Katrina.

Unbelievable, isn't it?

This is one of those once-in-a-century events.

Unfortunately, not in a good way.

last I heard only 50 people were confirmed dead

That's because they can't count the floating, and they don't have time or resources to get housebound bodies into trucks.

It's dreadful. The loss of life of course is terrible.

We've got patients being flown in to Texas Children's hospital (my employer) even as I type this. All of the hospitals in the Texas Medical Center, and probably even all of the Houston area, are on emergency status to receive those who just can't stay there.

I can't even begin to imagine the loss of all that history, not yet. Not only am I still stunned at the loss of life, but.. It's staggering, the architecture, the graveyards, the Mardi Gras floats, all of it... when ol' Mom Earth decides to wash somethin' clean, she does a good job. So... here's hopin' they can salvage something. Something of all that history.

I haven't been to New Orleans. It was never really on my list to be honest. But I've always been proud that it's there, like the Grand Canyon and the Golden Gate Bridge and a thousand other things that I might see but probably not, which define this country I call home. It's mind boggling - painfully - to think it's under a depth of water I'm not comfortable swimming in.

I hope that the world will pull together for this the way we did for the tsunamis and we can somehow rebuild. There's got to be a way to help.

Devastatingly well put. As a newly minted Florida resident, my interest in hurricane stories has grown considerably, and I watched this storm at first with nervousness that it was going to swing back over me, and later with horror as it became clearer and clearer that this was going to happen.

The astonishing thing is that, in the immediate aftermath, it sounded like New Orleans would be OK. And then, one by one, everything that could go horribly wrong with the engineering in the city did. And now it's gone.

Fuck.

My little sister was there. Oh, she evacuated ahead of the rush -- though none of us can reach her now. She was starting a life -- actually putting down roots there, signed up to attend college, and now I suppose it's all gone.

It still isn't real to me -- but when she comes to my wedding in three weeks or so, there will be someone I'm in direct contact with to whom it's very, very real. Perhaps that will change things a bit.

I *rarely* swear, but damn. My prayers are definitely with these folks.

What's ironic is that my company had planned a trip to N'Orleans. And now I'll never get to see it. As it was, at least.

Jesus.

Still, as tragic as it is to lose a city, it's also a great opportunity. When is the last time we rebuilt one of our cities? It would be Atlanta, from the Civil War's decimation.

Now we have the potential to build a city fresh, with the newest technology, and according to a specific plan and purpose. While it's sad to have lost all that history... like a phoenix New Orleans will rise again, with a greater beauty and more majestic bearing.

And hopefully not built under sea level. Why rebuild exactly in the same spot? Let's put it on dry land, okay? :)

*bows head for all those who died*

Scary though. It could have been Boston, or New York, or any other city. The right storm hits... and we lose everything. The history, the sights, the memories... everything.

Take care, gang.

Robert A. Howard, Tangents Webcomic Reviews
http://www.tangents.us

Rats, must remember to preview!

I'm put in mind of Caroline, or Change: "Ain't nuthin ever happened underground in Lousiana
'Cuz there ain't no underground in Lousiana
There is only underwater"
This is a city that is almost completely below sea level even when it was dry; it's existed only by the grace of technology and luck. Not to belittle this tragedy, but it was really just a matter of time. Doesn't matter how good your technology is, Mother Nature always gets her way eventually. And I'm not sure if anyone's really noticed, but she's been pretty pissed off lately. We'll have more huge natural disasters in the next few years, and no mistake.

They've practically always known this would happen one day.
Those dikes, embankments, pumps and the rest of the kaboodle needed to keep something that lies below the water table dry do not come cheap, nor are they indestructible. In the end, nature always wins.

This is a given for a cloggie like me, we've grown up with it, we intellectually *know* that if the midden hits the windmill it could happen.
On a small scale it regularly does, over here. In 1953 it did big time.

In the end, you sit it out, repair the dikes, pump the wet stuff out, and rebuild, including bigger, better, and meaner dikes.
It might be that they'll do this with New Orleans, it might be that a new city will arise close by, there's a bit more ..room.. in the US than here in the Netherlands.

