The declaration is a classic government response, being too late and too much. It came out at 3:30 this afternoon, but the cold nights were last night and the night before. This afternoon was sunny and pleasant enough for twenty-something weather. Tonight it will be chilly -- teens -- but nothing like the below-zero weather with -20 wind chills we've been having. Tomorrow will be a pretty normal December day, weather-wise.
My favorite part is the order that all emergency services personnel should assist in carrying out this decree. In Canada? There's no way I am going to attempt to 'assist' in making one of the Old Men of the Mountains leave his nice, fire-warmed home on Christmas Eve. He's lived there for seventy years, and has seen cold weather and no power before. Some of the old ones lived up here before there was power. They're safe and warm in their homes, safer and likely warmer than they'd be in any shelter the county cared to throw up anyway. Their kin watch over them, but my experience is that they ask for nothing because they need nothing. There probably aren't enough deputies in the county to move three of them, let alone all the ones in the district.
Here's an equally ridiculous Christmas song in the spirit of the thing.
11 comments:
Although there are still some old timers left in the Canada Community, there are now a lot of "yuppies", for lack of a better word, who would gladly follow the diktats of the county government.
I don't know who this county person is, but it can clearly be seen that he/she is a moron.
And Merry Christmas to you and yours and to all the other commenters.
Sounds like the county has delegated broad discretion to the emergency management coordinator. Let's hope he's got good enough sense to let most people alone, especially long-term residents who obviously know what they're doing. What a nutty idea, to start talking about evacuations at this stage, especially if the roads are dicey. It reminds me of the stories we hear after every hurricane, people who are perfectly safe indoors but go outside for some crazy purpose or another and get killed by a falling tree.
This year I put together emergency packs for two different family members. My sister commutes in the Philadelphia area, which can suffer ugly snowstorms sometimes with long-term traffic jams. My niece sold her house to go on the road with her young man in an RV. I thought both of them could use a compact, lightweight, watertight bag full of things like emergency blankets, tube-tents, rain ponchos, food rations, shovels, and so on.
Here in South Texas, the weather has passed. The sky is blue and it's warming up. We're roasting a prime rib and have just made up some seriously hot horseradish sauce using about 3/4 of a bottle of Atomic brand I got in the mail, mixed with some sour cream, some Dijon mustard, and a dash of vinegar. I like horseradish to be about sushi-wasabi-hot.
Mike, I actually know the guy perfectly well through the fire and rescue service. He’s also the brother in law of a friend of mine.
I won’t say too much about him personally, but this mode of governance really bothers me. I’m not sure if it’s worse that they’ve gotten in the habituated mindset of declaring a state of emergency and granting themselves vast powers, or that they’re so bad at it. I want to say the former, because it violates moral principles of self-governance; but there’s a real pragmatic issue with the latter problem too.
And don't forget the grant money and other aid that comes with constant emergency declarations. Between the 2017 hurricane and the pandemic, we've been more or less permanently in emergency status for five years in my county. The soon-to-be-outgoing County Judge rather liked the extra executive powers he got: he didn't have to consult the rest of the Commissioners Court to impose a burn ban, for instance. No big deal, but he didn't like consulting. His term is up in a week. I have high hopes for the new guy.
I guess the high sheriff doesn't have much say anymore?
Back in March of '93, Jackson county had a hell of a blizzard, a no name cyclone storm just like this one. Sylva got almost two feet of snow. Some localized places had as much as 30 inches.
I believe Jim Cruzan was the sheriff at the time and he imposed an 8pm curfew during the duration of the storm and for a few days afterwards, until some of the snow started melting off. Anyone caught out on the road during the curfew was taken straight to jail unless it was a dire emergency. ( Running out of beer or liquor wasn't considered a dire emergency.)
You know, Mike, you raise a good point about the office of the sheriff. It's a constitutional office, not merely a statutory one (and with the surprising requirement that the sheriff not be a lawyer). It is an executive office, but independent of the governor rather than derived from the governor's authority.
Yet the emergency management plans generally assume the power to coordinate county efforts with state and Federal ones. As Tex points out, they also have the access to the money faucets that they can turn on and off if you do or don't cooperate. Ultimately that is all statutory, and derived from the Governor's authority directly as endorsed by the legislature.
I'd guess there's an unresolved conflict there.
In any case we have a lame duck sheriff and an incoming new one who is of a different political party than the deputies he'll be inheriting. It'll be interesting to see how that works out. There are some major corruption issues that need to be addressed. It may be spicy.
Corruption in the Jackson County Sheriff's Department?? Say it ain't so.
Back in the day when a certain someone was running the multi-county Smoky Mountain Narcotics Task Force, there was a fair amount of illegalities going on. A lot of confiscated material, vehicles and evidence disappeared.
As far as the deputies, low level officers will probably be asked to stay because any bad habits can be trained out of them. The more "experienced" officers will probably be asked to move on.
Officials are fed a constant stream of stories from above and from peers about people who were sued - and lost - for not "initiating proper emergency procedures," etc. School superintendents have little incentive to allow even reasonable risk on school cancellations for snow and ice for example, because one lawsuit disrupts the district. So even when they know it's a bad idea and want to hold their ground, there are news stories coming out from two counties over where some poor bastard is getting sued. And now your choice is switched from public safety to "Is this f-in' worth it?"
Yet there is a powerful lesson for libertarians in this that they neglect repeatedly. They pretend to know the motives of officials and that they are only doing this because they enjoy throwing their weight around and being BSD's. They like to feel morally superior to such folks (and I do not have anyone at The Hall in mind when I say this, only a generalised sense of all of us leaping to judgement of motive far too easily) without putting themselves in that chair. Proper libertarianism does not think government control bad because the controllers are evil so much as because they are petty, and weak, and subject to a thousand pressures we don't see and the System Itself would drag any of us in the direction of responses like this: evil not because of cruelty but because useless acts bring with them all the risk with none of the benefit. "Don't give anyone that power," not "Don't give these particular fools such power."
A CS Lewis quote comes to me, but I'll post it on my own site.
I don’t know what the motivation was, but I do know the guy. I’ll be sure to ask him when I see him.
I’m all about the conclusion, though. Making sure these powers are denied to everyone is definitely what I believe.
"And don't forget the grant money and other aid that comes with constant emergency declarations."
This seems to me a major motivator for these things, and if they need to do it, they need to make it sound like a *major* emergency to justify it unquestioningly. Formula for disaster, ultimately.
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