Yes. Your premise is a straw-man. The professionals already did a room to room search. Taking the pet owners with them added nothing to the risk equation.
From your link:
Obviously the first responders couldn’t bring the pet owners with them initially. Now you want them to risk their own lives to go back in again with the pet owners? Maybe you should have volunteered for it, instead of second guessing the people who were taking the actual risk.
There’s no obviously about it, You’re creating a straw-man.
there’s no legitimate reason the pet owners couldn’t go through the interior of the building alongside the people searching for their pets.
Also, the animal traps were placed there by cranes.
cite:
Search teams have even used drones with thermal imaging cameras and high lift cranes to place live animal traps on unstable areas and balconies
There really is. The people searching will be professionals who will try to listen for a lost pet and rescue it if safe to do so, and they’ll know better than amateurs which doors are safe to open, which archways are safe to walk under.
Unless the pet owner is handcuffed to a professional (danger, Will Robinson!) they will not be anywhere near as careful, and they won’t have the knowledge the professional has. Especially with - sorry - the kind of pet owner that would go the lengths you’re envisaging, the pros really could not trust them to act in a safe manner.
I mean, we’re not talking an open site that might have a few bricks you could trip over, we’re talking a building that was still collapsing.
right. Adults can’t follow instructions because SciFiSam says so. By projecting your biases you’re creating a false narrative as an argument.
Dude, you are really digging in on this for no good reason.
Yes, it’s possible you have discovered the secret hack that would have allowed pet owners in the building with acceptable risk. But please also consider the possibility that the 100s of people actually on the scene have a better understanding of the situation than you.
Letting people go into the structure would be an unnecessary risk; not just to those people, but to others. If the building suddenly collapsed while those people were inside, whether because they slammed a door too hard, they tripped and fell, or just dumb fucking luck, that collapse would be uncontrolled. Maybe the building would just pancake… Maybe debris would kill some random person, or many random people. The folks keeping people out would be blamed, regardless of the reason. It is a risk that just can’t be mitigated, and all for somebody’s cat/dog or random personal belongings? Just… No.
I’m not sure what biases you think I’m projecting. Unsafe buildings are unsafe. Sending professionals in is a risk, and sending amateurs in with them is an even bigger risk. That’s the end of it.
Your original reply indicated you think people are so moronic that they would run after an animal they thought they saw, rather than staying with the people who are keeping them alive. That seems biased to me, too—biased towards assuming most people are complete idiots.
I don’t disagree that there is increased risk in taking in amateurs. The question is how much risk, and if there would be ways to mitigate those risks. I do, for example, wonder why they couldn’t have started this attempt at the point they were getting all the people out. The people were already with them in the first place, so they could be used. The idea that a stranger calling your animal and putting out food would get all the animals seems kinda silly to me. Plus, the sooner they get them out, the less risk for everyone, right?
I also had ideas like recording people’s voices or sharing hiding spaces. The former seems fairly easy to do quickly with modern tech: just have them send them in via text, and then play them all as they walk around. The latter would take a bit of planning to give the rescuers the info when they need it, but I’m not sure they didn’t have time to do that.
Maybe those ideas don’t work, either. I’m no expert. But I have to say that, if I got responses in the tone being used to reply to @Magiver, I would find it hard not to want to defend myself, too. It’s why I don’t think sarcasm is useful in arguments—it tends to make people defensive. For me, at least, the fact that he’s showing compassion means I’m not going to make a big deal out of it.
And, as always, none of this is meant to “lecture.” I’m just seeing something from the outside and hoping to clarify so that all sides come out understanding each other better. And, of course, maybe I’m wrong, too.
I talked earlier about how I think we’re all crankier right now. It occurs to me that the subject matter is also probably a huge part of that. I suspect we’re all imagining what it would be like if we were unable to rescue our beloved pet, and to see actions taken that would likely have killed said pet.
Some take solace in assuring themselves that there was nothing that could be done, while others like Magiver want to propose solutions. But it all presumably comes from the same place: compassion and empathy.
Lots of news out of Surfside…https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/07/07/florida-condo-collapse-surfside-deathtoll/
And even as inspections increase and problems are found in other buildings, and the district attorney has opened a grand jury to investigate the collapse and possible deficiencies in the building code, the Gov had this to say:
Speaking in Tallahassee, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) wouldn’t commit to increasing state oversight of Florida’s aging high-rise buildings, suggesting that Champlain Towers South may have been an isolated incident. “I think this building had problems from the start, let’s just put it that way,” he said.
Yeah, actually a lot of adults DON’T follow instructions. I see the general public do dumb shit every day I’m at work. “What if the pet owner runs off after the cat?” has to be a consideration of any rescue attempt like you’re discussing.
Some people did manage to take their pets with them when they left, including people holding onto their pets while being rescued from the balconies.