But, dude, if Murphy makes a point he sure as hell doesn't beat around the bush...

Zaq: Surely it's a condemnation of the news you have available that the only place you found out about it was Websnark?

Could we not catatostrophe dicksize?

I'm not going to engage in a debate about which city got hit worse, but I am going to point out that a lot more people are likely to have visited New Orleans than Biloxi. It in no way trivializes the other cities affected by Katrina to memorialize a specific one, any more so than attending the funeral of someone I know trivializes a stranger's death.

A city I love is underwater.

A city I visited for 7 days once, and loved every moment, even the ones involving coughing up phlegm and taking massive doses of NyQuil and wishing I had better shoes and it wasn't 95 degrees out. A city with a church I consider one of the most beautiful in the world. One where I had iced café au lait while sitting in the shade, listening to the street musicians, and watching the horse-carts take tourists to see the little kernel of American history it contains, laughing at the way the powdered sugar coated everything on the table, including Wednesday's arm. A city I loved even before I visited it, for the things I knew about it, and that less than two days in made me wish I could get a second home there so I'd have a place I could always go when I got the urge.

I was going to go back. I was going to go drink coffee and watch the riverboats and visit the cemeteries I missed the first time around and see the inside of the Cathedral and have another drink at Port of Call and buy myself a slurpee-sized daiquiri and sit outside the pink hotel and watch the streetcars go by. I was going to take my fiancee there, because he's never been and because I think he would have loved it. We were going to have dinner on a riverboat. I could have taken him to see Marie Laveau's purported tomb so he could see the Xs and the gifts for himself.

And now I probably will get to do none of these things.

I'm sorry for the other people who have lost their homes and their livelihoods, and those who had to run in fear and wonder if they'd have anything to come home to, regardless of where 'home' was for them. But of all the places that were affected, only one of them holds my heart, now adrift.

I wouldn't worry. New Orleans might be shut down for about a year or so, but then the city'll be repaired and reopened.

'course, the police commissioner's wife will be killed by the Joker somewhere in the interim, but such is life.

Eric's right. New Orleans is the place the water is draining to. The levees need fixing now just to stop the further erosion of the lumpy bits (buildings to you and I) by the tides. The heavily polluted water will then stagnate and continue to dissolve brick and plaster. The pumping out will take weeks at which point initial assessments of which buildings can be saved will be made. Expect to lose a lot.

It's all very surreal right now. Virtual Tours exist on the Internet for buildings for which Actual Tours may never be an option again. Mapquest's ads still blithely tout offers for hotels and real estate in New Orleans. Blog entries less than a week ago record intentions and plans and...

Gah.

I'm a bit ashamed to admit this, but at my desk this morning I graduated up from my squishy stress foam to my official Narbonic stuffed gerbil when I realized that I didn't want to smush anything, I just needed some shred of security. And it helped.

I'm such a wuss.

It will be rebuilt.

I don't say that as an optimist or a romantic, I say it for the simple reason that it's a location that needs a city. It's a port, the gateway to the Mississippi/Missouri basin from the Carribean. You need SOMETHING there, between the river and the sea, to transfer cargo. The ocean-going boats can't make it upriver very far, and the river-going boats can't survive a rough sea. So you need a port.

Will it be rebuilt as anything approximating the old city? No way to say at this point. I expect the optimists and romantics will have a big hand in shaping the rebuilding, and will try to make sure as much as possible of the old character is retained, but that may not be enough.

They may have to just level everything and start over, depending on how long it takes to repair the levees and drain the bowl. In which case, the character of the new New Orleans will depend largely on who's footing the bill.

I feel deep sorrow for the loss of an entire city, a community of communities. I heard on the radio that people could now conceivably spend entire careers rebuilding NOLA. That's mind-blowing.




re: blame. Pointing the finger is pointless right now, but people are angry. However, deep sorrow and anger is no time to turn off our critical faculties. In fact, it is precisely when we most need to maintain a cool head.

One of our cities is gone. Many others surrounding it have been devastated. There's no one to blame, except maybe God. No enemy to shake our fist at. There is just the water, steadily rising.

