Posted on 11/01/2012 6:24:55 AM PDT by blam
Tempers Flare: Residents Complain Government Is Too Slow Distributing Food And Supplies
Mac Slavo
October 31st, 2012
Hurricane Sandy made landfall just 36 hours ago and already we’ve received reports of looting in hard-hit areas with some people brazenly taking to Twitter to post pictures of their new found wealth.
Ahead of the storm panic buying left grocery and hardware store shelves empty as concerned residents stocked up on food, water, batteries, flashlights, and generators.
With the run on supplies over the weekend, tens of thousands of people were inevitably left without essential survival items due to shortages across the region, and now they are demanding action from government officials.
Officials in the city of Hoboken, N.J., are defending their response to severe flooding from superstorm Sandy.
Public Safety director Jon Tooke says at least 25 percent of the city on the Hudson River across from Manhattan remains under water. He estimates at least 20,000 people are stranded and says most are being encouraged to shelter in place until floodwaters recede.
Tempers flared Wednesday morning outside City Hall as some residents complained the city was slow to get food and other supplies out to the stranded.
Tooke says emergency personnel have been working 24/7. He says the “scope of this situation is enormous.”
Without any way to heat their homes due to power outages, no food in their pantries and water supplies potentially tainted with polluted flood waters, those who failed to prepare are now at the mercy of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s crisis safety net.
But, as FEMA has advised in its emergency preparedness guidelines, despite millions of dollars in supplies having been purchased by the Federal government, if emergency responders and the transportation infrastructure is overwhelmed, help may not be coming for days or weeks.
While damage from Hurricane Sandy may not be as widespread or severe as earlier reports suggested it could be, what should be crystal clear is that any serious long-term emergency would be horrific for the non-prepper.
In New Jersey some 20,000 residents are affected and already there are not enough supplies to go around and sanity is rapidly destabilizing.
The government simply does not have the manpower to deal with an emergency requiring the delivery of food and water to hundreds of thousands of people. The saving grace for the east coast is that the damage was not as bad as it could have been, and residents were made aware of the coming storm days in advance, giving them ample time to stock up or evacuate.
Imagine the effects of an unforeseen, more widespread disaster such as coordinated dirty-bomb terror attacks, a natural disaster requiring permanent mass evacuations of entire cities, destruction of the national power grid, or the collapse of the currency systems necessary for the global exchange of key commodities.
Even those who set aside supplies for such disasters would be hard-pressed to survive; never mind those who have less than three days of food in their pantries.
What blows me away on this is that they had to know for several days that it was coming!
I would have filled my bathtub and every pot, pan, pitcher, glass and bowl and garbage can with water before the storm. If nothing had happened, I could just pour it all down the drain.
They were told to evacuate and did not. They were told to stock up and did not.
Now they are complaining????
They need cans of stfu delivered, not water.
3 days...sounding like katrina all over again. it ain’t as easy to do as it is to bitch about, is it “brownie”?
You were one of the worst on FR running around saying this wasn’t a big deal. Guess what? It was. Get lost and leave the hurricane threads to those who don’t have their heads up their butts.
This kind of talk makes me angry. This storm may not have been as powerful as those two, but it hit one of the most densely (if not the most) populated areas in the country. The loss is deep and wide to the people and the infrastructure. More people have already died due to Sandy than died in Andrew.
That’s right. Its a sad statement. The article gives the impression of people passively waiting for government to provide for them. Drive 50 miles inland and they’ll find stores full of food they can buy.
“But what if all your “preps” were stocked somewhere in your home, which is now 3 feet under water?
Ahh, the “best laid plans...” eh?”
If you still have your emergency stock you can stay, but if you lose this, you leave. What is so hard to understand about that?
Wasn’t there some kind of Executive Order put out by Obama that said that people who stock up on food and other supplies could be suspected of being “belligerents”? And another EO that said the government can confiscate anything a person has, if they consider it to be an emergency?
It’s blurry in my mind, but I remember something about those things. Anybody know more about this?
If being prepared means you’re suspected as a terrorist (and according to the NDAA you can be imprisoned forever with no charges, no trial, and no way for anybody to help you), and if the government can/will take away anything you prepare with anyway..... the government essentially decides who lives and who dies. Has the US government reserved for itself the right and ability to do exactly that?
