Sunday, September 04, 2005
Katrina aftermath
What a terrible disaster. A hurricane wiping whole towns off the map. Levees breaking causing flooding of an entire city. Looting, lack of food and water and no power and sewage. Terrible conditions for those who remain. And it will get worse before it gets better.
I hear people - politicians, the press and so on - complaining that the government has not done enough. While I agree that enough has not been done, I also believe that we could not have done much more than was done. It takes time to mobilize resources and get people and supplies into the devistated areas. Bridges and roads are out or unpassable. Whole areas lie under water. I see much of the criticism as political maneuvering, such as the comments of people like Jesse Jackson (see my previous entry...).
I don't know what I would do in the same situation and I hope no one ever has to go through what the folks of the Gulf Coast have gone through in the past week and what they will have to endure for the coming months as the recovery progresses and rebuilding happens. We will have to learn from this and try to prevent much of the disaster from happening again to the same or other areas. But Catagory 4 hurricanes are going to cause a lot of damage, no matter what we do. The Earth is not an intrinsically friendly place (though much friendlier than Venus would be!).
I hear people - politicians, the press and so on - complaining that the government has not done enough. While I agree that enough has not been done, I also believe that we could not have done much more than was done. It takes time to mobilize resources and get people and supplies into the devistated areas. Bridges and roads are out or unpassable. Whole areas lie under water. I see much of the criticism as political maneuvering, such as the comments of people like Jesse Jackson (see my previous entry...).
I don't know what I would do in the same situation and I hope no one ever has to go through what the folks of the Gulf Coast have gone through in the past week and what they will have to endure for the coming months as the recovery progresses and rebuilding happens. We will have to learn from this and try to prevent much of the disaster from happening again to the same or other areas. But Catagory 4 hurricanes are going to cause a lot of damage, no matter what we do. The Earth is not an intrinsically friendly place (though much friendlier than Venus would be!).
# posted by Jim @ 9:44 AM 
