1951 vs. 2005
Timothy Ellis of the well-intentioned but misguided blog Seattle Bubble has posted a great find over at his other site: a Seattle civil defense manual from 1951, distributed by radio station KVI. As anyone familiar with Lileks’ collection can tell you, things from that era tend to look a little dated. The deep fear of “THE MIGHTY ATOM BOMB!” seems a bit hysterical to us now, but perahps that reflects more on us now than on us then.
At any rate, one piece stuck out to me in particular, especially considering recent events: the Seattle Civil Defense Corps. The cleanly structred hierarchy clearly delineates responsibilities: Chief Eastman was head of the Police Corps, in charge of Area Isolation, Area Protection, Traffic Control and Plant Protection. Dr. Wayne Sims was head of the Medical Corps, in charge of Medical Care of Victims, Medical Evacuation, Public Sanitation, Epidemic Control, Decontamination, Coroners Functions and Radiological Monitoring. And so on, through the Welfare Corps, the Warden Corps, the Fire Corps, the Engineering Corps and the Utilities Corps.
While nuclear attacks and hurricanes are different things, compare that simplistic, but comprehensible structure to that described in the City of New Orleans’s Emergency Preparedness Annex I: Hurricanes (via RedState.) With such a lengthy, nigh-incomprehensible plan in state, is it any wonder that authorities didn’t bother putting it into place?
We can learn quite a bit from our history. After all, “In a properly alerted and organized for civilian defense, the death toll can be cut as much as 50%.” At least, that’s what they were saying in 1951.
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