[wnissen]

I'm donating my 38th pint / 17th liter of blood this Friday. I phone banked during the election, participate in two local community organizations, etc. So I'm going to have to ask that you take it on good faith that I believe strongly in both individual and organizational contributions.

My question is, what would have happened if the author hadn't stepped up to do dispatch? You would have had people searching blindly street by street, not knowing where they were needed. I am not for one second advocating that neighbors (or strangers) don't step up to help when needed, even at great personal risk.

By all reports the disorganized response ended up working well in difficult circumstances. But when (not if) there is an earthquake in a major city, this level of response is going to cost many lives. You will have a million people in need of food, water, and medical attention. There will be no power (let alone cellular service or Internet needed to run an app). There will be no gasoline because the pipelines will be out of service and a good number of the refineries are near fault lines. And you will have no warning.

We spend a trillion dollars a year on the Defense Department (and before anyone asks, I support that, too) that can, as noted elsewhere, project military force almost anywhere in the world, within hours. It's justifiably marveled at for its capability. Why can't we make it a national goal to get 911 up and running in a disaster zone in our own country within a similar time period?

I used the word heroes to describe the volunteers, your interpretation that I could possibly have been opposed them contributing is uncharitable at best.

[justin66]

> My question is, what would have happened if the author hadn't stepped up to do dispatch?

Some other solution would have emerged, or the volunteers would have proceeded with a lower level of coordination.

> You would have had people searching blindly street by street, not knowing where they were needed.

I expect you saw plenty of this in the last week, even with a relatively good communication network in place. It's not necessarily a big problem. It would be a mistake for rescuers on the ground to assume that their dispatchers are omnipotent and to only proceed based on what they're told via radio. You would miss everyone in need of help who was unable to communicate out.

> Why can't we make it a national goal to get 911 up and running in a disaster zone in our own country within a similar time period?

I feel your comments are grounded in an overestimation of the importance of universally available centralized realtime control in disaster response. That is something we've never had in a genuinely large disaster that takes out a lot of infrastructure.

The closest we have to universally available communications is actually Amateur Radio networks. I'm all for spreading that hobby among high school students and encouraging more people to volunteer.

We could also do the 911 whatever technological thing you have in mind, but we should proceed with the understanding that we will encounter disasters big enough to knock it over.