With all due respect, God isn't the one who built an entire urban community below sea level with a river on one side and an entire gulf of water on the water.




With further due respect, blaming the President for absconding with monies "earmarked" for flood prevention disregards the fact that the city has been flirting with disaster for its entire duration. We can't pin this on him with any degree of intellectual rigor.




Instead of blame, we should be focusing on giving blood, money, time, and prayer (if you are so inclined) to the effort. This was a slow motion disaster and it has affected much more than just NOLA. It is our own tsunami, and we need to rise up again and help our people however we can.

Respectfully submitted, etc.

To add to the list of decimated cities -Galveston, TX was practically wiped off the face of the earth in 1900 by a hurricane. At the time, it was proporationally about as large in the US of 1900 as New Orleans is today.



And since the US government spends more money than it takes in, it is just as accurate to say that the levee money was instead spent on buying prescription drugs for old folks. Or on school lunch funding. Or for on cancer research. It's a completely arbitrary assignment. In any case, can we wait until the dead bodies aren't still floating in the water before we try to politicize this?

Aye, Matt. Growing up in Houston, knowing about the 1900 hurricane, and Carla, the second hurricane to hit the city of nearly the same intensity, is just a part of life. Of course, living in Houston, hurricanes are just a part of life, as well... or they were, until this storm. Here in Houston, we get smacked by a hurricane every few years, sometimes more than once, but a hard-hitting one is rare, thankfully... but obviously, not rare enough for the folks in Louisiana and her neighbor states to the east.

The odd thing is that the only Katrina I've ever known is my step-daughter, who is currently in her early 20's and absolutely the sweetest, least violent gal around. She's a seriously hawt model, too... but we won't go into that here. The joke around here before the storm hit was "Katerina's coming (that's how she spells her name), and boy she means business!"... and then, this. this.... madness. That girl doesn't have that much temper in her whole willowy little frame.

Tangent -- a nuclear weapon wouldn't work against a hurricane. There are lots of reasons why, and of course putting nuclear fallout into the epicenter of a cyclone effect hundreds of miles across is an ecological disaster of unparalleled dimensions, but the most cogent reasons are twofold:

1. A typical hurricane puts out as much power as a multi-megaton nuclear explosion every twenty minutes. We don't have a device nearly powerful enough to make significant changes.

2. Even if we can apply massive amounts of energy to the hurricane, the structure of the hurricane is based on differences of air pressure. Immediately after a superbomb were set off, we'd need to have some means of teleporting hundreds of tons of air into the eye in order to dismantle the hurricane.

For more detailed explanations, check out Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them? on the NOAA's FAQ about hurricanes.

(Who's the bigger geek -- you for mentioning using nuclear weapons on hurricanes, or me for knowing the reasons not to and where to get substantiating information?)

I remember living in South Florida for four years growing up. Specifically, an area that was below sea level and right next to the Everglades. This was always a fear anyone with a sense of realism has when you live in such an area. I feel terrible that it did happen for these people.

Also, Katrina ended up doing incredible damage to areas that aren't really "coastal" (which I believe is within 20 miles of the ocean). I believe it was still a category 1 hurricane when it hit northern Mississippi. Category 1 hurricanes aren't much if you build a city to withstand them, but I truly doubt a city that far north was built to hold up. The numbers are going to get horrifyingly high.

Personally, I hope they build a new city further up, where they won't be depending on dams and pumps to keep it from flooding. As it was pointed out before, this kind of tragedy was more of an inevitability than anything else.

A point or two.

I'm a meteorologist (yes, I'll get my AMS card whenever I can scrounge up the $60 dues they require). I am surprised they didn't do more to try to force people out from New Orleans. There was nothing between Key West and New Orleans than a very hot Gulf of Mexico (water temps were in the 90s). Any weatherperson worth his salt would have told you this was going to be a very severe hurricane. I don't understand it.

Eric, there are a lot of national weather service guys that want to belt the idiot(s) that asked the question why we couldn't nuke a hurricane to prevent it from happening. (If anything the additional energy would have intensified the storm. Storms run on thermodyanmics and fluid dynamics, which have a lot to do with energy.)

