one interview with weather/hurricane forecaster i watched (don't remember which station, but it came from hurricane centre - wherever it's located).
the meteorologist stated that while "katrina" was a hurricane "4" , the city of NO got only hit by level "2" sideswipe. he further stated that if "katrina" had hit NO with full forece, the devastation would have been much worse. hbg
ps. i'm trying to retrieve the link to a program shown on friday (thursday ?) around 7 to 8 pm on PBS.
this program had originally been shown in 2002 i believe. it provided the history of NO going back to the french and their fight against flooding and also showed the problems of preventing the marshes from dying out.
has anyone else seen this program ? do you have a link ? i've tried tracking it - unsuccessfully so far.
hbg
Dr Phil says the relocated folks need to feel comfortable, safe, and fed before counseling starts.
A) counselling, in this kind of thing a wash of good hope, should have started several days ago.
B) I am gathering the marshes are dead...
or as I suspect, near dead and in need of expert purview.
But, substantially dead as doornails. Marshes aren't nothing.
Functionally they're ballasts, but they are connecting life systems...
Yes and there's a new danger too.
Took me a minute.
I did see a dolphin in a hotel pool, though. (Chlorine couldn't be good for the poor thing...)
ossobucco : the program i watched said essentially what you are saying. some local authority had a british scientist (geologist type ?) working with local scientist to make an assessment in 2002.
her simple assessment was : if the marsh is healthy, you can walk on it - so she asked people to walk on it and they almost drowned. her pronouncement was : is't dying quickly.
this assessment was made in 2002 i believe and debated at lenght by various government and scientific bodies(some of the debate highlights were shown). while everyone seemed to agree that action should be taken quickly, sadly, no monies were made available (other priorities !). hbg
I won't take credit for saying the wetlands there are dead, I've seen it on several sites I've read in the last few days.
I have not saved links.
Actually, I haved saved links, but links are flying by all of us who are paying attention here. I wish I'd kept some I nabbed and then deleted...
osso check you history file in ie
Ok, yes, check history...
right, husker.
alas, I am just a plain human watching stuff fly by. I hope some more academic types are watching it all...
if you have standard internet explorer there is a little blue circle with a green arrow going counterclockwise click it and you should be able to view your browser history of today if more depends on your settings.
If I am missing links, husker, it is because I weed/delete them out with my caustic eye, caustic for a minute..
Oh, I'm like that with the shredder. Caustic for a minute. There is no history.
really I erased the tapes
Stagnation of support bothers me too, but I can certainly understand it. When hurricane Floyd (a massive Cat 5 that made Andrew look like a joke on the weather maps) was coming at us, everyone knew a direct hit spelled doom for us all. But it was supposed to turn. My friends on the beach threw the standard "Hurricane Party" and I did attend it. This was on Singer Island, where no such place would exist, were there a direct hit. When it didn't turn 8 hours later than "they" said we'd be in trouble if it hadn't, we bugged out... The day after it didn't hit, after the largest evacuation in American history to date, my girlfriend lost her job for not being able to get to work... because the traffic going back was literally backed up from Florida's West Coast to East on all the major Highways.
New Orleans was certainly more vulnerable do to the bowl effect and the fact that every model said it was taking a beating regardless of turns. But how far do you go? Do you use the military to force evacuations? No time. Do you shoot the resistance? Of course not. I assure you every coherent person over the age of 10 knows what "Cat 5" means, in a Hurricane zone. But, at some point, you have to allow people the freedom to make up their own minds. The Federal Government was never intended to protect me from me. Imagine the outrage had the National Guard been forced to resort to violence over a forced evacuation... on a near miss?
Those giving ear to the complaints of fund cutting of levy cash before the Hurricane, should read the link I posted earlier. Katrina, even at the Cat 4 strength she struck with, striking a tiny bit West would have used those same levies to trap water in NO, increasing the devastation and Death ten-fold or more.
