I don't think anyone anticipated that the levees would be breached.
[Sounds of coughing and spluttering. See Sunday's post.]
Thursday, September 01, 2005
THIS IS WHY YOU GOT TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS YOURSELF, GEORGE
I heard Incurious George on the radio today:
[Sounds of coughing and spluttering. See Sunday's post.]
[Sounds of coughing and spluttering. See Sunday's post.]
EVERYONE'S OKAY
At least, my father-in-law and his family. We finally heard from them. The house is still there. Eight feet of water broke down his garage door and swirled everything downstairs around and swept it away. But the living quarters upstairs are fine. He has power. Most of the siding is still there. The roof is still there. The air conditioners are untouched. And his collection of 1940's Coca Cola memorabilia is still on the walls where he left it.
So he considers himself the luckiest man in Louisiana.
Oh, and his 12' boat is in a tree.
I told him he was very clever to break down those levees to lower the water level in Lake Pontchartrain. Because, y'know.
No clue what he's going to do now. Or what anybody else in New Orleans is going to do now. But I'm glad my family is okay.
So he considers himself the luckiest man in Louisiana.
Oh, and his 12' boat is in a tree.
I told him he was very clever to break down those levees to lower the water level in Lake Pontchartrain. Because, y'know.
No clue what he's going to do now. Or what anybody else in New Orleans is going to do now. But I'm glad my family is okay.
LISA WOULD LIKE HER DAD TO CALL
And she wrote a letter to the Gazette about it. They sent over a photographer yesterday, and they published it as an op ed piece. (Registration required.)
It's a pretty good piece. Now I hope her Dad will call.
It's a pretty good piece. Now I hope her Dad will call.
WHY MOVIES ARE IMPORTANT
Looking at today's New Orleans horror stories... movies are entertainments, sure. But they also show us how heroes are supposed to behave. The typical American movie hero is an ordinary person in an extraordinary circumstance. Movies give us a context in which to be heroes when we're put in extraordinary circumstances. I was reading yesterday about some guy in a motorboat who was out rescuing people during the storm after his gas ran out. He was dragging the boat by the anchor to some people who were stuck in a house with floodwaters rising.
Who told that guy to do that? His parents? I doubt it. Your parents would rather you stay safe. Movies (and to a lesser extent TV) told him to do that. A culture in which we glorify heroes told him to do that.
Who told that guy to do that? His parents? I doubt it. Your parents would rather you stay safe. Movies (and to a lesser extent TV) told him to do that. A culture in which we glorify heroes told him to do that.
FILL'ER UP NOW
With a big chunk of North America's oil refining capacity out of commission, along with the Port of New Orleans, as well as the offshore oil terminal that is the continent's only hub serving the biggest supertankers, expect to see lines at gas stations and serious price hikes.
Many oil rigs are missing. Some of them are miles away from where they're supposed to be. I imagine the oil situation will be sorted out faster than the humanitarian disaster can be, but this is going to affect everyone.
Many oil rigs are missing. Some of them are miles away from where they're supposed to be. I imagine the oil situation will be sorted out faster than the humanitarian disaster can be, but this is going to affect everyone.
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
BUSH VIEWS DEVASTATION FROM 1700 FEET
Bush, returning from vacation in Texas today (!), flew over New Orleans at 2500 feet, then Mississippi at 1700 feet. There's a cute picture of him looking out the airplane window in this article.
1700 feet. Yep, that's about the closest you'd want to get to actual suffering, isn't it? You wouldn't want to fly over in a helicopter or anything like that. Might get in the way of rescue efforts.
Meanwhile, the (Republican) governor of Texas, in a shocking example of doing the right thing regardless of what it will cost, not only offered to put up the refugees from New Orleans, but offered to send their kids to school in Texas, so long as they don't have a school to go back to. Just because it is the neighborly thing to do.
Now that's leadership.
1700 feet. Yep, that's about the closest you'd want to get to actual suffering, isn't it? You wouldn't want to fly over in a helicopter or anything like that. Might get in the way of rescue efforts.
Meanwhile, the (Republican) governor of Texas, in a shocking example of doing the right thing regardless of what it will cost, not only offered to put up the refugees from New Orleans, but offered to send their kids to school in Texas, so long as they don't have a school to go back to. Just because it is the neighborly thing to do.
Now that's leadership.
WRITE YOUR BOARD OF ED. NO, WAIT. WRITE TO KANSAS.
You can write to the members of the Kansas Board of Ed, and suggest that supporting Intelligent Design is part of why Kansas is becoming a byword for "backward place you'd never want to live." That is, assuming you believe in the separation of Church and State.
