Pricey and Precious

“We Mendocino Coast people are expensive for FEMA and other agencies to rescue, so we need to help.”

How so? 

We are spread out over a very long strip of land that is crossed by 20 major waterways. If the bridges go down, we become 21 Islands. Even with the bridges working, it takes many hours to drive to us all. 

-FEMA and other official disaster planners and responders have to perform triage. Triage is the art of saving the most lives possible in a particular situation using finite resources. Triage means dividing a group of people into 3 sub-groups: those who are likely to survive and heal up even without any expert care, like people with scrapes and bruises; those who are unlikely to survive even if we spend a lot of resources on them, like people with really large wounds; and those for whom the care of trained professionals can make a great deal of difference, like people who are half-drowned or have broken bones.

-Triage involves facing the painful fact that because resources are finite, sometimes not saving person D makes it possible to save people A, B, and C.

-As a group, Coast people are somewhat like Person D. We are costly to rescue because we are hard to get to from the freeway. Along the Highway 101 corridor near Ukiah, if you put up one emergency shelter during a fire, thousands of evacuees will go to that shelter for water, food, safety and instructions. If you provide those same services in Albion or Elk, perhaps only 50 or 100 people will be able to get there to make use of them.  Not many lives will be saved per dollar spent; it’s not a great use of tax dollars. 

-However, Person D is just as valuable to Person D as Person C is to Person C!  We Coastal people want to be here. When we supplement the tax-funded types of rescue with our own resourcefulness, we help our communities survive without using more than our fair share of taxes.