I do believe global warming is a factor, but to what degree is part of a heated and too often political debate hiding behind scientific studies. Keep this in mind about future long-term weather predictions: it's chiefly based on models which have a bases upon 40 years of certifiable data and hundreds or thousands of years of guessing of what happened before 1960. Yes, we've kept weather data since the 1700's, but the data has been considered scientifically accurate since 1960. And there will always be times when the models are wrong for daily weather predictions, so who's the say that long-term forecast for average temps in 2020 are going to be good? (There are lies, damn lies, and then statistics. And there's weather data & predictions.)

I'm still in shock that the American media hasn't folded completely up into another self-contained ball over this. (There's an order of magnitude between this and the last major piece of destruction to an American city.) At the back of my mind, I suspect it's that the wrong people are dying in the wrong kinds of numbers.

32 -- I agree, except there's another issue as well. New Orleans was the seaport that bridged the Gulf with the Mississippi River. Some kind of seaport is needed in that vicinity.

I think we'd be better served by giant concrete platforms to above sea level in the delta, however, with infrastructure connecting it to a city nearby but off the coast and above sea level naturally.

But we'll see what happens. It's possible they'll do a minimal Port Orleans, maintain some historical presence in the current city limits, but rebuild significantly up along the way.

Matt: As I understand it, it's the most likely (By a considerable margin) scenario. I think it depends largely on how quickly they can get the levees plugged and how quickly they can the pumps operating. Even at full capacity, it will take over two weeks to completely drain the bowl.

I don't know enough to comment on how big a factor tidal forces will be on the city, even if they plug the levees it could still cause some damage, I don't know. Flood damage is chancy at best when there's only two or three feet of water in a building... completely submerging it can do a lot of damage very quickly. As a rule of thumb, stone and brick buildings should be better off than all wood construction, which would definitely be better off than more modern buildings that are mainly drywall over a wooden frame, but really, all bets are off.

Admittedly, a port is needed. But as you mention, Eric, having the bulk of the residents live futher up while the port facilities are at the river mouth makes more sense, given the geography of the area (at least according to the map in today's Boston Globe, which showed a frightening amount of Louisiana's coastal areas as being below sea level).

Also, maybe someone with a background in structural engineering can answer this one - is it possible to build a foundation for the city such that it won't settle below sea level? I know that wasn't something deemed necessary back when the French first built the city, but it's an obvious need now.

But we'll see what happens. It's possible they'll do a minimal Port Orleans, maintain some historical presence in the current city limits, but rebuild significantly up along the way.

This is essentially what happened after the Galveston storm-with the already constructed Houston shipping canal, all of the shipping moved to the relatively safer location of Houston.

Yeah, cause N.O. really needed this,

"Officials said a 3-foot (0.9-metre) shark had been spotted cruising the flooded streets."

Of course, the shark won't last long considering the water is toxic with chemicals, including oil and gas.

Above quote from this Reuters article.

And for those that don't read boingboing, an interesting photo. The rainbow effect you see in the water is from gas and oil.

And from that boingboing post,

"The water poses major health threats. Anyone with even a small open cut is prone to infection. Anyone who touches this water and touches his eyes, nose or mouth without find a way to "clean" himself first will be sick with stomach problems before long."

Weds, as much as the media annoys me, this is a different situation than last time. Please don't compare the two.

It's too late. I can't stop thinking about it. I want to know why the destruction of an entire American city, and more besides, does not somehow merit the same level of media reverence, saturation and concern.

Wednesday wrote:

I can't stop thinking about it. I want to know why the destruction of an entire American city, and more besides, does not somehow merit the same level of media reverence, saturation and concern [as the 9/11 bombings].

I see a couple of differences that could account for it. First of all - as I recall commenting here, or somewhere, in the wake of the tsunami - I suspect we're all as a culture, U.S.ians that is, a bit numbed in the wake of not just the attacks but the political furor in reaction to them. We've had enough of disasters, we've hit a tolerance point. Second, despite the disparity in lives lost, this disaster was slow in the coming and slow in the event - it boiled the frog instead of burning it.

