Some people were completely igornant of it. If many of the poorer and rural areas, some people speak little to know English, and there is no Spanish-language news or weather tv stations serving them. The state passed out Spanish-language flyers the Sunday before the hurricane hit, but many people heard about it by word of mouth, and did not get notice that they should exacuate until only a few hours before it made landfall.
I’m with you completely on the ex post facto problem. My question is: should, say, Detroit, pass a law NOW mandating a fine for ignoring mandatory evacation orders?
I agree that people may have a strong psychological block… but those people will end up having to be rescused, and those rescue efforts will use resources that could have helped people who were stuck not because they chose to stay, but because they HAD to stay. That seems more wrong to me.
I’ve been waiting for Santorum to say something like this. I KNEW he would, after telling flood victims on life TV that they basically were at fault because they couldn’t get flood insurance.
So I can’t say I’m surprised.
CASEY 2006!
Sure, as long as the parameters are well-defined and well advertised. I’m sure there’s some sort of “reasonable person” threshold on what those might be. And as well as a law, reasonable means of egress should be assured so that people can comply with said law.
Even so, this assumes that The Government™ knows best. They may declare that (made up) route 67 over the Old Mill Bridge is the best way to go, but smart evacuees may realize that said bridge is a death trap. If someone decided to defy the law and stay, and the Old Mill Bridge collapsed, would you still fine the person?
I see an enormous amount of gray area in this whole concept.
I love how we’ve turned a pit thread on Santorum into an interesting legal debate.
I get that there are strict liability offenses and agree with most of them. You didn’t know she was 14? Well, you should have asked for her ID first I guess.
Snow days means I can only park on the right side of the street? Well I guess I’ll go out and move my car. Clearly I can see it’s snowed outside, so right now I might be in violation.
But we’re talking about a natural disaster here with (relatively speaking) little warning time. Whatever law you propose to have on the books won’t make a difference if someone doesn’t know about it. Mr. Nolan the professor just wanted to spend a weekend shut off from everyone, sipping his cognac and reading a good book. No newspapers, no TV, no radio. Just him and his Longfellow.
Now the law might say “everyone needs to heed this evacuation notice or get fined.” But poor ol’ Professor had absolutely no way of knowing there even was a hurricane coming until his roof blew off. Now what? It’s too late to evacuate! So if he goes to the court saying he had no idea there was an evacuation notice, can (or should) the courts tell him he really should have been watching the TV?
Propose it a different way: let’s say (as I believe it happened in NO), the evacuation notice came on a Saturday. An Orthodox jew is trapped in his house because he didn’t know of the evacuation notice on account of not turning on any news programs in his house. during the Sabbath.
Strict liability here? The law is the law and ignorance is not a defense? Isn’t a valid counterargument that, but for the inefficient means of communicating the evacuation notice, they would have escaped? Both have the means and ability to escape but, for their own personal reasons, they do not have the ability to know they are required to.
I think the costs of ensuring a mandatory evacuation and then punishing those who ignore the evacuation will exceed the costs associated with search-and-rescue of “voluntary” strandees.
To ensure a mandatory evacuation, you’ll have to do a door-to-door announcement (some people don’t watch TV or radio). You’ll have to provide free public transportation–enough to accomodate everyone who can’t leave on their own (not to mention the fact that people with cars will be upset about having to pay for gas…some may opt for public transportation for that very reason).
And it seems to me that leaving behind the sick and infirm after the disaster has already struck is foolish. A mass evacuation plan should consider these people as well, providing transportion for hospitals, nursing homes, and other residential facilities.
But the hard work isn’t over yet. What are you going to do with all those people who you pushed out? All the hotels and motels and camping grounds in the area are going to be booked solid. Ones that have vacancies will be too expensive for many of the evacuees. Are you going to direct these people to free shelters in other communities? What about the sick and infirm? Are you going to round up hospital beds for them? What about the gridlocked roads and worries among refuge communities?
Down here, the Keys routinely evacuate during hurricane watches and warnings. The university where I work serves as an emergency shelter for folks from these areas. But there aren’t millions of people living down in the Keys, and on average these people are middle-class and healthy. They are also quite used to both storms and evacuations.
Evacuation is not an easy thing to enforce. Nor is it an easy thing to do as an individual, let alone entire families. If you punish people for staying home, it seems to me that you have to go above and beyond the call of duty to help them evacuate. If you don’t do all that it takes to help people, then expect there to be a chorus of perfectly valid excuses when you start wagging your finger.
This reminds me of my Criminal Law class. My professor would ask us some horrible question and then sit back and wait for us to reason outselves into agreeing with the question. “There is a man trapped in the entrance to a cave. The cave is filled with twenty people. It is also slowly filling up as the tide comes in. The people kill the man to get out. Is that murder?”
Interesting philosophical question. Not related to anything in real life. And whenever we came up with a suggestion, “We could try to coat him in oil” or “We could try cutting his arm off” the professor would stubbornly deny any additional fact. He wanted us to say that murder was okay in that instance.
That’s what Bricker’s doing. Pregnant mothers? The judge will decide. Sick people? Judge will decide. What he wants you to do is make a bright line distinction: people of means should be fined.
