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Sometimes delving into the details reveals more than the big picture. HCR (click) shows how the senseless dismantling of our nation’s emergency management system impacts ordinary people. As a former first responder, I know about the detailed and nuanced planning that goes into preparing, responding, and recovering from emergencies. The Trump administration sees only bloated bureaucracy “the deep state”; I see planning and readiness. Think about your local firehouse. It’s a garage with very expensive trucks parked facing out with a full tank of fuel and thousands of dollars worth of tools and equipment. All of it is unused and idle almost all the time. Seems wasteful, doesn’t it?
But on that truck, every piece of equipment is in its place, cleaned, checked out, and service-ready. That’s so that when your home is burning, firefighters have what they need for rescue and firefighting and can deploy it quickly. Similar preparations were in place for the disaster that happened on the Guadalupe River. The weather service had tools to estimate rainfall and predict flash floods. They had planned for communications to local officials who could warn those in the path of the water. But things went terribly wrong. The individual who should have received the warning and transmitted it to the locals was retired early in Trump’s cost-cutting drive for DOGE. The locals weren’t warned for a critical three hours. To see how rapidly water rises, watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqXXbjN-hhs
You first see a side channel of the river, dry except for the mud. Then you see the leading edge of a flow of water. Thirty-seven minutes later, you see a river, a quarter mile across, the bridge inundated as a house floats up to it! I try to imagine trying to evacuate a camp full of girls in less than half an hour as those waters surged.
In the aftermath, FEMA terminated the contracts for the phone banks taking calls for assistance from flood victims. They had run out of money to pay them.
It took Christy Noem three days to mobilize the Federal recovery. The Trump administration is lying and covering up these successive failures, and there are doubtless many more that I don’t know about yet.
Ignorant, incompetent, criminally negligent, inhumanly cruel. As a Quaker, I try not to have a hateful heart. But when I see the Trump administration undermining and destroying humane systems that took years and thousands of hours of training to build, systems that keep us safe, my blood boils.
The justification? We need the tax cuts. We need a bigger, meaner, ICE.