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There's no need to panic; NASA and FEMA have a plan to respond to a potential asteroid collision:
It's a scary scenario: an asteroid headed for Earth, just four years away from slamming into our home planet. It may be too short a span to plan an asteroid-deflection mission, but it's long enough to present very different challenges from those of a more typical crisis, like a hurricane or earthquake.
NASA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) came together Oct. 25 to plan a response to such a hypothetical event. In a "tabletop exercise," a kind of ongoing simulation, the two agencies tested how they would work together to evaluate the threat, prevent panic and protect as many people as possible from the deadly collision.
"It's not a matter of if, but when, we will deal with such a situation," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's Science Mission Directorate's new associate administrator, said in a statement. "But unlike any other time in our history, we now have the ability to respond to an impact threat through continued observations, predictions, response planning and mitigation."
Also at JPL.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday November 07 2016, @04:08PM
I hope you're joking.
1. "Brownie" left FEMA a long time ago.
2. The guy who's currently running FEMA, Craig Fugate, has handled quite a few major emergencies (most recently, flooding in North Carolina) without massive embarrassment of himself. That probably has something to the fact that he started out as a firefighter/paramedic and worked his way up through the ranks of emergency management, and thus demonstrably knows what he's doing, rather than getting the job because he was a fundraiser for the president.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 07 2016, @11:02PM
Kidding? Yes, a little. More like a hyperbole rooted in truth.
Wait for the next election, when we haven't had an emergency for awhile and Hillary (or Donald) needs to pay off a key supporter with a cushy appointment.
For the most part, heads of Agencies don't matter for squat anyway when it comes down to the day-to-day gruntwork of the organization. When political appointees get any genuine progress done within the bureaucracy, it is a fluke.
Yes, operators make better directors generally, except when the operator can't make it as an operator and therefore gets political as a way of surviving. Not saying Fugate is that way at all. Just that credentials as an operator don't automatically transfer credibility... judging whether the appointee was a GOOD operator does.
Now, for the reality behind the fun:
* Running a tabletop exercise for an asteroid strike is a bit like running a tabletop exercise for alien first contact. Might be nice to establish basic working policy, but won't mean shit if an incident ever actually happens.
* FEMA, like any Federal Agency, first and foremost wants and wants to maintain power.
* It does indeed have bunkers for the National Command Leadership. It does indeed buy its' own ammunition reserves for disaster contingency, and it does indeed have large areas reserved for staging and other purposes.
* Its unified response plan is indeed based on military command-and-control structures. They state so, openly, noting that "it works."
* Any agency that expects to provide assistance in an emergency must recognize the primacy of FEMA or risk not only being denied service but denied entry into an emergency zone. Sometimes locals have fought this successfully.
* Any responder for mutual aid is expected to be trained and adhere to FEMA standards of the incident response system. Local/state agencies that don't play ball face risks of denied funding. (The origin of a local fire department traveling several states to provide assistance, only to find themselves tied up in sexual harassment classes instead of working in the field. Yes, some time ago, but it applies.)
* While military command-and-control structures do work outside of the military, it is completely unproven that they are the "best" way to coordinate assistance between diverse agencies and providers. To the contrary, the militarization of disaster response easily provokes distrust and resentment among the 'served' individuals. I'll trust organizations like Red Cross ahead of FEMA, thanks. (And yeah, RC does cooperate with FEMA. Because it must.) More importantly, I'll trust my local government ahead of any higher authority.... but the Integrated Response Plan virtually guarantees that if state or fed gets involved at all, it takes over the response. Which is completely fucked up, sorry.
* Unless their little exercised reached a point where they realized that their whole structure breaks down and they then consider, "What Then?" well, it wasn't a REAL exercise. Because asteroid strikes can VERY easily reach that potential. (And yes, Virginia, they can also be much smaller than that from a local disaster up to a 2-3 Tsar Bomba explosion. But until they know what point exhausts their response ability, they won't know when to tell people, "Nope, don't evacuate.")
In any kind of area-wide emergency, 90% of the ready.gov instructions basically fly out the window. Disasters and emergencies are fluid situations, and while those directions may start one on the road to preparedness, real life has a way of completely shitting all over one's finest made plans.
So kidding? Yeah. Up to a point. But only up to a point.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 08 2016, @03:08AM
It means that if an incident ever actually happens, the response will be to dust off the plans that come out of this process. The military does this kind of thing all the time over really unlikely scenarios, like how the US can defeat Canada in an all-out war if it came to that.
Not proven by any means. I mean, do you really really think that the random civil service bureaucrats are sitting there trying to figure out how to maximize their control over the citizens at large, or do you think that they're trying to put in their 9-5 and go home?
That all makes perfect sense:
- The people in charge need a place that they can plan and direct operations that is well-protected from the effects of the disaster in question.
- Part of keeping them safe includes shooting criminals that might try to take advantage of a disaster situation to loot or rob.
- Areas reserved for staging purposes means that they can quickly move things that they will need during a disaster to a location near to where that disaster is expected to occur. For example, if a hurricane is coming, it's incredibly valuable to have an area in the southeast where you can put all your food and boats and water and helicopters while you wait for the storm to come in, so that as soon as the storm leaves you're there to help those in harms' way within a couple of hours rather than a couple of days.
Wouldn't you want FEMA to do something that works, rather than something that doesn't work?
This is done so that somebody has a complete picture and can provide overall operational guidance. There's good reason to do this: If 10 different agencies all are trying to work in an emergency zone, but nobody's directing traffic overall, you could very easily find yourself with one area that is over-saturated with emergency personnel while another area doesn't get any assistance at all.
There's good reason for that too: If there are undertrained groups of people running around, they will do more harm than good. Sexual harassment classes may seem like a waste of time, until there's a group of firefighters who show up in a disaster zone and are putting the victims of the disaster through even more trauma.
So now we get to your real reason: You just plain don't like the federal government, so you don't like FEMA.
Those are indeed the kinds of scenarios they go through.