The CNN reporter is trying to paint DeSantis as the bad guy because Lee county didn’t order mandatory evacuations until 24 hours before Ian made landfall. DeSantis is replying that everyone up to that point was calling for a Tampa landfall. This is what the cone looked like on Monday night. Note that Ft Meyers isn’t in the cone, and the NWS was calling for a Tampa landfall. Note also that Ft Meyers is only under a Tropical Storm warning (in blue) and not a hurricane warning (in red) :
The second point here is this: Why do people wait for the government to tell them to get out? Can’t people think for themselves? If you believe that a deadly storm is headed for your barrier island, why wait for someone else to tell you what to do?
This is our supposedly neutral press playing games in order to help Joe Biden, because DeSantis has been owning his wrinkled, senile ass for months and everyone believes that DeSantis is a real threat to his election chances in 2024.
There are tons of people criticizing Florida because everyone hasn’t been rescued and fed by now. I was a professional rescuer for more than 2 decades. I responded and served in dozens of disasters, including at least ten major hurricanes. The unit I was part of used to call themselves the “Masters of Disasters.”
I will use Katrina as an example. The hurricane hit at Waveland, MS on August 29. We were given alert orders to report to a staging area in Tallahassee on August 28. We arrived there at around 2200 and spent the night sleeping in a livestock pavilion. We got up at 0600 on the 29th and headed west. The convoy was over 3 miles long. We stopped to refuel just outside of Pensacola. There was a logjam at the I-10 tunnel in Mobile, AL and we had to use police to get through traffic outside of the tunnel. We finally arrived at the Stennis Space Center on the MS/LA border just before sunset.
We spent the most of the day of August 30 setting up a logistics point and command post at the Stennis Space Center. We had to clear the runways, build a tent city, and other logistical tasks. Late that afternoon, we headed out and wound up in Biloxi. We had dinner in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart just outside of town. My dad had died at the hospital there just three months earlier. I had spent two weeks in that town while he was in intensive care. The hotel that I had stayed in and the restaurants that I had eaten in were all gone. We moved on and wound up in Pascagoula on the night of the 30th.
On August 31, we began operations in the Pascagoula area. We took over all EMS services in the area. We had to. Most of the EMS and fire equipment in the area was damaged, and the people who worked there had their own problems to deal with. We began assisting the USAR in searching homes for victims. Our efforts were hampered by the bridges mostly being destroyed. We distributed food and medicine. We were giving inoculations for diphtheria.
Note that we were three days in before we even STARTED. That is the reason why they tell you to have 3 days’ food and water at a minimum. in the ensuing weeks, we searched cars submerged in mud filled swimming pools to see if they contained bodies. We had to largely stop operations at night because it was too dangerous in the pitch dark, and there isn’t enough fuel to operate generators all night.
All of that debris has to be searched for survivors and bodies. It’s tiring, dangerous, and technically demanding work. There is miles and miles of that debris, and before you can start, you have to clear a path through other debris in order to get there, clearing roads, and make sure that you aren’t running over any bodies in the debris.
The ground is saturated and muddy, and there is no infrastructure: no cell phones, roads are damaged or even missing, bridges are down, and all repeaters are down, cell towers are down, and satellite phones are congested and jammed. The units all have to bring fuel in from outside of the disaster area, and all units have to carry their own food and water in with them. It’s a difficult, logistically complicated operation as difficult as invading a foreign country. All of that takes time. It will be weeks before every single pile of rubble is even completely searched for bodies.
My job twice a day for a week of Katrina was hauling a fuel buffalo 30 miles to a refinery to get 500 gallons of diesel at a time so we could refuel my unit’s trucks. So every morning, I would get up at 0430, be on the road by 0500, and back before 0700 so I could refuel the vehicles in the morning. Then I would do the same every evening at 1700. Now imagine doing that every day, but with a barge trip at each end.
To make a long story short, it is difficult and time consuming. There is destruction and flooding from this storm from Fort Meyers all the way to St Augustine. One in ten houses in the state are without power. My old fire station is under water, and that station is 120 miles from Fort Meyers. This is a huge disaster area.
The responders of this state are doing an impressive job. Anyone who thinks things are going slowly have no idea what they are talking about.
Don’t even think about looting. Don’t even think about taking advantage of people in this vulnerable situation. And so local law enforcement is involved in monitoring that. You can have people you know bringing boats into some of these islands and trying to ransack people’s homes. I can tell you, in the state of Florida, you never know what may be lurking behind somebody’s home, and I would not wanna chance that if I were you, given that we’re a Second Amendment state.
