by Ned Barnett, American Thinker:
This is more of a think piece than an article, so please stay with me here. It’s based on decades of public health and disaster management work I’ve been involved with during my career.
I first got involved in this while working as an executive at Lexington County Hospital, across the river from the state Capital of Columbia in South Carolina. I’ve had similar positions at other county and city hospitals, including such disaster areas as Flint, Michigan’s city hospital. In all cases, those hospitals were responsible for public health in the counties and cities they served.
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At Lexington County Hospital, we were hit by Hurricane David – not just hit, but for roughly eight hours, the eye of the storm seemed to hover right on top of our hospital, which was in itself frightening.
Nowhere near as big as Helene, even a relatively mild hurricane like David is a monster storm. Until you’ve seen water blown into the hospital through the brick wall, you have no idea what a deluge coming at you at 85 miles per hour can do – let alone Helene’s 140 miles per hour winds – you really can’t appreciate the damage it can do. I do know that when David was approaching, I evacuated my family – my wife and infant son, but not our pet Sheltie, “Pumpkin” – into the hospital. This protected them – hospitals are built to withstand such winds and environmental violence – so I could focus on doing my job without worrying about their safety.
In this South Carolina community, the Army at nearby Fort Jackson provided helicopter emergency medivac – medical and evacuation services. This was great, real-life training for the Army helicopter and air-rescue crews, and it provided excellent med-evac services for our five-county region.
This got me involved in what the military have to offer in the realm of support services during a natural disaster. Later, I worked with a hospital in Jacksonville, on the North Carolina coast, and immediately adjacent to Marine Corps Camp LeJeune. During my time with them, both Hurricane Fran and Hurricane Floyd slammed into the North Carolina coast with winds of up to 137 and 122 miles per hour, respectively. The disaster rivaled Helene’s impact, but in a much smaller scale.
My point (and I do have one) is I’ve seen what’s involved in hurricane recovery, both short-term and long-term. Added to that, my father-in-law, John Lines, was the senior Civil Service employee at what is now the Department of Health and Human Services. This was before FEMA, when his agency responded to natural disasters. His job was to get on site fast and coordinate disaster recovery. I learned a lot from his after-action discussions over the family dinner table, lessons I later put into use when I had similar responsibilities, but on a city or county level. He was a rare breed – a career civil servant who actually cared about what he did and the lives he impacted, for good or ill. We need more like him.
But how does this impact Helene? Well, first, we just learned that the Biden-Harris administration diverted funds intended for hurricane disaster relief to help illegal aliens. Since we can count on having hurricanes each year, this was a Capital B “Bad” decision. Not because of mythical “global warming,” but because hurricanes are how the Atlantic interacts with large land masses. In the Pacific, most tropical cyclones are called “typhoons,” but in the Atlantic, they’re “hurricanes.”
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