The audio on this report drops out briefly in a couple of places, but it's illustrative of something important.

If you live in an area that may be prone to flooding (or any disaster), you need to educate yourself on what you will do in the event of a disaster.

This is something the state of Florida and the federal government could do much more, ahead of this, to help fight disinformation. We're going to be dealing with much more of this in the decades to come, and we need to get much better at it, and fast.

At the state level, I'm sure it's not congruent with efforts to "promote growth," but making sure people understand how to respond in a disaster, the process, what resources are available, how fast they're available, and what they will have to do on their own while they're waiting, is important.

Watching some of the videos in North Carolina, there are dozens of volunteer organizations trying to help, and no coordination among them. We need to get better at this. Local emergency management officials should lean forward and ask for lessons learned. Plan for how to establish communications networks between volunteer organizations. Let them know how to become part of those networks.

And what is the long-term recovery process? Who oversees that? Implied in this video is that people who were flooded may be eligible for FEMA grants to elevate their homes. How does that work? I'm certain it's a much slower process than the one speaker seems to think it is.

And Florida is just incredibly vulnerable. If you can leave, you probably should. I want to, but I'm only 49% of the vote. Otherwise, be ready to be just like these folks if you don't plan for becoming a victim of a natural disaster.

We have at least one advantage now, someplace to go if we get flooded out here. That's a privilege, for sure, and it has brought me at least some peace of mind. Yeah, it's not ideal in terms of managing things here. I was watching mail get delivered to flooded out, uninhabited homes on the gulf coast, because the Post Office can't just store it all, and the mail carriers feel bad about it. So we need to plan to get a mail forwarding request in as soon as the Post Office resumes operations.

Maybe everyone needs to have a mail forwarding record on file that gets activated in a disaster declaration?

We need to figure this out.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:23 Tuesday, 15 October 2024