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Copyright (c) © (copr) 2001 all rights reserved by TJH Internet SP and Earth Operations Central, with exception of icons linking to other sites, used with permission, or images supplied by the US Park Service. Transmission or rebroadcast to any non-Internet media, including radio or television, are expressly prohibited except by arrangement. Each unauthorized retransmission to non-Internet media will be billed at the statutory damages under US Copyright Law and the Berne convention on Internet Copyright - $250,000 per instance, payable to this writer only. This document is Coded By Hand. Last Updated: 2001 September 11! |
Welcome to Washington. We wish it could be under better circumstances. The nation girds for War, and Washington must do so as well.
We welcome the creation of the Cabinet Level position of the office of Homeland Security, which is in our opinion long overdue. Among other things, this will provide coordination between the many disparate agencies which have occasionally stumbled over each other when implimenting emergency plans, or have simply stumbled, due to the lack of sufficient Emergency Response Planning.
The initial response of the Metropolitan Police Department was nearly heroic. Instant cancellation of all leave was instantly followed by a call to duty of all officers. But despite the instant ramp-up in fielded forces, the MPD and indeed the City of Washington were only able to provide a higher level of visibility of anti-crime forces and a higher level of traffic-direction personnel. As the city largely emptied on September 11, massive gridlock occurred. Also, active organizational direction had to be handled by the Secret Service, which had tasks of its own. It is strongly to the credit of the talent and instincts of the MPD that there were as few problems as did arise. Yet the City of Washington was clearly unprepared to organize efficiently to respond even to a major incident which occurred on the far side of the Potomac River.
Congress is highly displeased. The House Appropriations Committee has voted to withhold half of the funding for a variety of District programs until the District reworks its emergency response plans. The District will be reimbursed some $13 millions to cover emergency expenses since the beginning of the crisis, as well being provided with some $16 millions to establish effective Emergency Preparedness.
We note that the District's telephone and cellphone system collapsed utterly during the emergency, yet we also note that the InterNet continued to work "just fine". Even as the emergency developed, we were able to scan and index all known District Government websites. We believe that the District should enhance its InterNet internal communications, and that the District should create a fallback to wireless-internet modes which do not depend on the cellphone system. We are rather expert in adapting off-the-shelf technology to such ends. Even when the phones weren't working, Earth Operations Central's neighbors all had wireless access to the InterNet, at our own expense. If the District is interested in contacting us for consulting, we are able and are interested in assisting with the development and deployment of wireless non-cellphone-dependent InterNet/IntraNet for the District. We'd consider it an honor and a privelege.
Noted in passing, Congress also voted to provide half of the requested funding to create a separated Family Court within the DC Superior Courts. This is as a result of a long standing calamity of collapse in the DC Family Services, which is a multi-agency hodgepodge which has led to dozens of probably preventable deaths of infants and childern. Please see the excellent coverage from the Washington Post. You will probably want to read another, related, excellent article about the District's Lost Children, which also has links to many other such condemnatory articles.
The District probably fared better in this particular emergency than it otherwise would have, were it not for the combination of a recent emergency response to the widespread flooding of 2001 August 10-12 -- in which the angry gods saw fit to massively overload the city's drainage capabilities with an astonishing fall of up to 6 inches of rain over a period of a few hours -- and the preparations for the protests against the expected meetings of the International Monetary Fund ("IMF"), which have been cancelled due to the emergency. The District had expected massive protests and had prepared for disturbances of a scale comparable to those in Seattle in recent years. The presence of active FEMA "disaster recovery" centers -- established when the District was declared a disaster area after literally tons of crap overflowed into basements across the District -- combined with MPD's recently-trained preparedness for another class of disaster, and massive confusion and disorganization thus were avoided, and a merely incompletely-effective response to the Pentagon strike ensued.
We have stated before that we were no longer much interested in reporting the minutae of District Governance -- and insofar as such reporting might tend to provide information as to exploitable weak-points to enemies, we are even less interested. However, some things are simply too interesting to pass over, and as we continue to be Moving Right Along, we will remark in passing on a variety of subjects, which you may possibly research in a variety of other local publications. And so:
According to a rather extensive survey, there are some 60,000 addicts in the District, with about 10-percent of District residents being addicted to drugs and/or alcohol. The Mayor states that he wishes to reduce this to no more than 25,000 by 2005.
The District will no longer require female applicants for Fire, Emergency, or Police positions to take a pre-employment pregnancy test. Recently, allegations were publicised regarding a reported policy on on-the-job pregnancies which reportedly led several female employees to seek abortions under the theory that it was a requirement of the job.
The District will, quite understandably, begin increased towing of abandoned and junked vehicles, and will -- also understandably -- begin a much tighter auditing of the paperwork involved. We recommend coordination -- if possible or sensible -- of abandoned/junked vehicle towings with information sharing between the District and other agencies.