fog lamps and communities competed to see who could covert first to the new fog lamps. On the West Coast San Diego touted the savings that the city could get from installing the orange halogen street lamps. There was an immediate public outcry people called in to talk show hosts saying “they didn’t want those damned cheap lamps in their neighborhood”. The lesson is where there are deep emotional issues you should develop an approach appropriate to each segment of the community. What causes some segments of the community to buy-in will cause others to reject the plan.
