Because if they are in the Midwest, in about three months they will begin freezing to death. If they are in the Midwest, they will have no way to re-establish contact with former employers (or future employers if their previous employment has been destroyed). They will be unavailable to participate in the re-creation of the destroyed communities (which will have a great need for a pool of labor to help in the reconstruction). Because if they go to the Midwest, a lot of Midwest school systems are going to be disrupted with an influx of strange kids (or, if the families are truly scattered to the winds in order to find housing, each kid will have psychological isolation added to the burden of the disruption in their life). Because if they are scattered across the Midwest, the bureaucratic nightmare of actually finding and tracking them so that government agencies can actually provide support, (financial, educational, employent, etc.) will be overwhelming.
And, I suspect, that the actual effort to create vouchers to send people out on their own in the vague hope that they can find reasonable accommodation, education, and temporary employment would dwarf any effort the country could reasonably provide.
Y’all aren’t getting the numbers… 500,000 isn’t high enough. I’m telling you, there will be more than 1,000,000 homeless, possibly closer to 2.3 million. This is devastating.
There are some folk who think that the hurricane force dropping from a cat 5 to a cat 4 was at least one small blessing in this tragedy.
I’m not sure it has made all that much differance in the bigger picture, its the amount of rain that was dumped that is going to cause the main problems now, true that mechanical damage from the winds themselves would have been reduced, but this is precious little comfort when you find that this has simply been replaced by a longer term form of destruction.
I ain’t no meteorologist, however, the amount of energy that had to be dissipated when it was cat 5, must have been the same as when it dropped down to cat 4, and all the rain it was carrying must have had to fall too.
I’m not sure what the implications of that would be, like, when it went from cat 5 to cat 4 does that mean it spread a slightly lesser trail of destruction over a wider area ?
Huh? They can reestablish contact with telephones and the internet. They’re not going to “freeze to death.” They’ll be living in the Midwest inside a house or apartment not in a Siberian labor camp. Psychological isolation? They’re still within the United States. Same money, same culture, same language. We’re not talking about adjusting from Pol Pot’s Cambodia to the United States.
Huh? A million I could maybe believe, but 2.3mil? That would be more than half the population of the entire state of Loiusiana!
Since when? Most Dopers’ attitude about the government runs the gamut from mild contempt to frothing hostility.
:smack:
Sorry, squeegee. That should have been 1.3 million, not 2.3 million. I had a couple of typos in that post. I was tired and forgot to preview. My bad.
Actually, the pumps are already there. There are 20-something high capacity pumps used to drain the basin of rainwater and whatnot. The problem right now is a) plugging the breaches in the levies and b) getting power to the pumps.
Well, the pumps, at best, can lower the water level by about 1 foot per day, so they say. They’re old, and quite probably some number of them will fail. They weren’t designed to pump a lake out of NO, simple as that, so the task is, to put it mildly, beyond their design parameters. No doubt they’ll get the job done, eventually, but it likely will not be a smooth or quick process.
I seem to recall that there was a proposal to use Navy nuclear vessels as emergency power plants in the event of a disaster.
Is this on the table?
Sadly, if the headlines aren’t completely distorting the current situation, there are some number of thousands of people left in NO, and some percentage of those are causing major headaches for the relief and response effort. The “human element” is a discouraging X factor here, the effects of which I doubt anyone can reliably forecast.
The problem is not that there isn’t enough power. The problem is the distribution network has been smashed.
There was a gasoline panic in Atlanta yesterday, triggered by a report in the local paper that the two pipelines serving the region were down indefinitely (due to a lack of electricity along the Gulf Coast). People lined up at the gas pumps, many stations ran out of gas, and prices in some locations surged to nearly $6 per gallon.
This morning’s paper reports that the pipelines are back up, but at 25% of normal capacity. The long-term outlook is still foggy. We don’t yet know when (or if) the refineries along the Gulf coast will return to normal output.
I suspect that a protracted surge in gasoline prices could trigger a 1970s-style inflationary spiral.
Well, if they are looting, you can hardly blame them for following the example set by their state, county and city elected officials.
Well there’s that. Shooting at helicopters while people are being evacuated is more along the lines of what I’m thinking of.
Yeah, but the food, man … they’ll have to eat midwest food. shudder
Jello molds! Gaaah!
Has anyone done that? What would be the point?