(I'm not after justifying anything, just thinking out loud.)

From Wednesday:
It's too late. I can't stop thinking about it. I want to know why the destruction of an entire American city, and more besides, does not somehow merit the same level of media reverence, saturation and concern.

A thought:

To paraphrase Buffy, people committed 9/11. People with souls got on planes, hijacked them, and flew them into buildings, killing several thousand people. People did it.

Mother nature committed this disaster. There is no one to blame, except perhaps the deity of your choice. No person is to blame, not the terrorists, not Bush, not the liberal media, not red staters or blue staters.

Getting angry at natural disasters is about as useful as spitting into the rain. We cry, shout, depress, and to try accept it eventually. We bury the dead and try to rebuild. I think most people are wired that way. It's pro-survival.

But anger at people who are diametricallly opposed to your government, who massacred innocents by the thousand in one blow? That's a heat that will last a long, long time.

Let me give you an example: Most US people will remember WWI. Not well, but they will remember it. You can have a discussion with folks about it to some degree, because they were taught about it and remember it, somewhat.

A hell of a lot of GI's came home from WWI infected with Influenza. They infected their home towns all over the States. More Americans died from Influenza than died in combat from WWI. In fact, over 40 million people died worldwide from the Flu Pandemic of 1918.

Ask most of those Americans who remember WWI about the Flu Pandemic, and I'd guess 15 out of 20 wouldn't know about it. I think that the reasons why are the same as todays disparity.

But we are getting wall to wall coverage of this in the States, so it isn't being ignored. As to it's reverence, by definition that takes time after the tragedy.

My heart aches for all of you with friends and family in the area. May you find them safe and sound. Pax.

Reave--Your post makes me wish we had policies that prevented people abusing the writers here, because your response seems to me to be over the top and insulting.

Also, the part about fucking asthma doesn't actually make any sense to me at all.

And she's not worried about the "lack of media heartbleeding," she is making a perceptive and largely correct comment about saturation effects in the American media.

That said, it makes a certain amount of perverse sense to me, Weds. The saturation around 9/11 was, of course, political, but it was also a response to the fact that Americans just plain didn't know how to respond. It felt new, it felt crazy, it felt different. (Honestly, it felt like the part in the sci-fi movie where aliens blow up the White House and it's all pretty with the explosions--just one take on the unreality of it all.) New Orleans is awful, devastating, and tragic, but we understand hurricanes. They're something we contend with on a regular basis. We tend to want to watch the news until we understand what's going on--for many people after 9/11 that might've meant a long, long time of watching and trying to make sense. The scenery of this hurricane feels more like "the same, only MORE," when compared to the yearly inundation of hurricane news.
Also, the vague relationship of 9/11 to security/war/national whatever vaulted it up there in terms of analysis and consequences and a hundred other things that occupied TV time. Whereas we aren't going to declare war on the weather (I bloody well hope).
And finally, somebody planned 9/11 and carried out on purpose, set a human will (several, actually) to accomplishing that destruction. The same cannot be said of the hurricane (barring acts of evil weather-manipulating Bond villains in underground lairs). That, also, made 9/11 feel aberrant and intriguing.

I don't want to sound like I'm not taking this seriously. Please believe that I believe it deserves the fold-in-on-itself treatment America tends to offer at these times, as long as we're going to be having that media tradition. Also, as far as I know, the media coverage really does inspire a lot of donations of blood and money and such, so in that sense, coverage=good. I just had some thoughts, not necessarily answers, when I read your question and thought I would share them.

Weds, I see at least three things behind the media coverage issue.

1) As siwangmu mentioned, we know hurricanes. Before 9/11 most people had no idea about the situation that brought about 9/11, the US had to have a crash course in international relations and history.

2) Katrina is not something that can be politicised easily. Hence there is not a major push for post 9/11 style coverage. 9/11 was an action that could be used to push forward political agendas, the longer it was in the news, the more those agendas could be pushed.

