Husker--
Quote:why so you pass judgement?
Quote:You wouldn't be saying those things if you were poor. Only the rich think that's how society is supposed to work and the poor are too uneducated to know any better.
Only Christians are entitled to judge? Come on.
Noddy24 wrote:Roverroad wrote:
Quote:You wouldn't be saying those things if you were poor. Only the rich think that's how society is supposed to work and the poor are too uneducated to know any better.
Where do you fall on the income scale, me boyo?
Rich? Poor? Or in the middle of an educational process that will help you eschew facile answers?
I do ok, 37k per year, single with no kids and no major bills to pay. Unfortunately because of this society that your president is creating I have to mail 250.00 of that per month to my mother so that she can pay rent and buy groceries. That said, how are you going to judge me?
au1929 wrote: Brooklyn my European friend is not built below sea level?
It is not immune to dirty bombs however.
Perhaps more relevant to the topic of the thread, twenty-five percent or so of the Netherlands are below sea level too. The Dutch have so far done a fairly good job keeping the place dry -- even creating new land that was previously covered by the Atlantic. Apparently they found the fiscal cost of a huge levy system worth the benefit of added farmland. I don't see why the preservation of New Orleans would not be worth the same cost. (Actually the Dutch dike system is much larger, so probably much more expensive than what you would need for New Orleans.)
au1929 wrote:As for Al Quaeda . Germany has more to worry about from Islam than the US.
I am reading this while munching a kefir-based müsli and drinking mocca from my nearby Turkish grocer. I'm sure I have nothing to fear from him and his family, and my guess is that you greatly overestimate how scary our fellow citizens from Islamic countries are.
Rover Road--
Quote: do ok, 37k per year, single with no kids and no major bills to pay. Unfortunately because of this society that your president is creating I have to mail 250.00 of that per month to my mother so that she can pay rent and buy groceries. That said, how are you going to judge me?
I didn't vote for Bush and I'm delighted that you take care of your mother.
I don't "judge"
you/ I just find your opinions.....unpolished as yet.
Walter Hinteler wrote:I've been referring to the Dutch quite often now, on various threads.
It seems that such an example isn't really worth looking at for most.
Probably not. It's so much more fun to wax eloquent about what the bottom line of a non-existent balance sheet would be, rather than looking around and see what the rest of the world finds practical.
I heard that the Dutch took a look at the N/O Levee system and decided that it was too far gone for them to be able to do anything with. But I for one think it would be a great idea to have the Dutch build the new levees if they are going to rebuild them. For the same reason you want your TV set to be built by the Japanese, I'd want my levees to be built by the Dutch because they know how to build them rite.
roverroad wrote:I heard that the Dutch took a look at the N/O Levee system and decided that it was too far gone for them to be able to do anything with.
As early as 1667 Hendric Stevin produced a plan to prevent flooding around the Zuyder Zee by damming the channels between the islands in the Wadden Sea. At that time the technology simply did not exist to do this but the idea persisted and in 1889 a thorough study was made of its technical feasibility.
1927 and 1932 more works were done, and a days before the 1953 flood, the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management had published a policy document detailing plans to prevent precisely this sort of disaster.
In the light of the disaster, immediately after the devastating storm surge of 1953, first steps of the works begun which is known as the 'Delta Project'.
Walter Hinteler wrote: In the light of the disaster, immediately after the devastating storm surge of 1953, first steps of the works begun which is known as the 'Delta Project'.
Today's New York Times has an article about it. This is how it starts:
Quote:On a cold winter night in 1953, the Netherlands suffered a terrifying blow as old dikes and seawalls gave way during a violent storm.
Flooding killed nearly 2,000 people and forced the evacuation of 70,000 others. Icy waters turned villages and farm districts into lakes dotted with dead cows.
Ultimately, the waters destroyed more than 4,000 buildings.
Sound familiar? Here is what happened next.
Quote:Afterward, the Dutch - realizing that the disaster could have been much worse, since half the country, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam, lies below sea level - vowed never again.
After all, as Tjalle de Haan, a Dutch public works official, put it in an interview last week, "Here, if something goes wrong, 10 million people can be threatened."
So at a cost of some $8 billion over a quarter century, the nation erected a futuristic system of coastal defenses that is admired around the world today as one of the best barriers against the sea's fury - one that could withstand the kind of storm that happens only once in 10,000 years.
Source
Now, can any of you smug accountants tell me how protecting New Orleans against future Katrinas is
not worth $8 billion over 25 years? The the war in Iraq, supported by some you, costs about ten times that much every year. Get some perspective, people!
Why would you bother???
