Ooo, you need to check out the Pit. It’s a real funhouse!
Just got your wish.
Bush- “If ya don’t need gas don’t bah it”.
No cite, but I recall reading that the population of Louisiana is heavily, heavily concentrated in the New Orleans region.
I haven’t seen any price gouging here in Jackson, MS.
However, I have seen lines of cars that were easily 80+ long in an effort to get gas.
Three times coworkers have rushed out to get in a line that was supposedly short. Twice they’ve returned because they were out of gas before they got to the front of the line, and once was cops telling everyone to go home because it was now ‘emergency vehicles only’ at that gas station.
The boss is having his son in Baton Rouge overnight eight 5-gallon gas cans so that he can run down to Louisiana to fill them up tomorrow. I think he’s wasting his money.
It’s just amazing how nutzo the people I’m working with are getting in regards to the gas situation. I only hope it’s not going to affect food distribution too much. Then it’d get scary.
Now a rumor floating around is that the fire department is going to announce today at 8PM that there will be no more gas sold to non-emergency ANYWHERE.
We’ll see.
I’ve got enough gas in the Accord to last till Tuesday or Wednesday assuming no driving besides to and from work. And I should have food to last a few weeks, even if I will have to eat the stuff in the “What was I thinking when I bought this?” pile.
-Joe, livin on the edge! Waaargh!
On one side of Briley, here in Nashville, we got gas for $2.79.
On the other, $3.29
THIS IS NUTS!! :mad:
I’ve been trying to wrap my little brain around the logistical nightmare of the insurance companies.
Do they have the money in reserves to rebuild everything they insured?
And what kind of time frame is someone who had 100% coverage on their home looking at before they can get their home replaced?
Say you’re average Joe 9 to 5 working as an accountant in Biloxi. You have full coverage on your $200 home that you have a 20 year mortage on and have been paying for 4 years. Your home is now gone and so is your employer.
Best thing for you would be to relocate and get a job as soon as possible in Atlanta or Birmingham?
Meanwhile you still own the property buried under sewage water and rubish somewhere in Biloxi that has no utilities running to it until who knows when.
So does your homeowners insurance tell you “yeah, we’ll get you a new house, but it has to be built on that same lot. We have no idea when that will take place. Meanwhile your homeless.”
Will insurance companies and banks be buying homes for these people in other states and then take possesion of the exsisting barren property?
One hopes not too many people are domiciled in an Ikea stereo cabinet, but it may yet come to that.
More seriously, regarding insurance companies, I think it’s safe to say that the national firms will pay through the nose but still be standing at the end of the day, but the local and regional firms disappear into bankruptcy.
How bad? Very very very bad.
Looting – It’s The Latest Thing!
Hospitals Getting Very Desperate
Where’s FEMA?
It’s been a while since I’ve taken an econ course, but might taking enough money out of insurance reserves and putting it into circulation cause significant inflation? I suspect raising interest rates would not be in the best interest of those down here desperate for money.
I’m in the camp that says this is bad, bad, bad. I think New Orleans is basically finished. Technically they can rebuild it, but are people from New Orleans going to wait years for that to happen? And at that point, if enough people bail, why rebuild at all, knowing what can happen any time a hurricane ambles along?
I can also see a national gas panic happening. It seems to me that no other mechanism is needed than the knowledge that gas prices will go up tomorrow. So knowing that, people have an incentive to get gas now, which pretty soon leads to scarcity, which causes higher prices, etc. It’s not inevitable, but if people start feeling panicky, it could get ugly pretty quickly.
The other scary thing is that the hurricane season has just started. I imagine another costly storm will start wiping insurers out.
I heard on the Ed Schultz show today the North Dakota Insurance Commissioner speak about the insurance companies’ situation. Basically, the companies are very well funded, to the tune of a trillion dollars. I haven’t seen estimates of damage higher than $25 billion.
So as I understand it, the ruination of the insurance companies is not imminent.
there is major difference between all the other towns and cities that rebuilt after natural and unnatural disasters and new orleans.
none of them have had to be totally evacuated. they were able to rebuild with the population in place.
galveston, seattle, chicago, new york city, peshtigo, the keys, charleston, san francisco, anchorage, and even the areas in miss and ala now (are), were able to have thier people live in tents, trailers, shacks, etc in the town while they rebuilt.
new orleans will have to clean up and rebuild with its population elsewhere. some of them hundreds of miles elsewhere.
I am watching New Orleans local news, broadcasting from Baton Rouge, via a local cable channel here in Dallas. It’s very enlightening.
Just for a taste of the scope of the disaster, the newscast itself is very interesting. They are obviously broadcasting from a temporary facility. They have two anchors reading off of notepads, with items being occasionally handed to them. They are obviously trying to cover a LARGE amount of information, so much so that they often aren’t paying attention to which camera is pointing at them. In fact, they just switched out one of the anchors. They handled it by the guy standing up and walking off the set while his replacement settled in. As he fumbled with his clip-on mike, his co-anchor sort of kidded him, “yes, this is live TV, ha ha!” and on with the newscast they’re going.
They continue to mention how to check in and get hold of loved ones. They show the one “graphic” that they seem to have that has phone numbers to call.
I don’t think so. As confused as this newscast is, there is an underlying assumption, or spirit if you will, that New Orleans will rebuild. They were quite put out by Hastert’s words along these lines.
