Chapter 90
5:30 PM EST Day two of 1260 Camp David, Maryland - Conference Room
General David Stoups had been talking now for over two hours and Stevenson had started to drift off in other directions. Being President, he knew required him to occasionally listen to very long speeches, but they were usually in the Senate. Politicians and military brass always had an agenda and they droned on forever. He usually tried to get them to speed up, but usually to no avail.
He just wanted to be given the facts and then the solution so they could move on. The General had at least five hundred pages of documentation that he had passed out for his portion of the meeting and seemed to have the same amount of PowerPoint slides, which he showed as he kept talking.
Basically, he could have summed most of it up in ten minutes by simply saying that they were going to start evacuating the affected areas once they felt one-hundred percent sure that Mr. South’s predictions were true and would actually happen. There was not much room for doubt. He had not missed a beat yet, and after the island prediction, that had sealed it.
The General also outlined the residual effects of getting people relocated when the hurricanes hit the Gulf areas. Hurricanes usually moved due north after they hit land, which meant that in Texas, the flooding would be far inland and moving up into Oklahoma. Then the other two to hit the Gulf would move rain into the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, also causing severe flooding. The other issue was that planting season had just started and there was concern over crop loss in these areas. It could well be disastrous with some areas experiencing a total loss of crops; not counting the loss of life and property.
The General showed a map of the U.S with highlighted areas that would be affected by the hurricanes whether through flooding or a direct hit. There were eighteen states in the direct path and ten to fifteen other states, which would be affected by flooding.
He suggested that we call up the National Guard immediately and all unassigned military personnel that were not overseas should be dispatched to manage the FEMA camps located in various areas of the country. His plan was to seal off cities that were severely damaged as soon as they had been evacuated. As he said, they were going to have the equivalent of seven Katrina’s at almost the same time and there was no other way to deal with it.
It was also suggested that they first try and keep Houston afloat, as a national priority over other affected cities. This was due to the oil refineries in that area. They needed to be back in operation as soon as possible, as a matter of National Security. The next priority would be Washington D.C. and then New York City. Everything else would have to wait. If the people did not want to evacuate in any of the cities, then they would force them to, or they could just leave them there to fend for themselves; depending on the severity of the storms and availability of FEMA camps.
The other logistic was the amount of displaced people that needed to be moved. The populations of New York City and New Jersey amounted to almost seventeen million people. Then add another two million for the D.C. area, plus Maryland and Virginia. That now made it somewhere in the vicinity of twenty million people. Now add Jacksonville and Miami, Florida. There were two and a half million people in Dade County alone and some two million in the Jacksonville area. Savannah, Georgia and Houston, Texas had around two million people each. It was mind-boggling. Stevenson had forgotten Mississippi. He was finding it hard to focus on all the numbers. He did not think they could fully deal with the problems.
The other issue the General brought up was the safety of the national treasures in the museums. He suggested they be moved out of the areas which would be worst affected. If the weather did not destroy them, then the looters would. That meant hundreds and thousands of trucks to move the nation’s art and history collections to different parts of the country. This was becoming a nightmare.
The General was winding down talking about troop placement in the areas and that they could expect damages in the region of five hundred billion dollars to infrastructure alone, in addition to personal property, loss of production, and camp administration costs.
For the first time in his life, Stevenson was not happy to be who he was and really wished he were not the President of the United States.