In any group that does emergency response, from the military to cops and even including child services, there is a call list. Generally it's a call tree. Person at the top gets a call. He or she calls three people, then starts getting ready to head in. Those people call two or three people lower than them and start getting ready. Assuming more or less equal transportation distances, the bosses get to work first, which helps in most cases.
There was no such phone tree for bus drivers. So there was no real way for anyone to get ahold of them in an emergency.
Oops.
Drivers had never been told that they were supposed to drive people out in an emergency. So they weren't exactly sitting by the phone if there had been a phone tree. They had jobs and cars. They were packing to leave or already gone.
And that was the last point. The order to get out was sent out before any thought was given at all to the "transportation challenged" plan and even the evacuation order was more of a bow to reality; the roads out of New Orleans were packed (by among other things the bus drivers) when it was given.
People who develop emergency plans always seem to leave out the emergency.
But the EERP wasn't a bad Plan as such things went.
The first part was the Emergency Vaccination Distribution Plan. Spread the vaccine to health providers. At the same time, spread it to emergency services personnel and the military including National Guard. As time permits, go to nationwide forced immunization if it got that bad.
Simultaneous with that, call up all the National Guard and Reserves. Mobilize all active units to full combat status. If necessary, start a "staged redeployment" of the rest of the military world-wide.
Second step, shut down the country. It's called "zone quarantine." Close all the borders, not only between the U.S. and other countries but internally. Preferably, close it down to county level where possible. International travel shuts down first. Planes coming from other places are turned back. U.S. citizens and residents can enter the country but go into quarantine, not home. This would probably start before the first vaccine shipped. It was planned (there's that word again) to be total "primary" quarantine in three days. I think that's optimistic, but we'll give it that just for shits and giggles.
When, not if, you have outbreaks you start "ring immunization." That is, when you find someone who has the flu you ensure immunization status of everyone they've come into contact with or anyone they could have come into contact with. You do not ask for permission; unless they can prove they're immunized, you stick them with a damned needle whether they like it or not. You go through the whole neighborhood the person lives in, you go to the stores they've visited, you stick everyone at their workplace. You stick people that just sort of knew them in school or that they sort of remember from seeing across a bar.
There are leakers. Always. You find them and do the same thing, hopefully quicker. You broadcast that such and such a person had the flu and beg people to go to a doctor and get checked. And anyone who has been in contact with those people
You hit that motherfucker with a full fucking court press.
You don't open up the borders, any of them, until you've killed the son of a bitch.
Fuck the economy. Fuck anything. Shut the fuck down until your population is safe. They can't buy trinkets or gas or groceries if they're mostly dead.
Nothing. Else. Matters.
There were some plans for this we knew were going to work. 9/11 had proven we could ground aircraft at will. We'd called up the National Guard enough times to know exactly its predictable response rate. Deploying troops internally had been done enough that most units could do it in their sleep.
Distribution? Ring immunization? Zone quarantine? Nobody had tried it, ever, in a Western country. We'd never had to, not really.
As it turned out, we never did, not really. Oh, the words were spouted, but . . .
"Forced immunization is not an option."
That's not really what the bitch said. Look, Presidents get paid to, among other things, handle emergencies. And there are supposed to be emergency drills. Yes, it's a busy job and not every contingency can be covered. But mass epidemic was a scheduled drill. (Congressional Testimony On H5N1 Spiral Event.) One that the President was supposed to attend.
Seemed she was meeting with, irony of ironies, some Chinese businessmen the day the drill was scheduled. And despite being a lawyer, apparently never took the time to even RTFM (read the fucking manual).
So when the meeting finally came around where the Secretary of Homeland Security was explaining the full EERP, it went, apparently, something like this:
"Mass requisite innoculation program . . ."
"You mean forcing people to take the drugs?"
"Yes, Mrs. President."
"That is not an option."
Now, you can't go to school these days without a measles shot. And four or five more, some of which have some good clinical studies showing they are a. not very useful and b. very very fucking nasty. But unless you can prove, with a doctor's test, that you are allergic or something, you can't go to school without the shot.
But . . . well . . . politics.
Look, there are "freedom uber alles" wack-jobs on both sides of the political spectrum. There are the guys who feel very very strongly that the Constitution entitles them to owning an M-1 Abrams with full load. (Okay, okay, that would be me. Love and hate those fuckers depending on if I'm cranking one or killing one, done both . . . ) And Don't Tread On Me and Pry My Gun From My Cold Dead Fingers. Also "If I don't want to take a fucking shot, I'm not going to take a fucking shot. And anybody who tries to give me that devil poison, or fluoride, is going to get blasted by my Mark-Four-One Blaster with Puring Optical Sights that I whack off on every single day! End the slavery that is government! With no government, things would be perfect!"
Blah, blah. Libertarians with a capital L and hand me that rifle, buddy. Ask one some time if their utopia has building inspectors. Or, you know, how much it looks like, say, Somalia. Or Detroit after the Plague.
Okay, that's the nuts. Let's take a look at the fruits.
"End the cycle of violence. Eating animals is murder." "A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy." "Don't poison your body with pesticides and hormones. My body, my choice . . . "
Guess which side contributed about 15% of Warrick's core supporters. Not to mention:
"The Southwestern U.S. was once Mexico's and shall be again!"
And I did mention Chinese businessmen?
Warrick had a whole team of people, working in the very crowded and space short for really important shit White House, that did nothing but monitor blogs. Oh, not the "Pry it from my cold dead hands" blogs; the other guys. In that, she was politically nearly as smart as her husband and a bit more techno-savvy. Her team of nerds were mostly members of the blogs and occasionally passed on juicy news, thus increasing the importance of their most crucial supporting blogs. But more importantly they kept the pulse of the fruits.
And the fruits were not going to be forced to accept innoculations. Some of them were screaming for them, others were explaining how a diet of honey and organic herbs would prevent any flu. AIDS in Africa, after all, was a plot by the free-market world to kill off the black-man, blah, blah . . .
"Forced immunization is not an option."