That’s not to say that NO will be the same. It’ll never be the same. And I’m sure there’ll be a lot of people that don’t move back. But for the most part, the city will rebuild, it will be back.
I don’t think you’ll see a national gas panic. Yesterday here in Edmonton we had lines at gas stations. Today, everything’s already back to normal.
What will happen, in my opinion, is that the lack of refining capacity will drive up the price of gasoline by some amount. How much is unpredictable. Whatever the new equilibrium price is. Once it gets to that price, demand will equal supply and all will be well, albeit more expensive.
Then when the refineries are back on line we may even find that there’s a glut for a while, and prices may go lower than they were last week.
One lesson to be learned from this disaster: EVERYONE should be prepared to look after themselves in the event of a disaster. You can’t rely on the local government or the feds to come to your aid. And when a city is cut off from supply, there are typically only a couple of days worth of food and water available for the population.
Take this as an incentive to put together a disaster preparedness kit appropriate for your region, if you haven’t already. Make sure you have a good supply of water. We use milk in those 4L plastic jugs, so I collected a dozen of them, sterilized them, and filled them with water. Make sure you have a good battery operated radio and a flashlight with spare batteries. Put together enough dry food to last you for a few days. Some nylon line, a hatchet, a small toolkit, etc. Drive your car on the top half of the tank instead of the bottom half, so you always have enough gas to evacuate if you have to.
Here’s a good link for some advice: Dept. of Homeland Security “Ready America” kit
ElvisL1ves wrote:
Damn. And here I was already thinking the song Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? would have a new poignance.
What worries me is the picture I saw of a neighborhood in NO in which the only thing visible was the rooftops of the houses. How many people are dead in those houses or trapped in a stifling hot attic with no food or water waiting in vain for the water to recede or for someone to come and rescue them. I know some people were able to make it on to their roofs, but what about the elderly, the weak, or the just plain non-athletic types for whom climbing out an upper story window and pulling oneself onto a roof in the middle of massive flooding is just about an impossible feat? 
Truer words were never spoken.
Until recently I was laughing at my Dad’s rather expensive plan to have a generator installed at his house. I’m not laughing anymore. And I think maybe Casa RickJay needs to have more bottled water on hand, and dried goods. Just in case.
You probably won’t believe this since it flies in the face of many of the things I’ve been saying in a Pit thread, but let me provide some info that might be usable here:
(The water isn’t pouring through anymore since it has reached an equilibrium. )
If you want to believe a Corps of Engineer Colonel, he says it can be done in 4 - 5 days using, basically, only helicopters to drop big sand bags. I’ll believe it when I see it, but he was pretty clear on the concept suggesting that the Corps had done it several times before.
Actually, there are some huge capacity pumps, and the Army has them, and they’re portable.
Sure, they’re listed as fuel pumps, but I’d guess they’d pump water. (Getting them to where they’d need to be is a logstical problem of another matter.)
(Now here we’re going to get to some math, and I’m sure somebody will correct me if I slip a decimal somewhere, and if any of you engineers get the heebie jeebies around feet and gallons, please feel free to convert this to meters and liters.)
I heard an estimate that 80% of NO was under 20 feet of water. Let’s just say we’re going to drain that part only. (We’ve been allowing in the Pit thread that NO is approx 100 sq miles.) So, 80 square miles times 20 feet deep is:
80 x 5280 x 5280 x 20 = 44,605,440,000 cubic feet of water.
There are 7.48 gallons in a cubic foot, so multiply those two together and you get:
333,648,691,200 gallons of water to draw down.
If we could drain 60,000 gallons per minute with one of those pumps, then it would take 5,560,811 minutes, which equates to:
10.58 years.
(God, I hope I got that right.)
Ten pumps cuts it down to 1 year. 20 pumps = 6 months. Et cetera.
All this supposes a number of things–transportability, power for the pumps (even offering a best case sceneraio in which they string wire along the tops of the levees as they’re being repaired, the fuel vs water capability, and the fact that they all probably won’t be able to run continuously and without interruption for months at a time.
But this still doesn’t take into account one additional, but vitally important consideration: Rain.
It rains a lot down there. That may be a good thing for people dying of dehydration, but it certainly doesn’t help out the situation re: pumping.
But then again, it doesn’t take into account evaporation, either. Whatever.
That’s exactly what they’re planning to do: knock a hole in the levee on the lower side (Mississippi). The Colonel said that higher water from Lake P will drain down to at least the level of the Mississippi. After that, it’s all men to the pumps.
Furthermore, when asked how long it would take he said (and I think this quote is pretty accurate),
“It’ll take about six months to dry out New Orleans.”
If that’s so, then I’d consider it at least equal to water into wine, loaves and fishes, and healing lepers. Hell, that ranks right up there with Red Sea gambit.
Man, the Corps of Engineers kicks ass!
I didn’t think about the fact that, somewhere along the line, NO’s original pumps will come back on line and begin pumping, too.
Mea culpa.
In the other thread I was talking about obvious stuff that the government hasn’t done that baffles me. Here’s one: How about a tax break for ‘approved’ survival kits? Let companies make them and sell them, and if the contents of the kit meet the approved list, purchase of the kit is tax deductable.
This is the kind of simple thing the government could do to mitigate disaster. Stuff like this never seems to happen, though.