CONTACT THE TERRYREPORT HERE

What is The TerryReport?Follow @TerryReport

CLICK HERE to go to recent posts, nearly 300 pages of news and comments filed during the first nine months of 2013 and during the critical election year of 2012.

CLICK HERE to go back to previous year’s (500+ pages) of The TerryReport

                                                                                                                                   EXPLANATORY JOURNALISM: The TerryReport

                                           News, commentary, opinion on politics, government, books, social trends, American life, travel, cycling, books, other stuff

FROM THE NY TIMES:

Though law enforcement officials initially tried to keep loggers out of the search area, the men took time off from work, risked arrest and came anyway.

While the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the National Guard have brought advanced technology to the search, the loggers have come with heavy earth-moving equipment and their expertise working in the forests of rural western Washington, where rain and mud are constants.

“We know the country and the guys that are blocking the roads don’t,”  said Bob DeYoung, 48, a logger from nearby Darrington, Wash. “The local community is pretty tough. Once they saw that we were going to go in anyway, they started taking volunteers.”

Later, in the same news story:

Gregg Sieloff, a deputy incident commander, said the use of loggers had been a practical decision.

“We realized we needed some big machines,” said Mr. Sieloff, who is also the assistant chief of the Lynnwood Fire Department. “This is a logging community. We told them we needed some big machines, and big machines showed up.”

You can read the entire Times story on this link (no subscription required)

The blanket excuse for refusing help from citizen volunteers is that people will get hurt and, second, that they don’t know what they are doing. The fact is, that uncontrolled assistance could lead to danger and injuries, even death. That should never be allowed to rule out all assistance, however. As stated above, sometimes the volunteers know better what to do than the paid workers. We shouldn’t allow ourselves to be captured by the ethos of “professionalism” to the point where lives are lost.

There are more people than there are firemen or other first responders. When more people are needed, the “professionalism biases” of those who are paid full time to be responders should never been allowed to interfere with getting the job done. Who cares, when lives are at stake moment by moment, who gets the credit?

In New Orleans after Katrina, the men with boats were told that “we’re not quite ready” for you. They were never quite ready and people stuck in the flood zones might have died because the volunteer help was refused.  Why was it permissible for the media to hire boats and go around shooting video of people stuck in the flood when volunteer rescues were not allowed? No one ever answered this question.

As The TerryReport has written previously over the years, we have over professionalized the business of search and rescue to the point where reasonable assistance is being turned away repeatedly. “Crowd sourcing” is showing its power through the Internet, but it will take a long time, and perhaps some outside influence, before direct citizen involvement in helping their neighbors in a time of emergency is a standard part of emergency response.