Joy Reid from that leftist show of cackling chickens then accused DeSantis of racism by claiming that he was exhorting people in Florida to kill black people.
Here is my question: DeSantis was talking about shooting looters. What makes Joy Reid think that all looters are black? Doesn’t that make HER the racist?
Big Country is a fellow blogger that I consider to be a friend. He needs our help to save his little granddaughter. Chris Muir is on board with it, too.
As is typical for storms, I am slowly finding damage to the house from the hurricane. Also as usual, it is electrical and electronic damage. While trying to find out why I am having so many Internet issues, I discovered that I lost the UPS that powers my routers and modem. That isn’t why I am having problems, but it is something that has to be replaced.
I also lost my intelligent irrigation system. The one that stings is the irrigation system. Its two year warranty expired 16 days ago.
This morning’s military article comes to us with news that the sailor who had been accused of burning down a baby carrier has been cleared of any wrongdoing. The article actually points out two problems that have plagued the Navy for decades.
The first is that the US Navy has a long history of finding scapegoats upon whom to place blame for institutional failures. In this case, you have a ship that is poorly maintained and cluttered with junk. A sailor warns his division officer that the place is a fire hazard and is ignored. A fire is started by some unknown source. Sailors can’t put it out because they and their officers have no idea how to perform even basic damage control. Instead of blaming the command for poor training, maintenance, and housekeeping, blame the sailor who tried to warn you. The Navy saves face, and who cares about those stupid enlisted men? They are there to be destroyed for the sake of officer careers.
That is reminiscent of the Iowa explosion. In the case of the Iowa battleships, there was a flaw in the firing system. The silk making up the 50 pound bags that the gunpowder comes in were famous for leaving embers behind in the chamber of the 16 inch guns. Ramming them into the breech too quickly while those embers were still there was a recipe for explosions. They had been known to cause mishaps in those guns for decades.
However, those cannons were a huge PR point for the Navy, providing tons of photo ops and bragging rights for recruiting commercials. So when the Iowa had an explosion, instead of blaming a faulty process in a 50 year old weapons system and hurting their recruiting tool, they blamed a sailor who they alleged was a jilted gay lover.
That brings us to the second issue exposed by the above article. The Navy has had recruiting issues for decades. The smarter and nerdier recruits all want to go to the Air Force, which is seen as more technical and cerebral. A lot of the muscle-head jocks want to prove their masculinity and join the Marines. Many other kids want to be able to play with machine guns and blow shit up, so join the Army. What does the Navy have? The Navy has historically solved that problem by trying to project this image that everyone in the Navy is a fighter pilot, a SEAL, a computer technician, or an officer. You will note that no one in Navy movies except Steven Seagal is ever a cook, and even then, Seagal was a Navy SEAL cook. Assigned to a battleship. Not everyone can have those awesome jobs. In fact, most Navy jobs are tedious jobs more akin to janitorial work than to anything cool or technical. There are more people cleaning toilets and doing officers’ laundry than there are SEALS in the Navy. (There are as many Admirals as there are ships– someone has to be their orderlies.)
So the Navy convinces everyone that they can be a SEAL, or a Rescue Swimmer, or a nuclear power plant operator. The recruiters make the pitch and convince you that your job is going to be AWESOME, and will come with all sorts of promotions and large cash bonuses. What they don’t tell you, or at least gloss over, is that the washout rates are on the order of 80 percent or more for some programs. Sometimes they wash you out for nebulous reasons, like “possesses traits undesirable in this career field” because the kid got caught with a beer while under 21 years old. Starry eyed high school kids join the military to be SEALS, washout before training even starts, and find themselves cleaning toilets and chipping paint with a hammer for the next four years.
The Navy knows that those jobs suck, but they have you under contract for the next four years, so they don’t care if the sailor is happy or not. As evidenced by the statement from the Navy prosecutor:
Prosecutors said Mays was angry and vengeful about failing to become a Navy SEAL and being assigned to deck duty, prompting him to ignite cardboard boxes on July 12, 2020…Mays thought he would be jumping out of helicopters on missions with the SEALs, but instead he was chipping paint on the deck of a ship, and he hated the Navy for that, Jones said.
This is a common story. The reality of the Navy is far different from the image it portrays in the movies. The Captain of the ship doesn’t listen to some E-4 Petty Officer with grudging respect for the knowledge he possesses. The Captain is more likely to be a career ticket puncher who is desperately trying to become one of the Navy’s 265 Admirals, and will destroy that E4’s life to do so. I can’t speak for the other branches, but that is life on the big, gray boat.
