Who Ya Gonna Call?
# 800
Yes, this is a real sign, snapped at the Port of Mumbai, in India. It was sent to me by my world traveling brother.
As a side note, there were no phones within eyeshot of the sign. Hopefully, if they have a fire, whoever calls it in has a good memory for numbers.
After viewing thousands of pages of state and federal pandemic plans, I keep coming back to this sign, and wondering if they didn't all come from the same source.
While these plans go into elaborate detail on how the state and federal governments will deal with a pandemic, they give little practical guidance to local communities or individuals. If there is a real plan to deal with local problems in these documents, they are buried so deep, as to be impossible to find.
Ultimately, the responsibility for the safety and welfare of our citizens will rest on local communities, and how well they are prepared to respond to a crisis.
Michael Leavitt, Secretary of HHS, has made it abundantly clear than any community that fails to prepare under the assumption that the Federal Government will be there to rescue them will be tragically mistaken.
And yet, most local communities are waiting for detailed guidance from higher up. Many seem oblivious to the problems they will face, and some are in complete denial over the possibility of a pandemic.
We need local awareness, and local solutions, and we need them now.
Otherwise when a pandemic does come, anyone lucky enough to find a phone may find a recording saying:
"Please stay on the line. Your emergency is important to us. All of our representatives are busy with other emergencies. You have been placed in the queue, and your call will be answered in the order in which it was received. There 16,422 callers ahead of you. The anticpated waiting time is approximately 9 weeks. Please do not hang up."
