Home Depot has a well-established disaster-response team that go to hard-hit regions, repair and staff up their local stores quickly (local employees typically busy dealing with their own damage), with extra truckloads of what they already know people will need. After Ida my sister reported the impressive walls of stacked generators in their local HD. (They’re also pretty good at pre-stocking the materials people need to prep for a hurricane in the first place.)
Things are so much different than after Katrina, where the idiots at the checkpoint heading into New Orleans blocked a Walmart truck delivering water for the survivors. Emergency management knows to leverage as much commercial assistance as they can get.
That is all the responsibility of (democratic) government. Leaving it to corporations and rich people’s fickle and essentially malevolent sense of charity is a degradation of society we cannot tolerate and should not allow.
The atomized privatization of the electrical grid (already largely corporate-owned) will likely lead to increased emissions and more difficult paths to lower CO2 emissions and other pollution. ERCOT has effectively decreased the public’s trust in governmental bodies even more, playing into the privatization scam of the far right. Ironically (if there were such a thing as irony) what caused the Texas and other energy failures was failure in the supply of fossil fuels (and nukes). When stress hits again, who will the suppliers prioritize, new single-family customers or the large corporations that failed before?
November 27, 2021 at 7:51 pm
Home Depot has a well-established disaster-response team that go to hard-hit regions, repair and staff up their local stores quickly (local employees typically busy dealing with their own damage), with extra truckloads of what they already know people will need. After Ida my sister reported the impressive walls of stacked generators in their local HD. (They’re also pretty good at pre-stocking the materials people need to prep for a hurricane in the first place.)
Things are so much different than after Katrina, where the idiots at the checkpoint heading into New Orleans blocked a Walmart truck delivering water for the survivors. Emergency management knows to leverage as much commercial assistance as they can get.
November 27, 2021 at 11:52 pm
That is all the responsibility of (democratic) government. Leaving it to corporations and rich people’s fickle and essentially malevolent sense of charity is a degradation of society we cannot tolerate and should not allow.
November 28, 2021 at 12:21 am
The atomized privatization of the electrical grid (already largely corporate-owned) will likely lead to increased emissions and more difficult paths to lower CO2 emissions and other pollution. ERCOT has effectively decreased the public’s trust in governmental bodies even more, playing into the privatization scam of the far right. Ironically (if there were such a thing as irony) what caused the Texas and other energy failures was failure in the supply of fossil fuels (and nukes). When stress hits again, who will the suppliers prioritize, new single-family customers or the large corporations that failed before?