3) I doubt we'll ever see coverage like the post 9/11 coverage again. That was to much and there was a backlash against the media over it. The chance of them ever do that much coverage again, is slim.

To be fair to those who stayed, a LOT of them were too poor or too infirm to travel far. One of the consequences of a fairly densely packed city and decent mass transit is that many people have no need to own a car...and while mass transit is good for moving people around a city, it's less able to get people out in a hurry, if it can accomplish the feat at all. Sure, people caught rides with friends or helpful strangers, but that still left thousand without the means to flee.

As for the looters, there's an interesting spectrum there. In one case, cops helped looters get food out of a Walgreen's to take to a shelter, then let the looters take whatever ele they wanted. In another case, a band of armed looters was just stealing electronics, jewelry, etc. Some people are just trying to survive, others are fucknozzles. It happens.

Oh, and Mexico City was built in the middle of a lake, which was eventually drained (mostly) and built over. It's kinda slowsand, if you will. And it shakes like jello whenever there's a quake.

[quote=Eric Burns]Actually, swearing is perfectly legal. Fuck-fuckity-fuck-fuck-fuck.[/quote]

Swearing is one thing, but Reave was goin' off a bit on Weds there. I was just tryin' to calm y'all down a bit.

One love. Group hug. An' all that.

For various tags of all sorts - use HTML tags, not phpBB tags. One of the drawbacks to the prevalence of phpBB boards is that everyone seems to have forgotten how to properly write regular tags.

Also, FYI, I think the proper tag is the "blockquote" tag (replace quotes with arrow parens).

Don't forget Hazel.

I'm thankful for the people who took my question in the spirit it was intended. Please understand that I'm not an American, and I've lived outside of North America for long enough that there are some things I really can't wrap my head around. (For example, I honestly didn't realize that there had been a perception of excess in the 11/9 coverage over there. From outside, it looked rather different.) I asked because I really wanted to know; this isn't some absurd cry for sensitivity, it's a sense of inconsistency, logical disconnect and shock. The near-complete destruction of a city is *also* something previously unknown to America, particularly one which plays such a significant role in distributing one of the lynchpins of its economy.

It's difficult for me to understand how this issue can be viewed entirely in terms of natural disaster, too. Most of those reasons have been addressed above. The more I look at this, the more I think, "there's a *huge* tangle of causes and consequences here, many of which are getting *glossed over*. And now is not the time to be doing that, particularly when the resources are there to do otherwise."

My intention is not to minimize the impact of terrorist activity on any population.

Not completely unknown to the United States. The British sacked Washington DC during the War of 1812. Sherman torched Atlanta during the American Civil War. San fansisco was rent by earthquakes in 1902. The Great Chicago Fire wiped out large swaths of that city. American cities have been destroyed on a large scale before. It just hasn't happened in our lifetimes, which is what shocks so many.

TV has a severe disadvantage compaired to the internet in that it has to continuously rebroadcast the most basic facts about what you are seeing so that people who are just tuning in know what is going on.

Oh, yes. That's the other thing I don't like about continuous TV news broadcasts, but failed to mention.

People who think you can't politicize Katrina might want to take a look over at Making Light at some of the commentary there.

I think, too, that Wednesday made a good point. It's very bizarre this isn't having the same sort of communal universal reaction as Certain Other Incidents.

It shouldn't matter how the destruction happened. The point is, this scale of destruction should get our attention regardless of the reason, and yet somehow this time it's not to that level, it seems.

I am in as much shock over this as I was over planes crashing into the WTC. The biggest differences for me are that a) I knew more people in NY that I had to worry about and b) I've never been to NY and I don't have any attachment to it, so the type of shock is basically reversed. That doesn't erase it for me, though.

I am not going to tell other people how they should feel, mind you. I'm just saying, I don't get why this doesn't strike people the way That Other Thing did.

Speaking of things I Don't Get, I don't get Reave's post at all. But I'm not going to try to dissect why. It just seemed like misplaced vehemence to me.

here's the point about Racism I was making earlier:

TWO PHOTOS:

http://news.yahoo.com/photo/050830/photos_ts_afp/05083007181 0_shxwaoma_photo1">IMAGE 1

IMAGE">IMAGE">http://news.yahoo.com/photo/050830/480/ladm10208301530">IMAGE 2

WHITE COUPLE ... caption reads that the couple "Found bread at a local grocery store."

