Farrow, what are you gettin mad at me about? We have no disagreement
here. I haven't visited New Orleans myself, but I've read plenty
about the disaster and it's my impression that humanity's common
failing, procrastination, was the main culprit. Louisiana has known
for well over a century they'd get a direct hit at some point from a
hurricane, but they kept putting off becoming fully prepared for it.
I can't help comparing San Francisco and Los Angeles, cities that were
hit by major earthquakes in the 1990s. But both cities had long
prepared for the inevitable, so loss of life and property damage were
held to a minimum. A quake the size of the Northridge one could have
killed tens of thousands of people or more in many parts of the
world. Centered in greater Los Angeles, a metro area of 10 million,
only fifty people died.
Preparing for the future is always a tough sell politically -- both
politicians and voters generally let things slide until an emergency,
and then have to pay many times what it would have cost for an ounce
of prevention earlier.
In New Orleans, the sheer incompetence of the governor and the mayor
was startling. Everyone blames FEMA, but FEMA is actually a very
small agency whose purpose is to *coordinate* local responses to a
disaster. Certainly Bush's FEMA head was a mediocrity, but If the
local and regional authorities are completely unprepared and f*&%ed
up, as was evidently the case in The Big Easy, there's little FEMA can
do, even if run by a genius.
Incredibly, the people of New Orleans re-elected the mayor -- the same
clown who'd even forgotten to make a phone call to get the school
buses rolling that were supposed to evacuate citizens from low-lying
areas. So the buses ended up sitting there in parking lots, dead in
the water. If you keep electing that kind of politician, you're
asking for it ...
On Apr 20, 3:26 am, Stephen Farrow <stephen.far...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> Well, no, Katrina was definitely more than simply a meteorological
> phenomenon. New Orleans essentially survived the hurricane more or less
> intact; most of the subsequent damage was the result of engineering
> failures.
>
> (And yes, I've been there and seen the devastation for myself. Have you?
> No? What a surprise.)
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