And this is why I don’t live in the city. Plenty of room here to have dry storage, plenty of wood to fire up the wood stove and for cooking, a lake within walking distance.
I could actually do quite a lot more prepping for a TEOTWAWKI, but a few weeks without power is not a big deal. Not fun, but not deadly.
I have relatives in Virginia near DC. They were not told to evacuate, but on Saturday, they packed up the car and headed westward. They were responsible. They took action. Didn’t wait for government.
The ones crying the loudest about slow relief are the ones who were advised to evacuate, but they chose not to. If you make a bad choice, you live with the consequences. You don’t look to government to bail you out.
We are in Ohio, so all we had to deal with was the power being out from Tuesday night until last night.
But we have a modest travel trailer, so we bought a little generator that was on sale at Aldi, for less than $150. That’s less than a year of the cable bill we don’t have.
So while all our neighbors were huddled in darkness or visiting relatives, I built a cord with plugs on both ends, disconnected the mains so as not to backfeed the grid, and ran an extension cord to one of the circuits in the house and backfed the breaker panel. We used about 8 gallons of gas (less than $30) and had the furnace, fridge, freezer, TV, Internet and plenty of lights running. My wife even ran the dishwasher once.
We certainly couldn’t run like that indefinitely, but winter’s coming and it only takes one ice storm or blizzard to accomplish the same result. The power goes out just about everywhere once or twice a year. One doesn’t have to spend a fortune or build a bunker to be able to outlast something you should be expecting as a matter of course.
I look around in amusement at people who have to have the latest smartphone, or a game console, or satellite TV, or every possible cable channel - all of which cost more than the little generator that kept us in comfort for the duration of this event.
>>But what if all your “preps” were stocked somewhere in your home, which is now 3 feet under water?
Well a true prepper wouldn’t site their home right next to the ocean, or next to a flood prone river. It’s not just about collecting stuff, it is also about thinking about problem areas for weather events, having enough natural resources to last a long time w/o power, etc.
Frankly, I’m not as concerned about society breaking down permanently as much as events like this that result in localized destruction and a localized break down in society.
October 28th, 2012 at 9:53 am by davidyeomans under Weather Hurricane
Sandy continues to steam towards the northeastern United States, potentially bringing a life-threatening situation to millions of people within the next 24 hours.
Sandy has not set any records with her peak wind speeds – only maxing out briefly at Category 3 status (115 mph) before impacting Cuba. But as of this morning, she has set a record of a different sort.
At the time of this image, Sandy is a Category 1 hurricane with maximum sustained winds of 75mph. Hurricane Sandy is now the most energetic tropical cyclone in history, due mainly to its massive wind field.
In technical terms, Sandy contains the most integrated kinetic energy of any storm in history – meaning if you add up all of the total energy contained in her incredibly large area of tropical-storm-force winds, as well as her smaller area of hurricane-force winds, there has never been a tropical cyclone in history that has contained more overall sheer power.
Camille and Andrew were worse hurricanes, no doubt. But I see people tossing ‘just a Cat 1 storm’, well the winds were not the concern, never were, and Cat 1 just refers to wind speed and by proxy wind damage.
The concern was always coastal flooding with this storm, and that is exactly what happened. Locally in Conn, for example, the storm surge was worse than the 1938 Hurricane, which started as a cat 4 or 5 and hit land here as a cat 3. This storm made landfall about 250 miles down the coast. We went through 3 high tides before the storm surge was over.
Bear in mind that this area had been warned for at least a week that the mega storm was coming so people had ample time to stock up on food. All they had to do was buy a bunch of cans of soup and chili and some crackers and peanut butter. They just did not do it.
Imagine some real disaster like a solar Flare or the New Madrid fault shaking its tail feathers.
So much for the idea of 72 hours of self-sufficiency. This was their Charley. How will they survive their Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne?
NYC big government dependence not quite working out?
the comparisons are so interesting.
makes you wonder what thos ny types did spend all the federal grant money.
Will NY require concret construction or will they rebuild with wood? unreinforced brick?
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