To be fair: No reasonable code could prepare a coastal area to deal with a Cat 4 or 5 Hurricane... period. But an area under sea level, which offers no possible natural escape for water is, put simply, a time bomb. No amount of funding, Federal or otherwise, could protect NO from a direct hit of the business side of a storm like Katrina (which even considering the carnage, she was still lucky to avoid)... Consider a 20+ foot storm surge and the 20 to 40 foot waves on top of that...
This is the description of a time-bomb. There is no "riding out" a Katrina in such an area, regardless of safeguards. Nor could a timely acceptance of the Kyoto Protocol of every nation on earth make it more realistic. Mother Nature has kicked our a$$, again. The very funding that may have prevented this disaster could with a tiny trajectory change be blamed for the single biggest single day loss of life this country has ever seen. Research the results of similar storms elsewhere, and see how comparatively trivial even this travesty is.
With each of you, I mourn the loss of every unnecessary death. But, I'll be damned if I'll politicize it in any way
or look the other way while my friends do the same. I try to imagine myself as the Cop who wills himself the courage to face the suffering masses and comes under fire by the misguided fools taking aim at him. I try to imagine myself as the crisis manager who knows his orders will put people in harms way, while a lack of same will result in the same. I only come up with potentially reasonable guesses at what I might do (or wouldn't do), and feel pity on the brave souls who don't abandon their posts and do or don't make decisions that help or don't.
On a personal note, I continue to wonder if my personal contributions are enough to sleep soundly. If it were possible, I would be pointing them more directly to the folks East of New Orleans, who took this monster head on. There are areas not being talked about that are simply gone. I do believe we should rebuild NO, but not there. I further believe that while we build this brand new city, we should consider making room for the people of Galveston who reside in the same Time-bomb type of environment.
On a side thought; I wonder if we shouldn't finally realize Frank Lloyd Wright's dream and subsidize a mile high building, with state of the art technology to draw the private interests that could help draw investors to the brand new city. After several glasses of my favorite wine from Alexander Valley, I'm thinking a finger (middle?) that pointed simultaneously at Mother Nature and the more petty menaces of the world (terrorists) might make a glorious statement that Humankind will not be thwarted.
In the mean time, I remain in awe of the brave men and women who are tasked with solving this unprecedented problem and I will continue to look past the inevitable mistakes that I know no human would intentionally make. I understand both the righteous complaints of Mayor Nagin while disdaining the criticism contained in same. 1,000 miles (lightyears?), from the reality of what Katrina has done, I am profoundly unqualified to judge the decisions of anyone.
I'm sorry Bill's girlfriend lost her job because her boss was an asshole, kind of like the contemptuous assholes who are now pointing the finger of blame at the little old ladies who died in their wheelchairs waiting for FEMA. Yeah, they shudda gotten out, too bad about not having a car.
What was FEMA waiting for? The paperwork. That's according to Mr. Brown, former director of horse shows and college roommate of the previous FEMA director. That's right. It's all the fault of state and local officials
who failed to file forms in a timely manner and those poor, poor black bastards and other miscreants, like the old men drying up on the highway overpass, well, they can just die on national TV in front of a disbelieving world, while those in charge of a government, who believe government is the problem, make it the problem.
They don't know we've changed as a nation. We are now fully free of the impediments of a bothersome government and those who need assistance, even in time of emergency, had better learn to fend for themselves and quick. We have now accepted the idea that the government we formed under our Constitution doesn't have any role in protecting our lives and property, we do that ourselves. They deliver the mail and invade nations at the bequest of the President.
Hey world, this is the face of America now.
I've never been more ashamed in my life of my country.
Joe( read these two pieces)Nation
Killed by contempt
Bush to New Orleans: "Drop Dead"
WaPo has an excellent, in-depth investigation of the entire context of what went wrong, where. Six reporters and a researcher took part in gathering the info.
Is it possible to bring this information up and discuss it, without being accused of "politicising" the issue? I think each of the points highlighted in the report should be addressed, without talk of it being some sort of unpatriotic to focus on bad news. There's definitely lots of thought-provoking stuff here. Facts, info, hard data and some provocative opinions.
I posted excerpts in
one of the other threads; the full article is
HERE
I've been wanting something like that, thanks.
