06 October 2006

Queen of the Dead

I was talking to the Queen of the Dead yesterday over at her Headquarters, just downhill from the Capitol. To get to her, I did not have to take a barge up the Styx, or the Potomac.

I just walked past the television monitors in the heroic lobby where the images of the horse-drawn buggies carrying the murdered schoolgirls were playing, the sound on mute.

It was gray outside, the changing season bringing dank chill rain late in the day. Halloween is coming soon, the American version of the Day of the Dead.

The Queen is quite nice. She is one of my favorite people over at the Office that is charged with protecting the American people from threats to public health. She has one of those portfolios that we don't talk about much, but becomes utterly critical when nature or man has run amok.

You remember the Dead of New Orleans. The images won't go away. We all recall the man near the parking structure whose earthly remains stayed on the street for days. They are still finding the dead a year after the storm swept in.

The Queen's constituents are normally not so vocal in their voicelessness. Mostly they are quietly taken away for eternal storage and that is the end of it.

The monuments come as the living come to terms with their departure.

I take it personally. After the terror attacks I put down the tools of war and tried to help with the preparations for the long struggle.

Toward the end of my time in the Government, there was an awful fire in a small nightclub in Rhode Island. Since legal matters have longer lives than most of us, it is still periodically in the news. The owners of the place were just sentenced, and I think that is the end of it, finally, except for those that must live with the scars.

The dead transitioned almost immediately, but there were many of them, over a hundred.

The conflagration proved to be an important teaching point, but I am not sure that we have learned the lessons. There were two points. Our health care system is stressed enough in normal times. There were only a couple inhalation and burn cases from the fire, but they saturated specialty hospital beds all along the northeast coast.

The disaster told me that our ability to cope with something truly nasty was limited. Since our health-care system is operated on a for-profit basis, and there is no business case for maintaining excess capacity.

That means we will not have enough respirators and sterile beds when we need them, and that means a lot of people that could be saved in the event of a disaster are going to die.

The Dead of the nightclub were their own discrete problem, and the Department dispatched teams of emergency morticians to help them.

It was a long process, filled with sadness and not a little horror. The idea that one could be enjoying a frosty beverage one moment and dead the next was too uncomfortable for words. That is why the mission of the Department is so important, and why I am so passionate about it still.

The Government does a lot of planning, and I was curious to know if they were hard at it. The Queen nodded, and said that they were, given the limitation of resources. They were definitely thinking about mass casualties.

I leaned over the table and asked what the planning numbers were. “A thousand?” I asked. “Ten? How about a hundred thousand, all in a short period of time?”

She explained that the notional disaster was modeled on the crash of an airliner, since that was the most common real-world mass casualty situation. And yes, she said quietly, the process was working to try to accommodate things that were much worse.

Big storms. Barge loads of toxic chemicals blown up in urban areas. Maybe even a nuclear weapon.

We talked about refrigerator trucks and trains, and the challenges of collecting the dead in a contaminated area. The Queen gave me a couple good ideas to work on that might be useful when we have to execute one of the plans.

I wondered if this whole disaster mortuary business might better be outsourced to the private sector. WalMart knew where every square inch of blue tarpaulin material in America was located before Katrina came ashore, even if FEMA could not find its collective ass with both hands.

We parted at the elevator, and I vowed to bring good ideas if I could find them. I thought our conversation was a wonderful focus to the mind. I am always pleased when I find good people laboring on tough problems that the rest of us do not want to think about.

If Congress dares to come back after the election, we ought to encourage it to spend a minute and try to help her out.

The Queen is an astute and caring person, but there is only one of her. She does the best she can, given the limited power of her constituents.

You'd think it would be greater, since eventually, inevitably, we are all part of her realm.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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