Rapid reaction
On Hurricane Helene, Ben Franklin's fire department, and the time to consider what the national government can do best to help states bounce back from disaster
Americans are a notoriously self-organizing people. We can point to a heritage celebrated by Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 or reported with pride by Benjamin Franklin in 1790 for evidence of its long lineage.
■ But there are times when voluntarism can only do so much, and the catastrophic damage left behind after Hurricane Helene -- especially in western North Carolina -- gives an unfortunate example of the limits. North Carolina's state Department of Transportation has said, "Unless it's an emergency, all roads in Western NC should be considered closed". Local media depict complete devastation of the local transportation infrastructure.
■ Individual states within the United States already have a considerable supply of what we call "state capacity": The ability to get things done. Most states are comparable in population to independent countries around the world, and almost all have state-level gross domestic products that punch even further above their weight for population.
■ It ought to be well within our capacity at the national level to have a sort of backup level of service that can be rushed to the scene of similar disasters -- in much the same way that insurance companies have reinsurance companies to help backstop their own risk. More than anything, the national level of government should be able to supply a rapid-reaction effort to fill in for ordinary transportation and logistics networks until those networks can be brought back into operation.
■ We lean heavily on the National Guard to do that work, but considering the volatility of the geopolitical situation, it might be time for us as a nation to decide that the risk burden is large enough and widespread enough to justify a commonwealth investment in building the capacity to make the fastest repairs possible to stand in when everything else falls apart. It’s hard to rebuild when you can’t get the tools and supplies.
