[Paleopsych] WP: Over-Ruled

[Premise Checker]

Over-Ruled
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/23/AR2005092302377_pf.html

[I learned this when I was a small kid. But, like several people reported 
below, I get into endless trouble, though most often no one notices that a rule 
was broken, or at least didn't say so. I've never been praised for breaking a 
rule.]

    When There's No One to Ask, Just Do It

    By David Brown
    Sunday, September 25, 2005; B01

    The people and agencies responding to Hurricane Rita's ominous
    approach to Texas and Louisiana appear to be fast learners.

    Preparations for this latest weather onslaught, while hardly perfect,
    went better than they did a month ago in New Orleans. People evacuated
    earlier. There were more shelters awaiting their arrival. Food and
    water were stockpiled in great quantities; troops and surveillance
    helicopters were ready to help those who stayed behind; an improved
    system of post-storm communication was in place.

    But preparation -- even when it hews closely to the "game plan" --
    only gets you so far. In the coming days, people with varying levels
    of authority all along the Gulf Coast will likely have to make many
    decisions. Often they'll have to make them quickly, alone, and without
    experience to guide them. Let's hope they have learned one more thing
    from Katrina: Sometimes you need to break the rules to avert greater
    disaster.

    I got a glimpse of how some people learned this lesson when I
    interviewed some of the 65 workers who weathered Katrina and the
    resulting flood at New Orleans's 70-acre Carrollton Water Purification
    Plant. The day after the storm hit, the plant stopped working for the
    first time since 1906. Engineers, electricians, pump-operators and
    laborers scrambled to get it going again.

    Normally, when any worker at Carrollton throws an important switch,
    fills a boiler or starts up a pump, he must first get permission from
    the control room. That's the way they tried fixing it at first, but
    the plant came on line for just 20 minutes before once again shutting
    down. "The intercoms were out and cell phones didn't work," John R.
    Huerkamp, the chief of operations, told me. "We finally got to the
    point where the gentleman who was in charge of central control had to
    say: 'Look, if you in the boiler room need to roll a pump, roll it.
    You don't have to call and ask permission. Just do it.' "

    The new rule didn't guarantee success: On the second try the next day,
    the plant operated for only an hour. But it helped make success
    possible on the third try. "This was a whole learning experience,"
    Huerkamp said.

    It's unfortunate that more people in New Orleans -- and in Washington,
    too -- didn't catch on so quickly. But the sad truth is that despite
    its success as a sportswear slogan, "Just do it" isn't a terribly
    popular idea in real American life. We've become a society of
    rule-followers and permission-seekers. Despite our can-do self-image,
    what we really want is to be told what to do. When the going gets
    tough, the tough get consent forms.

    To be honest, the forced relocation of a major city's population in
    less than a week was notgoing to happen without chaos, violence and
    death, even if it went according to script. But it might have gone
    better with something added to the script -- a little more
    insubordination and freelancing.

    How different might things have been if officials on the ground had
    somehow commandeered every bus or other large conveyance they could
    locate to get people out of the lowlands as soon as water levels
    started rising? Wouldn't it have been better if, before the storm,
    someone in the city public works department had unilaterally moved
    water, food, generators, gas cans and portable toilets to places like
    the Superdome and the Convention Center, where it was likely people
    would congregate? If an assistant school superintendent had ordered
    all the school buses moved to high ground? If the crews of some of the
    innumerable helicopters circling overhead after the flood had decided
    to drop off pallets of drinking water on the "interstate islands"
    where people were marooned for days?

    It's difficult to say what specific actions might have made what
    degree of difference. But it seems that there was a dearth of big,
    risky and unambiguous decisions by mid-level responders -- managers or
    intermediate officials with some resources potentially under their
    control, who had the greatest opportunity to do the right thing at the
    right time. Instead, there was an excess of waiting for leadership and
    coordination.

    You say letting people throw the switches whenever they think the time
    is right is a recipe for anarchy? Certainly it can be under normal
    circumstances. But a hurricane's aftermath creates abnormal
    circumstances. Anarchy is what happens when people are left without
    the essentials for life -- and are terrified to boot. They find their
    own stocks of water and food (and guns and drugs and liquor, too).

    The unfortunate truth is, when a 100-year hurricane hits a city that
    is poor and violent under the best of circumstances, if the people in
    charge don't break the rules, the people who aren't in charge will. It
    seems at least possible that there would have been less disorder after
    the storm if more people had put their hunches and reputations on the
    line before and during it.

    Of course there were examples of constructive rule-breaking in the
    Katrina disaster zone. One of the more memorable involved the mayor of
    Gulfport, Miss., who, as reported in this newspaper,ordered his police
    chief to hot-wire a privately owned fuel truck and move it onto city
    property. One of the more incredible was the report in the New York
    Times about two Navy helicopter pilots who, after delivering food and
    water to military installations along the Gulf Coast, heard a radio
    transmission saying helicopters were needed to rescue people in New
    Orleans. Out of radio range of their commanders and unable to get
    permission, they nevertheless went to the rescue of about 100 people.
    When they got back they were reprimanded, according to the article.
    One pilot was grounded and put in charge of overseeing a kennel
    holding the pets of evacuated service members.

    There were others. Some search-and-rescue teams agreed to carry out
    pets -- against the rules -- because they knew it was the only way the
    animals' owners would leave.

