New FEMA chief: Well, that's good

[LuckyTheDog]

Bush names a qualified person to run FEMA. He probably should have done that in the first place. But better late than never, I guess. I suppose we should now all praise Bush for declining to name another incompetent crony who lied on his resume.
:hurts:


http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/09/12/D8CIUQ5O9.html

[niyad]

1. qualified? this is the idiot who told everyone after 9/11 to protect

themselves with duct tape and plastic, for heaven's sake!

[davepc]

2. its actually pretty effective as a 1st line of defense against unknown

chemical agents.

Not as good as a decent NBC suit/gas mask though.

http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/duct.pdf

Expedient sheltering involves the use of common materials to enhance the safety of a room inside a building against the impacts of a chemical plume. The central premise behind taping and sealing with duct tape and plastic is to reduce airflow into a room.
Vapors penetrate into a room through cracks and openings in the walls, floors and ceilings, around doors and windows, and through openings for ducts, light fixtures, fans, pipes, electrical outlets, chimneys, door handles, and locks. The goal of taping and sealing is to significantly reduce infiltration at these points. Expedient sheltering was suggested by NATO (1983) using the term “ad-hoc shelter” to protect civilian populations from chemical warfare agent exposure. The concept was to use plastic sheeting to seal off a room by fashioning a simple airlock at the entrance to the room and sealing off doors, windows or louvered vents. The NATO guidelines also stressed the need for rapid exit from the ad-hoc shelter once the plume had passed to avoid further exposure (NATO 1983, p. 143).

This strategy was further developed by the Israeli Civil Defense in the mid-1980s to protect the public against a chemical weapons attack (Yeshua 1990). The tape and seal strategy was in place when the Gulf War occurred in 1991 and received considerable media attention. The Israeli strategy was to have citizens prepare a “safe room” in their house or apartment with the use of weatherization techniques to permanently reduce infiltration. Citizens were also instructed to take expedient measures, such as sealing doors and windows with plastic sheets, in the event of a chemical weapons attack. The use of plastic over a window was developed to reduce air infiltration and to provide a vapor barrier in the event of glass breakage from bomb explosions. A modification of the Israeli strategy was proposed for use in CSEPP (Sorensen 1988; Rogers et al. 1990).

[LuckyTheDog]

3. Really?

Oh, crap. And I thought I found something slightly positive to say about George the Incompetent.

:banghead:

[progdonkey]

5. now, what have we learned?

:spank:

[madrchsod]

4. i wonder why this guy wasn`t named in the first place?

he must be well known to jeb but something tells me the little king doesn`t talk at all to his big brother.

[geomon666]

6. I guess he didn't donate enough to the campaign.

We all know that's how government is run these days.

[Whoa_Nelly]

7. Three people died thanks to his BRILLIANT duct tape/plastic recommendation

Although the three who died were not from the US, nonetheless, Paulson did set off a national panic where duct tape, visclean and water supplies were emptied off store shelves. What happened to these people could happen anywhere...

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/ducttape.asp

Claim: Three people died of suffocation after sealing their home with plastic sheeting and duct tape.

Status: True.

<snip>
In mid-March 2003 the Associated Press reported on the demise by suffocation of three Israeli Arabs (a woman and her two teenage sons) in the town of Kfar Kassem, all of whom had spent the night in a room of the family home which had been sealed with plastic sheeting and duct tape against a possible Iraqi chemical missile attack.

Police said the three lost their lives because a coal-fueled heater in an adjacent room sucked oxygen from the room they were sleeping in, which was designed to stop air from entering but allowed air to escape. Around 5 a.m., the husband awoke and realized his wife and their two teens (ages 13 and 14) were not breathing, police said. Their two younger children (ages 3 and 4) survived.

By the by, although everyone (including us) calls that all-purpose handyman's necessity "duct tape," it is more properly styled "duck tape," which was the original name of the cloth-backed, waterproof adhesive developed for the U.S. Army to keep moisture out of ammunition cases.