After days or a week without food or water it is actually less silly.
Definitely true.
As near as I can tell, there were few non-human animals in the complex to start with. We’re not talking about dozens of people going in to try to catch their cats; more like two or three, maybe only one who was seriously trying to do so. And nobody in this thread is talking about letting people go in to get non-living possessions.
The particular woman who went to court had apparently recently moved into the apartment with her 80 year old mother. I expect that she was concentrating on first getting her mother out and that’s why she left the cat. I doubt she thought she was leaving the cat to days of starvation and terror followed by crushing in a deliberate demolition; I expect she thought that either that section of the building was going to come down almost immediately, or else it would be possible to get the cat out later.
And yes, some cats will come out for food and water no matter how weird the situation has gotten all around them – but others won’t. Some cats will hide and stay hidden, waiting only for things to go back to normal or for their known and trusted human to come rescue them. While it’s not guaranteed, some have survived astonishingly long times without food or water. And there are a lot of people who think they know how to look for a cat, but who don’t.
Whether the particular apartment that cat was in was judged unsafe for anybody to go into, I don’t know. But if that apartment was safe enough for other people to go look under the beds, I think they should have read that particular woman a vehement lecture about how not to risk the life of the professionals who were going to go look under that bed anyway, and let her come, guided by such a person, and be the one who looked under it.
I don’t think they should have taken homeowners in. But it must have been really horrible and wrenching for the homeowners to watch the rest of the building drop, on purpose, killing any surviving pets and destroying many not-yet-destroyed prized belongings.
Not run, but step away and move somewhere unsafely, yes. And we’re not talking people in general, we’re talking someone who’s so determined to get their pet that they’re risking their life for it. That indicates that they might not be acting entirely logically. And really, a firefighter might just about be able to manage to remain sensible if he heard a trapped cat (or what might be a cat) and couldn’t get to it, but it’d be really hard to do that with the pet you love.
Expecting distraught people to not be able to be sensible is not an unreasonable position to take. I’m not sure that can be the “bias” I supposedly have. And I’m not “making a big deal out of it” - I thought we were all just having a conversation. That doesn’t necessarily mean complete agreement!
The poor woman who lost her cat must feel like it was her fault. It isn’t, obviously, but that’d probably make her feel even worse.
I can understand her position. Not everyone loves their pets that much, but some do. Some people have literally run into a burning house to rescue their pets and some have even died from doing it. I’m sure any parent would do the same for their child. If they died trying to rescue their child, they would feel it was still worth trying. Some people feel the same about their pets. I suppose one option would have been for her to break into the building and go searching herself. I’m not advocating that, but parents who rush into a burning house do so after pushing past the firefighters trying to stop them.
Any amount of risk beyond zero is too much to expect another human to take on behalf of someone else’s pet.
Possibly because, of all the things rescuers had on their mind, “Let’s make sure people flee with their cats safely in arms” was not likely one of them.
Yep. Kind of silly, but also kind of above and beyond as far as I’m concerned, even if likely to be ineffectual. I might allow that had there been no demolition in mind, it might have made sense to allow owners back in at their own risk. But once there was an assessment that the building may need to be brought down to safely resume what was then still nominally a rescue, vice recovery effort, all bets are off where pets are concerned. If there was, further, an assessment that individuals going through the building might plausibly precipitate its collapse, then that too is another point beyond which owners should have been kept out, if for no better reason than having a human in the building (or not verified to be out of the building, and thus potentially in) when it collapses then risks forcing yet another rescue effort onto already taxed rescuers.
We could go on and on about what we might be able to do “quickly with modern tech.” But then we have the privilege of not having to balance the risk of wading through rubble next to an unstable structure or leaving the (albeit increasingly unlikely, even at the time) survivors who may have been under the rubble to languish and possibly die while we sort out how to literally herd cats.
No doubt the decisions made by rescuers will prove to have been imperfect with the benefit of hindsight, or worse, the kind of metaphysical certainty that goes into lay opinions on complex questions.
That may not have been possible. I’d be surprised if the site hasn’t been guarded since shortly after it fell down, in order to keep people from going in not only after their cats but after their valuables, photos, etc.
To demand, yes. To ask for a volunteer among the crew already entering the building?
I agree with that. However, as there were people officially authorized who did go in and look under beds in portions of the building, it must have been thought that in those areas such actions wouldn’t plausibly precipitate its collapse.
I’m assuming that was part of the assessment of whether a particular apartment was “accessible” or not.
As I said earlier, I don’t know whether the particular apartment in the court case had been determined to be “accessible”.
Oh, yeah? Did you ever see any adult NOT wearing a required mask during the lockdown/quarantine/COVID restrictions? Huh? Or how about airplanes? Have you ever seen an adult NOT obey the ‘Fasten seat belt’ instructions?
Oh, wait… 