Quote:"Like riotous Los Angeles since the 1960s, New Orleans has been a wasteland of politically correct dysfunction for decades -- public schools so obviously decimated vouchers were proposed this year (and torpedoed by the left), barbaric gangster rap culture no one will confront lest they offend liberal pieties, multiculturalist frauds who empower no one but themselves, and cops neutered by the NAACP and ACLU.
"Criminals have ruled New Orleans for some time, convincing many members of the middle class, long before the hurricane, that the city was unlivable. In 1994, New Orleans was the murder capital of America. It had 421 murders that year. Criminologists predicted 300 murders this year, a projection that now looks quite conservative.
"Conservative black leaders have been mau-maued into silence whenever they tell the truth about this barbarism and call for dramatic reform. But they are the ones who must lead the city now, and the phonies at organizations like the NAACP who despite all their rhetoric haven't done a thing to help the black underclass should step aside. Hurricane Katrina has made vivid the civilizational collapse they have long tried to conceal."
George Neumayr, the executive editor of The American Spectator, in "Masques of Death."
source
BTW - One day the San Andreas Fault will just RIP apart and turn L.A., San Diego and San Francisco in a memory. I'd say somewhere in the region of two and half million US citizens will die straight away, followed by another 3-5 depending on the kind of aid the Federal Govt can supply.
So, what kind of 'aid' do you think President Cheney or President Rumsfeld give at that point??? Or maybe they'll be 'liberating' Iran that week.....
What puzzles me is why, if there was a mandatory order to evacuate the city, did so many people ignore it?
Did the city authorities issue such a directive knowing full well that a significant proportion of the population could not get out? Did they, as my Independent says today, "abandon them to their fate", to drown trapped in their own homes? If so there can scarcely be a worse example of municipal mal-administration in modern times.
I'm looking at the front page of the paper. It features the makeshift grave of Vera Smith, "an ordinary woman who like thousands of her neighbours died because she was poor".
But read the full story on page 2. All is not quite as it seems. She didn't drown. She was hit by a car in the chaotic aftermath of the storm. And she may not have been rich, but "she had gone out to the shop to get something. We knew it was going to close. We did not want to run out of anything"....says her husband Max.
This is someone who died dont forget "because she was poor". So poor indeed that she did not want to run out of anything.
They had survived the storm, she was the victim of a hit and run driver on the way to the grocery store.
Back to the front page photograph. "Here lies Vera God Help us" is the message on the brick walled grave written on a sheet. But although the telegraph poles look a bit battered, the houses appear intact, there is no flood water, and on the road are what appears to be two perfectly serviceable cars.
Max found her body and left it. Then he went back and put a tarp over it. In the dark with the police clearing the streets, he approached officers and asked them to take her away. "They just told me to get the hell out of there".
More details about Vera...just an ordinary poor woman. "She liked clothes and shoes and shopping and like many people in this city - sometimes she liked a drink. She also liked books and every Sunday she went to the local Catholic Church".
Max says "We used to lie in bed. I'd drink bourbon, she'd read books".
...............................................................................
I'm not saying anything disrespectful about Vera or Max. I'm sure she was a good woman. But I have some nagging questions.
What were they DOING in New Orleans after a mandatory evacuation order had been given, and a category 5 hurricane was forcast? Max was an oil rig worker. Did he not have a car? Or the bus fare? Did the city authorities lay on any public transport?
What is the underlying message the Independent is trying to convey here, and is it supported by the facts of this case? I dont think so.
And is the tragedy of New Orleans 2005 just down to incompetence, and if so, who was the most stupid, the city authorities who ordered people out when they could not get out, or the the people who could get out but decided to stay?
"I think that it was a matter of denial"
I was shocked (in Cornwall England) when I heard that the entire population of New Orleans had been ordered to leave. I thought this is unprecedented. I thought more people might be killed in the evacuation than in the storm. But I thought people would actually leave.
Are you saying they just thought to themselves "we havent been killed before, so the authorities are probably just lying" ??
Where exactly is New Orleans anyway...its not part of America cant be.
Vera Smith was the victim of a hit and run driver. But neither her nor the driver should have been where they were.
Pheonix, thanks for the geography lesson. I was not being serious. (or rather I was, the inference being that New Orleans must be part of the developing world)
Is the US going to take up Fidel Castro's offer of relief aid?
In 1988, the big tornado that struck Raleigh (on my oldest male cubs birthday) ripped through my neighborhood and damaged my house.
A few years later, Fran put us out of our house for six months.
When Floyd came along, even though all it did was knock a section of my backyard fence, I closed up shop and got the hell out of town, heading for the Va. highground.
If we get one heading our way this year, I'll pull the cubs out of school and do the same.
Lesson learned.