This is absolute bullshit, and Bricker knows it. These mothers and sick exist, and that’s why we can’t make the decision. This would overload the courts for years.
Blow your stupid “teaching” exercise out your ass, Bricker. Santorum has already dribbled out of someone else’s.
Where was his Sabbath Goy?
By the way, did I use that term correctly?
Let me offer an analogy. Maybe it’s not a great analogy, but it an analogy nonetheless, and one that can be discussed without the emotional context of Katrina.
A group of hikers has plans to ascend a certain mountain peak. A blizzard is on it’s way and there is a warning against climing that mountain during the blizzard. The hikers are aware of the warning, but decide to attempt it anyway. They get stranded, suffer mentall anguish and some physical harm, and have to be rescued by helocopter, at some danger to the rescuers and some considerable cost to the taxpayers. Should we pass a law allowing people who do this sort of thing to pay a fine? I’m not talking about a fine for potientially entering a closed public area, but an additional fine for having to be rescued.
But doesn’t that make the fine all the more useful from a social standpoint? People unwilling to leave their place of security right now might be more inclined to do so when faced with a hefty fine for ignoring mandatory evacuation notices; therefore, the fine would be suitable encouragement for people to not decide to “ride it out” and end up trapped.
“allowing people to pay a fine” should be “requiring people to pay a fine”. Sorry about that.
Exactly, Elysian.
Not to mention, even if a judge excuses the sad schmoe who didn’t have a car, he still has to deal with the court fees and time off work. And how is he going to prove that he doesn’t have a car? Is the judge just going to take the word of all the defendants, no evidence required?
“Your honor, I didn’t have a car.”
“I find the defendant not guilty. Next case.”
“Your honor, I didn’t have a car either.”
“Me neither, your honor.”
“Uh…me neither.”
Sure people were endangered bacause he stayed. He was endangered, for one. Or maybe you missed the part where he described looting around him and his water being shut off.
And even if he was law abiding while he remained, he’s just one more person there, in a town that really didn’t need any more people at that particular time.
And in criticising him, I’m not criticizing people who didn’t have the means to leave. Nolan did, before the crisis, and chose not to.
Nolan’s behavior was inexcusable here, and I’m shocked to see so many folks excusing it. I can tell you all that, should an evacuation order ever come down for a hurricane in my area, I’ll follow it to the letter. I’ve done it before, and I’ll do it again.
Not a great one at all, IMHO. As I mentioned earlier, there’s a big difference between hiking and staying home.
Me, I am all for it. Hold trials, waste resources. Then the world will see that Santorum and bookend assholes Bricker and Moto don’t give a fuck about anything but power, because that’s exactly what this is about ladies and gentlemen, power. The power to force action even when that action is unreasonable. And the power to divert your attention from monumental fuckups. We have a 100 billion dollar effort ahead of us, and once again, it’s all about ignoring the man behind the curtain.
No. Fining people for rescue is like eating kittens: just plain wrong and no one should do it ever.
The Tick was a sage nigh-invulnerable individual.
You are right, and I shouldn’t have lumped you in with Santorum. His proposal is stupid, your proposal of fines is just silly.
By all accounts, Uncle Sam is going to spend more than $100 billion before this is all over. The monetary impact of imposing fines to pay for the cost of rescue efforts of some (as some have suggested) is just petty. For those who propose it, the phrase comes to mind, “knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing.”
Okay, maybe some want to say it’s the principle: the people should have left. To my understanding, the police have ample authority to force people out before a hurricane, but that option was not chosen. The idea that cops should then come in AFTER a disaster and exact revenge (in the form of court summons) on those who chose poorly does not strike me as a good use of police in the aftermath of a disaster.
Finally, would such a law have any effect? Do you think more people would have decided differently because of a $500 fine? For those who have such a strong attraction to their home, their pets, or whatever that they viewed staying put was worth more than whatever they perceived to be the threat to their life, would these people allow themselves to be driven out of their homes because they fear being hit in the pocketbook? That strikes me as outright silly.
And, suspecting that someone might propose that the fine be more exorbitent, like $10,000 or something, we run into a question of fairness: does imposing such a fine create any relief for those who suffered because they had no means to escape? The government is supposed to be taking care of those people anyway, so I can’t see a fine making them whole in any more effective way.
And given that anyone who might be subject to such a huge fine will have probably lost their home and possessions in a disaster, having the government punish them for their stupid decision is a notion about as quaint as having debtor’s prisons. What good does it do to pile more debt onto someone who suffered such losses? Wouldn’t it be more to the benefit of government to allow these folks to get back on their feet so that they can start rebuilding, rather than try to weigh them down with cruel monetary punishments?
Let us also not forget that Mr Nolan and his buddy took up two seats on the only bus out of town while there were grandmothers and little kids suffering in the “sweltering” lobby. If he and his friends had bothered to get out rather than hole up in his apartment drinking cognac, someone else could have gotten out of town on that bus.
So, lemme see: he takes responsibility for himself and doesn’t depend on the government to take care of him. And you want the big nanny goverment to punish his ass. How conservative of you.