Messy Solutions

My father and I watched the news of Hurricane Katrina together. One particular piece of information caught my father’s attention: with all the damage to infrastructure, most people were without power. Generators were the only source of electricity, but the supply lines for gasoline were similarly hindered. As a result, gasoline was going for more than forty dollars a gallon in that area.

The gears started turning in my father’s head, and he said to me, “You know, if we left in the morning, we could be in New Orleans by tomorrow night. I’ve got the truck and trailer – we could fit probably three or four hundred gallon containers in there and haul ’em down ourselves. After our costs, we could probably still net ten or fifteen grand for a couple of days’ driving.”

It sounded like a great idea to me – we bring gas to people who need it, and we make good money in the process! We set our alarms for early in the morning and hitched the trailer to the truck in preparation for the morning drive.

Except in the morning, the plans changed. A new news story was on that put a stop to our idea. Apparently someone had done exactly that the day before, and had been arrested. Somebody who lived a little closer than we did filled up a truck with gas cans and when he started selling them, he got arrested for violating price-gouging laws.

So a guy who’d done nothing wrong got arrested and lost whatever money he’d sunk in trying to help people, and a bunch of people who needed gas to run generators in a blacked-out city didn’t get it. I’ll never know how many more people might have driven in to help like my father and I were going to had it not been for that effect.

Look, some solutions are messy. Someone hears about gas going for forty dollars a gallon when people need it and they get upset. But gas was that expensive because there was a desperate need for it! That price is exactly the solution; it wouldn’t have stayed at forty dollars for long if people could respond by bringing in gas from other areas like we were going to. Instead, those figurative walls were put up and the shortage – and resulting crisis – lasted weeks. People died.

Solutions to emergencies often look messy. Think about a paramedic cutting the clothes off of a gunshot victim instead of carefully removing them. Yes, you’d prefer the clothes not be destroyed, but that’s not the crisis. It’s just part of the messy – and best – solution.