Don't bother with the sane ones -- Sue Gamble, Carol Rupe, Bill Wagnon, and Janet Waugh -- just write to the fundamentalist crazies. You know, the ones who are in the majority.
Don't bother with the sane ones -- Sue Gamble, Carol Rupe, Bill Wagnon, and Janet Waugh -- just write to the fundamentalist crazies. You know, the ones who are in the majority.
CATS AND DOGS AND 'GATORS
It is raining like heck here in Montreal, the tail end of Katrina. Yikes. I say "raining like heck" because it is obviously not raining like hell, that's what it was doing in the Other Major French City.
I'm glad to see the Pentagon is finally mobilizing the Navy to help rescue people. Where were they on Sunday when people couldn't get out of New Orleans because the roads were clogged? As a society, we're better at dealing with crises than preparing for crises. Everyone thinks it's not going to happen, whatever it is. When the Whittier Quake struck, I heard someone on the tv saying "we never thought it was going to happen to us." Even though when you move to California, everyone mocks you because of the quakes. People lose their houses to fire in the Santa Monica Mountains because they treat wildfires as something exceptional, something out of the ordinary. They are part of the natural life cycle of the chapparal. The hills are supposed to burn every 20 years. They've been doing it since the glaciers cleared out.
Disasters are exceptional, but it is fairly safe to say that one disaster or another is going to get you. In Quebec, we had a terrible ice storm half a decade ago. San Francisco had an earthquake and (much worse than the quake) fire in 1906. LA is just waiting for The Big One.
Thing is, most disasters are foreseeable. Not predictable but foreseeable. There will be an eight-pointer in LA. We just don't know when. There will probably be an eight pointer in Missouri, too, though nobody talks about it. There was one in 1857. Does anyone believe it can't happen again?
Jared Diamond talks about societies overrunning their margin of safety in his terrific book Collapse. All the Mayan cities were abandoned after one period of drought or another. Droughts were foreseeable, but populations expanded into marginal farmland, and when the drought came, there was no way to feed people. Famine, war, cannibalism, total collapse of a city followed.
New Orleans was built under sea level. Whether it's true that the Bush administration cut the hurricane budget for New Orleans last year, or that the understaffed National Guard failed to sandbag the levies in some places isn't the point. This wasn't even the worst storm that could have hit. It could have been a Category 5. It could have hit New Orleans rather than Biloxi. (Biloxi is pretty much just gone.) There was no likelihood that New Orleans wouldn't be devastated by a hurricane. Unless the various governments (municipal, state, federal) had taken the necessary and painful steps to prevent it. That would have meant 25 foot levees in town, not 20 foot ones. It would have means removing the Mississippi River levees that prevent flooding outside the city so that the barrier islands and marshlands restored themselves -- at the cost of whoever lived outside the city getting swamped every few years or so. It would have meant building up the city with landfill so that it wasn't below sea level. All that takes money.
Or, it would have meant forbidding people from building in drained swamps.
My dad once asked me how many earthquakes I'd have to live through before I bailed on LA. My response was that the more earthquakes, the less scary they were. Not just because you get used to them. But because frequent quakes mean that people take quake codes seriously. People don't bribe building inspectors so they can use substandard concrete in their house. At least, they don't the second time around. Frequent quakes mean anything that is going to come down has already come down.
I'd rather be in LA during a serious quake than in Missouri, or Boston. Hell, Montreal can't be far from a fault line. Look at the Hudson River/Lake Champlain corridor through the Adirondacks. Does that look like a fault line to anybody else?
As a society, our hearts go out to the victims of a disaster, and they should. Where we make our mistake is that then we give people help so they can rebuild their homes in the same goddamn place. Flooded out by the Mississippi? Build another house in the Mississippi River flood plain. Your house on a Carolinas barrier island was wiped out by a storm? Build another one. FEMA will help.
When you fly into San Francisco, you can see these lovely new housing developments built on these long, long straight lakes. That's the goddamn San Andreas Fault, people!
If New Orleans really is as devastated as it looks, maybe people should build their new houses upriver and inland. I'd rather a few more tax dollars went there. Buy people's land back, and let the place revert to swampland. Swampland is good. Swampland protects the high ground from hurricanes.
Still no word on Jim Hunter, but I will tell you that his old house -- the one he left ten years ago because it was too close to sea level -- is underwater along with all the rest of the town it was in, Slidell, Louisiana. And if his house is still there, the 100-mph wind rated siding he put in last year might have helped.