    But why weren't there more examples of ingenuity and initiative?
    Aren't Americans historically a people who don't bow to authority, who
    do things their own way? Isn't that part of the mythology of American
    restlessness, inventiveness and westward migration?

    From what I've seen -- in daily life, as well as in my reporting --
    two things have poisoned American decisiveness, at least in the public
    sector.

    One is the consciousness of legal liability that has permeated our
    culture in the most astonishing way. The shortest, safest school
    outing requires signed releases. School nurses can't give children a
    tablet of ibuprofen without parental permission. Paper coffee cups
    warn me that coffee is hot. I bought a kayak a couple of years ago
    that came with a sticker -- "Important Notice! Read Before Use!" --
    informing me that kayaks are used on water and that people can drown
    if they don't wear life jackets or don't know how to swim.

    This don't-sue-me mindset can pop up anywhere, any time. A small
    example occurred last winter when I rode a military plane from Banda
    Aceh to Jakarta while reporting on the tsunami in Indonesia

    The plane carried about 60 displaced Indonesians and 15 Westerners,
    including a security guard from the U.S. embassy who was accompanying
    several government contractors. We landed at 4 a.m. at the military
    airport in the pouring rain. Shaking with fever and anxious about how
    I would find my way to downtown Jakarta at that hour, I asked the
    embassy guard whether I could get a ride in the van that was waiting
    for him and the contractors.

    "I don't know who you are," he said. "Anyway, our insurance doesn't
    cover people like you in the car."

    The Hungarian ambassador to Indonesia, also on the plane and clearly a
    much bigger risk-taker, gave me a lift in his chauffeur-driven
    automobile.

    Another reason many Americans in authority hesitate to make risky
    decisions is the fear of criticism and even public humiliation -- at
    the hands of the news media, late-night comedians and, now, the
    nonstop cacophony of the blogosphere.

    Many members of my profession make a living, pay mortgages and send
    children to college in part by telling people how they could have done
    things better. We make a point about conflicts of interest, whether
    real or merely perceived, and whether or not they would make any
    difference. We get on the case of people who do too much, and we get
    on the case of people who do too little. We are obsessed with motive,
    and in general assume questionable competence or bad faith among
    public servants.

    Except in the rare case where action is immediately deemed heroic and
    subjected to little criticism -- the behavior of fire and law
    enforcement officials on Sept. 11, 2001, is a notable example -- there
    are few functions of government that, in their minds at least,
    reporters, editorial writers and columnists couldn't do better. Not to
    mention Jon Stewart.

    While this critic-and-second-guesser role is an important part of
    journalism, in practice there's too much of it, and it comes at a
    price. The price is that people have become afraid to do things that
    fall outside their job description without explicit permission and
    implied forgiveness for possible bad outcomes.

    Five days after the hurricane, a Federal Emergency Management Agency
    official ordered Mark N. Perlmutter, a 50-year-old orthopedic surgeon
    from Pennsylvania, to stop treating patients on the tarmac of the New
    Orleans airport because he had not filled out the proper paperwork. He
    protested, explaining that the woman he had just diagnosed with
    diabetic ketoacidosis might die without immediate intravenous fluids
    and insulin. But he was led away. The official said to him, "We cannot
    guarantee tort liability protection," Perlmutter told me yesterday.

    After learning that on-site certification wasn't yet possible, the
    doctor was allowed to return to the tarmac and get his medical
    instruments. The woman, who was semi-conscious when he'd first seen
    her, was dead, Perlmutter said. He then flew to Baton Rouge in a
    helicopter and got certified, a process he said "took about two
    minutes."

    This is an extreme example of rule-following -- which is why it made
    got news coverage. There are other examples.

    One of them was the behavior of the 769th and 527th engineering
    battalions of the Louisiana National Guard, which were housed at the
    Convention Center when that building became an island of deprivation,
    chaos and lawlessness.

    The 350 armed soldiers knew enough about what was going on to
    barricade their part of the building against the mob, and to come and
    go from a side door so few people would know of their presence. Later,
    they said no one had told them to restore order in the convention
    center. That's bad enough (and I know this is the know-it-all reporter
    talking). What's worse is that they didn't do it without being asked.

    "The idea of helping with the convention center never came up. We were
    preparing ourselves for the next mission," said the 769th commander,
    Maj. Keith Waddell, according to a Washington Post report.

    This was an engineering battalion, not trained in quelling civil
    disturbance. Fair enough. Then why issue them rifles, ammunition and
    helmets? These weren't U.S. troops, whose role in local law
    enforcement is circumscribed by federal law. This was a local Guard
    unit. Isn't the common denominator of being part of the state militia
    -- in whatever function -- that you are expected to keep order at
    times of popular rebellion?

    Certainly the prospect of entering a crowded hall containing armed men
    who might shoot at you in the dark behind the protective screen of
    hundreds of innocent civilians is terrifying. It is also a situation
    that very possibly could result in the death of guardsmen. But isn't
    this a risk that people who join the guard agree to face?

    The idea "never even came up"? I personally doubt this. But if it's
    true, it makes the whole thing even more astounding.

    By now, New Orleans appears to have become an extremely orderly place.
    At nearly every corner, soldiers stand ready to check ID. Rules are
    followed punctiliously.

    Everyone coloring inside the lines -- it's a great system until the
    wind starts blowing really, really hard.

    Author's e-mail:

    [2]browndm at washpost.com

    David Brown covers science and medicine for The Post.