BLACK PERSON... caption reads "looting" grocery store.

"FINDING" and "LOOTING" have two different connotations.

And since the US government spends more money than it takes in, it is just as accurate to say that the levee money was instead spent on buying prescription drugs for old folks. Or on school lunch funding. Or for on cancer research. It's a completely arbitrary assignment. In any case, can we wait until the dead bodies aren't still floating in the water before we try to politicize this?

This is almost so completely wrong as to defy belief. For two years, the citizens and government of New Orleans and Louisiana have been asking where the money that had been budgeted to repair and upgrade the levee system had vanished to. "Iraq" is the answer they got from the federal government. There is no mystery about this; there is no debate — this is, and has been, a plain and straightforward part of the public record (another straightforward part of the public record: the point of failure of the 17th Street Canal levee was one of the repair projects whose funding was pulled by Washington). There's nothing arbitrary about the budgetary calculations involved.

As for politicizing it, how can this possibly not be politicized? There's a straightforward issue here of how the government prioritizes the funding of projects from tax money — outside of "who are we going to drop bombs on?" there is no more political issue than that (and, hey — this issue includes the "bomb" question, too, anyway). That's the functional definition of politics.

A couple more comments.

32: Sure, you can prepare in the likelihood that you can't possibly leave or you don't think it would be worth it to leave all because a hurricane is merely a catagory 1. My beef isn't that someone is poo-pooing a hurricane. My beef is that people are more willing to remain where they are than to seek certifiable safety because it's going out into the unknown or they think they know how this is going to play out. The biggest danger with hurricanes aren't the winds, it's the water. Storm surges, flooding. Flooding is considered the biggest weather-related cause of death in the United States. More people are killed through the effects of flooding than anything other kind of weather phonemena. To put it this way: winds are overrated; rising water is underrated. That's the only danger that catagory one hurricanes have, quite frankly!

My experience has been when people say that they didn't a storm was going to be this bad or even make the statement, "I've seen many hurricanes and storms in my lifetime, and they've never got me to leave my home before, and I'm not starting now." they are usually the ones who aren't fully prepared to withstand the storm they didn't think would get really bad, but is. If you know what you're up against, and reckonize that Mother Nature might still surprise you, then I can understand. There was this book I read published in 1985 recounting the events after the Mount St. Helens eruption in 1980. One of the central figures was this old man who lived on the border to where they think the immediate eruption impact would be for that volcano and a possible safer zone. When asked to evacuate his log cabin, his response was essentially that he'd lived there all his life and there was nothing that would convince him to leave everything he had behind for his own personal safety. He valued the familiarity and comfort of his own present circumstances instead of his own life, even if it meant living for only a few more years before a natural death and even if it meant trying to venturing into a new period of uncertainity.

The latest I've heard from pontificators and speculators is that rebuilding New Orleans will take years if not a decade. Conservatively at least three to five years. I think I heard the head FEMA director say something like he thinks that up to half of all of the buildings, especially the older ones, will have to be demolished because of all the damage, particularly the water damage. At the very least, people will not be allowed to come back in for weeks, if not months, possibly up to a year or two. No Mardi Gras in New Orleans next year? [sarcasm]Will the Girls Gone Wild company be able to handle this?[/sarcasm]

Just to be nit-picky, I'd like to point out that New Orleans has not fallen into the Gulf of Mexico. It has "fallen into" Lake Pontchartrain. The waters pouring into the city? Are coming from the north.

(And actually they're not pouring in now. We've got equilibrium between the lake and the flood waters now. But I recognize I'm getting to the table a little late, what with the past few days being able to do nothing but watch WWLTV.com's live coverage and mourn.)

The "fallen into the Gulf" meme really needs to be halted. There's still a good few miles of swamp and other stuff, like Plaquemines Parish, in between NOLA and the Gulf.

That is all. Carry on.