Joys of Geography

[telosphilos]

I live in the USA and I rather like it here. The USA is a country of natrual disasters. The cold truth is they happen all the time in this country. There are big ones like what we are currently seeing and there are little ones that never make the international news like the wildfires out west. I've mostly lived in the east and south of the

Comments

[loopyloonyluna]

There were cerainly a multitude of things that were handled poorly or not at all in New Orleans, and I agree with your astute assessment. Perhaps the biggest shame of it all is the missed opportunities to take preventative measures before the storm hit (it seems that there were at least two days in ehich people were sure that New Orleans would be hit. That time could have been spent bussing people out to safety and provisioning the Superdome to handle last-minute refugees. People have been dying in that building because they have no access to medication which to me is heartbreaking. People dying in their homes waiting for someone to rescue them is also heartbreaking but not as unexpected because they are widely scatteres and nobody is sure who is still in those houses. From the news reports many survivors are on the brink of a full scale riot due to the horrendous conditions.

It's so very frustrating because there seems to be so little to do about it now. The relief efforts are hampered by the fact that the city has been made inaccessible due to the flooding. IMHO the first refugees to the Superdome should have been the first bussed out, along with the sick and elderly, but it looks as if that did not happen. There really doesn't seem to be any choice but to evacute almost all of the city's citizens until the flooding is controlled and the infrastructure restored but where on earth do you house that many people in any amount of comfort for what might be a month (or more)?

[telosphilos]

Food and water have finally made it to the evacuation centers. The fact is they should have gotten the flooding taken care of sooner rather then later because that would have prevented so much of this. There was time, there were opportunities, and they weren't taken.

How bad do you think the final investigations into what went wrong will be? If he could be reelected, I'm sure this mess would have prevented W from reelection. I somehow don't think the gov of LA will be reelected either. The mayor might, but he's the only one.

[loopyloonyluna]

I highly doubt that the governor of LA has a snowballs chance of getting re-elected. This would also have hamper Bush's bid had he been eligible for it (the republicans' chances in 2008 may suffer still, though a lot can happen in that amount of time). The mayor of New Orleans has probably gained a lot of support from his impassioned pleas for immediate and drastic action. The investigations are going to be awful but ultimately will probably yeild little resolution. To me it seems that the situation was mis-handled from the beginning- decades before Katrina to be honest. New Orleans was betting a lot that no hurricanes worse than a level three would hit and the city and its people lost the bet in as bad a way as possible. It's gut-wrenching in the extreme to see people suffer and die when things could have been done to prevent at least some of the damage and death.