OK now you’re just shitting here.
Start your own goddamned thread.
We’ll just agree to disagree. I do know, though, that when NOAA and my local authorities tell me I’m facing certain death by staying I don’t just sit down and pray.
I hope you keep it updated, Skippy.
By the way, I see you live in Mississippi. How did you fare with this storm? Any damage?
Oh yeah, baby.
There were at least 50 sticks in my front yard.
I agree completely.
Here in the UK, some property developers built cheap housing on a known flood plain. After a few years the river (as it had done before) overflowed and the houses were under several feet of water. Although there was no loss of life, there was considerable damage.
On the news, these homeowners were pictured demanding aid and restitution. I feel depressed that the whole situation arose, and have little sympathy for them.
Does the US need any aid for this? Certainly the international community should rally round to help anyone in need, but this is nothing like the tsunami, for example.
The US tracked the hurricane (as it does regularly), so people had plenty of notice to evacuate.
There is plenty of transport available in the US and well-trained rescue workers with access to modern technology.
An article in a UK newspaper stated that the insurance cost of the hurricane had already been estimated, and share prices in insurance companies had fallen slightly.
Am I to take what you all say as, “They lived there and didn’t leave, therefore they deserved to die and/or lose their home”?
I guess my vitriol scares away any sympathizers.
I didn’t say that. I said they were dumb fucks, with much justification. But hey, everybody does stupid stuff. Staying through a Cat 5 hurricane is not high on that list for me. I’m glad they survived, but that doesn’t make them any less stupid. Calling a spade a spade isn’t against the rules, is it?
Most people aren’t comfortable with leaving their homes when facing weather disasters in the making, especially ones you haven’t seen before, especially when you’re poor.
New Orleans doesn’t face strong hurricanes often. (See: Bottom of page.) The people there are as unprepared to deal with the reality of enduring one as Midwesterners would be of an 100-plus heat waves that cause brownouts, kill the elderly and tax regional electrical services… in August.
It’s as if… (casting for a local example) Atlantaens were suddenly faced with a severe ice storm and we were told to either bunker down in city shelters and schools or evacuate entirely. The storm hits and millions are without heat and power and access to food and medicine. There’s a damn good chance many hundreds of thousands of people here wouldn’t have left because we face winter hazards so infrequently we don’t prepare for disasters on that scale. We don’t even have serious salt truck supplies. The resulting panic would very likely start looting.
To hope for the best when faced with the worst is human, not stupid.
And who fucking ASKED for any fucking aid???
I mentioned it because it came up in the bar. No. We are the RICHEST FUCKING COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. So it’s not the “US”.
It’s the PEOPLE.
People who have lost everything.
Have you no shame?
Or, better phrased, what Askia said.
It’s definitely a plausible explanation, but come on. An analogy: if I pull a gun and start shooting at you, are you going to run for cover or stay and hope that I miss or if I hit you that it won’t hurt too much? Well, Katrina was one of the biggest Goddamned bullets this country has ever seen, and it was aimed right at their foreheads. To me it simply doesn’t make any sense that they didn’t run.
I just jumped over from the Katrina thread:
Not everyone evacuated because they have never experienced anything remotely like this in New Orleans or Slidell.
Once the Levee broke it was largely too late.
Thousands of people were still there taking care of patients at hospitals. There were shut-ins who couldn’t get out on there own and then there were a lot of people in areas that never flooded before, that are now surrounded by 9’ of water. It was very hard to anticipate.
Condemning the victims of the flood would be like saying, “Why would you work in the WTC, they already tried to blow it up”. Don’t complain if your son got shot to death, “what did he expect as a police officer”, etc. This is very wrong headed thinking.
I’ll concede that point. Cities totally destroyed to the point where they’ll be restarted from scratch, entire ways of life destroyed. I’ll admit, when I first heard/read both quotes, I was thinking of the destruction in terms of lives lost, and it really is incomparable in that respect.
I don’t necessarily see people saying that (though I’m sure there’s a certain amount of that with some folks) but rather ‘Hey, don’t live in a place in which you’re not prepared to deal with existing conditions.’
Kind of like that old joke:
A) If you want to live in a disaster-possible region get insurance appropriate to the risk. I live on a floodplain and have flood insurance. It’s bailed me out twice in the last two years.
B) When all the powers that be (government, media, technology) say ‘RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!’ the appropriate thing to do is run for your life. If you don’t and you don’t have a damn fine reason the sympathy level for you is going to be low.
Well, I’m kinda fat, so I’ll probrably curl up in a fetal position and whimper as manly as I could.
Friend, you just answered my question.
What if I shot at you but you were stuck there with your infirmed grandmother and your own six daughters?
You had no car. And now they announce it’s a cat5.
You’re fucked.
My point is, it’s not the poor sap’s fault.
It’s nobody’s fault.
But it happened. And it’s still happening. People are there, and they’re suffering, and it’s not really their fault.
No.
But I would certainly say that anyone who lives in a potential disaster area and refuses to leave when given official warning should have to pay for their rescue.
Well based on your original post you got some very unpleasant and hurtful remarks, and were quite right to complain about those.
However you do seem to let your emotions carry you away (as when you demanded to know why people weren’t being rescued from roofs, when the point was that these people were taking up valuable time and resources needlessly.
Of course we should all feel sad at loss of life and property, wherever it happens.
However I do agree that comparing this tragedy to Hiroshima or the tsunami was a ridiculous exaggeration, made for political gain.
I also think that the US has recently given a poor impression of itself to the rest of the world. Invading Iraq, refusing to help over the Kyoto treaty, appointing a hostile US ambassador, refusing to sign up to international tribunals covering human rights and war crimes etc.
Of course this does not mean we should not help the US if asked. But it does leave a strong impression of an Administration that cares nothing for the opinions of any other country.
Given.
They were stuck there, in many cases, for no fault of their own. And I didn’t demand SHIT.
Who the FUCK said that?
I said, in the other thread, that a certain video LOOKED like the aftermath of the tsunami. NOBODY EVER SAID it was as bad as the “tsunami”.
Yeah I bet you think that, but it really has nothing to do with this, and I think you are allowing your hatred to cloud your vision of any thing humanitarian.
But you explain why your ‘just walk out’ idea doesn’t work. Katrina was 100s of miles across and moving at a better speed than walking could ever get you out of the path.
So, the idea that they should have just walked out is now out.
Suppose that you had a large family and one of them couldn’t make the trip for some reason. (elderly) It would be easy to imagine that a family would try to stay together. Or maybe your afraid that if you left, looters would take everything you own.
There were people that tried to leave when the evac order came and they couldn’t the traffic was completly backed up. Being in NO during a hurricane is a bad idea but being in a car just north of the city stuck in traffic is worse.
(why did I see the traffic backed up on the north bound lanes but nothing on the southbound? Why didn’t they use both sides of the interstate?