"After 28 years of working as a Public Defender, and four years of being trained as a backup Emergency Services PIO, I got called out on my first bonafide disaster: the Mt. Vision fire in Marin County. What I saw there was a beautiful extension of the reason why I became a (often maligned, sometimes hated) Public Defender - people immediately being trusting, focused on a common good, and sharing an instant good will in the midst of a common disaster. I have seen that the softest things in life are the most enduring: |
Disaster response, like criminal justice, deals with broken, sometimes bleeding elements close to life iteself: our homes, our neighbors, sometimes our families and ourselves. The synergistic and sometimes geometrically expanding power of love & caring cannot be modelled in any engineering analysis I have yet encountered (and I, too, hold a degree in the sciences). That's what makes life worth living." Frank Cox /fcox@marin.org, backup PIO, Marin Office Emergency Services. |