Katrina

This is our Tsunami ???? What crack rock are people smoking saying that? The Tsunami in dec 2004 killed more than 200,000 people. Damn near 300,000. If Katrina breaks 10,000 dead it will be a surprise. It is a tragedy enough by itself but DO NOT try and put it in the same class of something that killed a cool Quarter of a million people. Have some perspective here folks. And lord knows the US economy is in far better shape to deal with such damage than the severely depressed south east Asian economies.

Also part of the magnitude of the death toll is directly tied to the fact many people CHOSE not to go in addition to those that could not go. For those that chose to stay when a cat 5 hurricane threatened the coast they lived on or near I have little sympathy. They played Russian Roulette and I have as much sympathy for them as someone stupid enough to spin the cylinders of a partialy loaded revolver and then pull the trigger to find out if they will shoot themselves.

For those that had no choice but to stay help is comming. It can't happen over night. Several hundred miles of coast and one major city are completely devestated and the worst case scenario of the levies being breeched in New Orleans happend. For those comparing speed of response to something like 9-11 have a sanity check on the comparitive magnitudes of devestation. One downtown district in the middle of the most highly technologically advanced coasts in the world that suffered no other damage vrs 100's of miles of wiped out coast line in the poorest areas of the US. Katrina left 1,000's of square miles spanning THREE states in utter dissarray and an ENTIRE MAJOR CITY under water with 10's of thousands, perhaps more than a hundred thousand, stranded imobile poor that were in bad shape BEFORE the storm hit. You think it might take a bit of time to organize how to deal with this... hell just to make a dent in it ?

To the people spreading FUD about the speed of the response ??? STFU !!!!. Good lord. The largest calamity this nation has seen on its soil since Andrew hit the Carolina Coast is just 4 days in the past and all the relief that can be mustered is headed that way. Power Trucks in the thousands headed that way without delay to the detriment of other communities ability to recover from less severe damage as the storm moved inland. The National Guard has been bringing itself to bear. 10 billion dollars in reliefe has passed about as fast as an unplanned bill can. 11,000 people have been moved to just ONE location 350 miles away. Sit down and figure out the logistics of that without power, water, gas stations in Jefferson Parish and only limited access to the interior of the city. Much less the thousands of others that have been pulled to saftey in other locations. Thailand WISHES they could have mustered the response that has been delivered to the areas devestated by Katrina. Hell they wish they could have mustered HALF of it. And it is just going to get bigger and bigger.

Damn. I know we live in a society that demmands immediate results but some things just plain take time. What could be done quickly has been done quickly, piece meal evacuation where equipment could be brought to bear and YES IT WASN'T ENOUGH. It was what was quickly available. Mustering and organizing the man power to effectively deal with this problem looks to have taken 4 days.

What might have been done better? Call up of National guard probably should have begun before the storm even landed. Soon as it hit sustained Cat 5 status and we knew it was going to make landfall they should have been mobilized and preperations made for where to send the reliefe. Oh wait.... THEY DID THAT. In accordance with past events. This one got bigger. And the response is scalling up accordingly. but if you wonder what the guard is doing just go check out their website. Perhaps the initial call up could have been bigger... but hell that thing was nothing till not much more than 48 hours before it hit. Can you imagine if it had developed into a cat 5 in the atlantic, Hit Miami THEN corssed into the Gulf and picked momentum back up the way it did? We may have had to define a new category beyond catastrophic and just called it the appocalypse.

Where should some blame land that it has YET to? How about the local and state government of Louisiana? The vulnerability of New Orleans to a direct hit by any significant Hurricane was far from unknown. The problem of dealing with the cities poor and essentially imobile population was recognized long ago as a major complication compounding factor to how ugly such an event would be. Yet when the evacuation became mandatory there was no allowance for evacuating those that had not the means to evacuate themselves. No busses already running moving people out of the path of the storm. Just a last ditch opening of the superdome for some of them to ride it out.... Nope instead of taking preventative measures with the immobile population the city rolled the dice on the deffenses they had built and they failed. They have done this for YEARS, hell DECADES. This is nothing new. What is new is that this time around the storm hit and the Levee failed. Thats the thing about odds and an infinate timeline. Sooner or later the event WILL happen. I see an awfull lot of similarity in this event and the discussion regarding asteroids colliding with earth. We know they have hit in the past, we know they will hit in the future. Yet we pay it no real mind assuring ourselves that before it hits we will come up with adequate deffense measures. Somehow I doubt many will take such a lesson from it... but I am strange.

New Orleans will Rise Again. Though I do somewhat question the wisdom of re-building a city that is well below sea level. But people do not always do logical things and the city has huge sentimental value. Hopefully we will take lessons from this and the next time it happens. Somehow I doubt it. If its deffenses are not built according to what we know can happen then they need to accept the risk or certainly plan better for what to do in the event that they know something is about to happen for which they have no deffense.