3 ms·
It’s really common for decisions to be made for more than one reason, even if some of those reasons are just advantages brought up during the planning discussio
by pfraze 6y ago
It’s really common for decisions to be made for more than one reason, even if some of those reasons are just advantages brought up during the planning discussions. I can easily see the defense motives as being one of the many factors involved in the freeway development.
- jcrawfordor 6y agoRight, and if my borderline conspiracy theory that evacuation was a bigger factor than we know today is at all true, I'm not saying that the federal DOT is lying to us today or anything. If there was a considerable FEMA influence in the motivation and design of the system, staff today probably just don't know about it. A lot of this stuff happened in face-to-face conversations, a lot of the documentation was classified and by the time it hit the DECL ON it was moldering in a bankers box somewhere... the same reasons that a lot of stuff about the relocation program isn't very well known today despite it being declassified. One of the consequences of secrecy is that the whole thing is more likely to just be forgotten as decades go by and the people who were in the know cycle out. And FEMA and its precursors seemed to have a particularly weird and insular inner culture that makes them hard to talk about from a historical perspective today.