Like the Boy Scouts say, be prepared.
What foreseeable disasters are on your horizon? What's your plan? Where are your spare resources? Are you just going to wing it?
What foreseeable disasters are on our society's horizon? What are we doing about them?
Preparation is boring. Much of the time, it's a waste of resources. But when the Big Bad Wolf comes, it's nice to live in a brick house.
I'm glad to see the Pentagon is finally mobilizing the Navy to help rescue people. Where were they on Sunday when people couldn't get out of New Orleans because the roads were clogged? As a society, we're better at dealing with crises than preparing for crises. Everyone thinks it's not going to happen, whatever it is. When the Whittier Quake struck, I heard someone on the tv saying "we never thought it was going to happen to us." Even though when you move to California, everyone mocks you because of the quakes. People lose their houses to fire in the Santa Monica Mountains because they treat wildfires as something exceptional, something out of the ordinary. They are part of the natural life cycle of the chapparal. The hills are supposed to burn every 20 years. They've been doing it since the glaciers cleared out.
Disasters are exceptional, but it is fairly safe to say that one disaster or another is going to get you. In Quebec, we had a terrible ice storm half a decade ago. San Francisco had an earthquake and (much worse than the quake) fire in 1906. LA is just waiting for The Big One.
Thing is, most disasters are foreseeable. Not predictable but foreseeable. There will be an eight-pointer in LA. We just don't know when. There will probably be an eight pointer in Missouri, too, though nobody talks about it. There was one in 1857. Does anyone believe it can't happen again?
Jared Diamond talks about societies overrunning their margin of safety in his terrific book Collapse. All the Mayan cities were abandoned after one period of drought or another. Droughts were foreseeable, but populations expanded into marginal farmland, and when the drought came, there was no way to feed people. Famine, war, cannibalism, total collapse of a city followed.
New Orleans was built under sea level. Whether it's true that the Bush administration cut the hurricane budget for New Orleans last year, or that the understaffed National Guard failed to sandbag the levies in some places isn't the point. This wasn't even the worst storm that could have hit. It could have been a Category 5. It could have hit New Orleans rather than Biloxi. (Biloxi is pretty much just gone.) There was no likelihood that New Orleans wouldn't be devastated by a hurricane. Unless the various governments (municipal, state, federal) had taken the necessary and painful steps to prevent it. That would have meant 25 foot levees in town, not 20 foot ones. It would have means removing the Mississippi River levees that prevent flooding outside the city so that the barrier islands and marshlands restored themselves -- at the cost of whoever lived outside the city getting swamped every few years or so. It would have meant building up the city with landfill so that it wasn't below sea level. All that takes money.
Or, it would have meant forbidding people from building in drained swamps.
My dad once asked me how many earthquakes I'd have to live through before I bailed on LA. My response was that the more earthquakes, the less scary they were. Not just because you get used to them. But because frequent quakes mean that people take quake codes seriously. People don't bribe building inspectors so they can use substandard concrete in their house. At least, they don't the second time around. Frequent quakes mean anything that is going to come down has already come down.
I'd rather be in LA during a serious quake than in Missouri, or Boston. Hell, Montreal can't be far from a fault line. Look at the Hudson River/Lake Champlain corridor through the Adirondacks. Does that look like a fault line to anybody else?
As a society, our hearts go out to the victims of a disaster, and they should. Where we make our mistake is that then we give people help so they can rebuild their homes in the same goddamn place. Flooded out by the Mississippi? Build another house in the Mississippi River flood plain. Your house on a Carolinas barrier island was wiped out by a storm? Build another one. FEMA will help.
When you fly into San Francisco, you can see these lovely new housing developments built on these long, long straight lakes. That's the goddamn San Andreas Fault, people!
If New Orleans really is as devastated as it looks, maybe people should build their new houses upriver and inland. I'd rather a few more tax dollars went there. Buy people's land back, and let the place revert to swampland. Swampland is good. Swampland protects the high ground from hurricanes.
Still no word on Jim Hunter, but I will tell you that his old house -- the one he left ten years ago because it was too close to sea level -- is underwater along with all the rest of the town it was in, Slidell, Louisiana. And if his house is still there, the 100-mph wind rated siding he put in last year might have helped.
Like the Boy Scouts say, be prepared.
What foreseeable disasters are on your horizon? What's your plan? Where are your spare resources? Are you just going to wing it?
What foreseeable disasters are on our society's horizon? What are we doing about them?
Preparation is boring. Much of the time, it's a waste of resources. But when the Big Bad Wolf comes, it's nice to live in a brick house.
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