Emergency plans never work.

Every now and then while driving I see a road sign that says, "Disaster Route". I wonder what the hell that means. I figure it's an evacuation route for some monstrous disaster. But I know that if the disaster is bad enough, there's no point relying on government emergency plans.

On January 12, Haiti was hit by a 7.0 Earthquake and 33 after shocks. Yesterday, Haiti got hit by another 5.9 earthquake. Estimates are that 100,000 people could die from this disaster.

I was watching CNN the other day and Anderson Cooper said that relief operations had been bungled. It took 3 days for international rescue teams to arrive because before landing in Haiti they were busy "assessing" the situation.

Have you noticed that in every major disaster, help never arrives on time and rescue efforts are bungled? That's just the way disasters work.

Here's the wikipedia entry on 1995's Kobe earthquake (approximately same size as Haiti and 6,000 people died):

In the aftermath, both citizens and specialists lost faith in the technology of their early warning systems and earthquake construction techniques. The national government of Japan was criticised for not acting quickly enough to save many people, for poorly managing Japanese volunteers, and for initially refusing help from foreign nations, including the United States, South Korea, Mongolia, and the United Kingdom.

And here's the entry on Hurricane Katrina:

The criticisms of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina primarily consisted of criticism of mismanagement and lack of leadership in the relief efforts in response to the storm and its aftermath. More specifically, the criticism focused on the delayed response to the flooding of New Orleans, and the subsequent state of chaos in the Crescent City.