Hey look! It’s another blog post about Hurricane Katrina!
I’ve refrained from writing about the hurricane for several reasons. One is that there’s so much to say and think about that I could never write enough to satisfy myself. Another is that so many people are saying so much that I don’t feel the need to add my voice to the digital cacophony. There’s poetry for ya.
When I saw Katrina coming, I said to myself "Hey, this is The One they’ve been thinking about and preparing for for years". We’ve known this would happen for decades. When I was a little boy, studying geography, I looked at New Orleans, and said "That looks like a dumb place to have a city, someday a storm is going to come and sink it!". Studies have been done, and data quantified, showing the damage that would happen, how many people would be lost, how long it would take to recover, etc.
What surprises me most about Hurricane Katrina is that people are surprised about the aftermath. Weather forecasters have been metaphorically jumping up and down and screaming for years that this would happen.
The loss of life, property, and culture is a terrible terrible thing, but we all knew it was coming, and we chose not to prepare.
Check this National Geographic article out, it’s from October of 2004. It could be a press release today and be just about 100% accurate.
Whoa. That is wild. We’re quite stupid, I must say. How we go about our lives and “forget” things that are glaringly a danger…but act as though we’ll always be safe and comfortable. That has ramifications in spiritual areas too, but I won’t use this comment post to rant on that topic.
i love jim watkin’s statement: But the blame for the tragedy lies not with God but with whoever thought of building a city below sea level surrounded by a lake, river, and ocean.
and i read this article yesterday that talks about all the plans new orleans had for this and nothing was done, including calling for and turning over control to the feds in a timely manner.
I tend not to blame anybody in particular. I tend to think about a bunch of contributing factors. The local leadership were certainly contributing factors. The funds meant for improving the levees that were diverted for use in Iraq were a contributing factor. The fact that it was a massive hurricane and so many people there thought they could ride it out was a contributing factor. The fact that the area and many of the people who live there are poor certainly affects the infrastructure for communication as well as the abilities of the government to follow through on any plan that it had.
It seems to me that there’s plenty of blame to go around on any level, but blaming is rather counterproductive to the extent that it stops people from examining how to improve things and leads to argument.
That’s what I was thinking. I also think then about people who build houses along a river (that get their houses carried away with the ice) or build their houses on the shores of lake Michigan (the foolish man built his house….).
Then I think of me, living in a house that has tested strongly positive for radon (a gas which causes lung cancer). I guess I am not much different.
Denial.
I must agree with Jim. Hurry up and establish whose fault it is and move on to helping and rectifying the problems. And to Bill please, please do something about your Radon. The http://www.mdch.gov site has good links and info about what you should do. It is not a minor manner.