In crises such as Harvey, you want outdoorsmen on your side

By Sally Jenkins

At a time such as this, you want the guys who can still thread a line when their hands are wet and cold. They’re descending on Houston in their fleets of flat-bottomed aluminum boats, the sport fishermen and duck hunters outnumbering the government rescuers by the hundreds, their skiffs sitting low in the floodwaters with their human catch in the back, clutching plastic-wrapped possessions.

The country is suddenly grateful for this “Cajun Navy,” for their know-how, for the fact that they can read a submerged log in the water, and haul their boats over tree stumps and levees and launch them from freeway junctions. There are no regulators to check their fishing licenses or whether they have a fire extinguisher and life preservers on board, which they don’t. They’re used to maneuvering through the cypress of Caddo Lake or the hydrilla and coontail of the Atchafalaya, where the water might be four feet or it might rise to 18, and the stinking bog is called “coffee grinds” because of the way boots sink in it. Spending hours in monsoon rains doesn’t bother them, because they know ducks don’t just show up on a plate, and they’ve learned what most of us haven’t, that dry comfort is not the only thing worth seeking.

“They can handle their boats better than the average fireman, who handles a boat once a year during annual training,” says Lt. General (ret.) Russel Honore, who estimates outdoorsmen saved 10,000 from floodwaters in New Orleans while he was in command there after Hurricane Katrina. “They use their boats all the time and know their waters, and know their capacity. It’s an old professional pride. It’s like good food: Some people didn’t go to the Cordon Bleu, but they can cook like hell. That’s these fishermen and their boats.”

...This Cajun Navy is a nebulous, informal thing. It has no real corps or officers. It’s “an intensely informal and unorganized operation,” says Academy Award-winning filmmaker Allan Durand, a Lafayette, La., native., who did a documentary on the “Cajun Navy” volunteer-boats following Katrina.

...So thank God they’re coming, in their skiffs and Gator Trax and Wigeons and Mudbugs and Riverhawks. They are unafraid of Houston’s vast floodwaters — the Atchafalaya Spillway is 150 miles long. They don’t care if they’re wet, “or how hot you are, or how bad you smell,” Durand said. “These are people who spend 300 or 400 hours in the swamp every year, and being in a subdivision in Houston is not real scary to them. It’s just water.”

They have always existed, according to Honore, forming their boatmen ranks anew in every storm. They were there for the great Mississippi Flood of 1927. They were there again for the Great New England Flood of 1936. They were there for Katrina, and they are there in Houston.

“The Cajun Navy is just a branding mechanism for volunteers that come to help their fellow citizens,” Honore says...

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This Cajun Navy is a nebulous, informal thing. It has no real corps or officers. It’s “an intensely informal and unorganized operation,”...

A little example of Hayek's Spontaneous Order. 

 

Here is the Washington Post video