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Aug. 31st, 2005 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatIt's annoying you know, I sit all day at work, come up with these long pithy posts and great verbage for my novel - get home? Gone and all I want to do is veg. Watched the news tonight, for a change of pace - usually skip it since depressing, but wanted to know about Katrina.
Then picked up the phone and called my mother who is an information junkie. Also lives just off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Katerina apparently was a category 4, possibly 5 hurricane when it rolled over the coast of Missippi and leveled every town in sight. Then blasted New Orleans with a storm surge strong enough to weaken its levees and flood the entire city. It wasn't the storm itself that hurt New Orleans, it was the effect the storm had on the levees, causing the lake to flood into the city, which is below sea level. People who had evacuated this weekend and came back to check their homes on Tuesday, discovering them to be fine and dandy, were in for a shock on Wed, when the levees broke. The deluge did not stop until the lake and the city had the same amount of water. So technically speaking? New Orleans is now a lake.
They are evacuating the entire city of New Orleans. Okay. Let's put this in perspective here - there are at least 1.2 million people in New Orleans, and New Orleans is major US domestic and international port. This would be similar to evacuating San Franscisco or Sydney, Australia or Melborn or Liverpool. Do you have any idea what the economic ramnifications of this disaster are? The international and domestic trade ramnifications? Boggles the mind. Let alone the death toll - they predict over 1,000 in New Orleans alone, this isn't counting the number in Missippi. Plus the number of people without homes or anything to return to. Close to a million people in the US just became homeless. Oh and jobless. That's just New Orleans, we aren't counting Bilouxi and the other small towns that dotted the Gulf where the hurrican hit. Add to that the four oil refineries that have been knocked out - oil refineries piping gas to major urban areas such as Atlanta? How about the international trade routes depending on the grain shipped up from New Orleans via the Missippi River?
What about the cities along that route depending on those barges and traffic? This is the worste natural disaster in US history - because we've had a major urban center destroyed. No wait it was more than that, it was a major US port of trade. One of the big three. Even bigger than Miami. No matter where you live, you will feel the ramnifications of this baby. New Orleans as we knew it, is gone. And as Mom put it, hurricane season ain't even over yet. Not only that but they are predicting even worse hurricanes to come barreling through in the next decade.
I'm donating a portion of my paycheck each week to the Red Cross, that's about all I can do at the moment. Wish I could do more. It's not just a tragedy though, it's a national crisis. A tragedy - you grieve. A crisis - you have to figure out a way to solve. Over a million displaced refugees....ugga bugga. Sort of puts things in perspective, don't it?
Then picked up the phone and called my mother who is an information junkie. Also lives just off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Katerina apparently was a category 4, possibly 5 hurricane when it rolled over the coast of Missippi and leveled every town in sight. Then blasted New Orleans with a storm surge strong enough to weaken its levees and flood the entire city. It wasn't the storm itself that hurt New Orleans, it was the effect the storm had on the levees, causing the lake to flood into the city, which is below sea level. People who had evacuated this weekend and came back to check their homes on Tuesday, discovering them to be fine and dandy, were in for a shock on Wed, when the levees broke. The deluge did not stop until the lake and the city had the same amount of water. So technically speaking? New Orleans is now a lake.
They are evacuating the entire city of New Orleans. Okay. Let's put this in perspective here - there are at least 1.2 million people in New Orleans, and New Orleans is major US domestic and international port. This would be similar to evacuating San Franscisco or Sydney, Australia or Melborn or Liverpool. Do you have any idea what the economic ramnifications of this disaster are? The international and domestic trade ramnifications? Boggles the mind. Let alone the death toll - they predict over 1,000 in New Orleans alone, this isn't counting the number in Missippi. Plus the number of people without homes or anything to return to. Close to a million people in the US just became homeless. Oh and jobless. That's just New Orleans, we aren't counting Bilouxi and the other small towns that dotted the Gulf where the hurrican hit. Add to that the four oil refineries that have been knocked out - oil refineries piping gas to major urban areas such as Atlanta? How about the international trade routes depending on the grain shipped up from New Orleans via the Missippi River?
What about the cities along that route depending on those barges and traffic? This is the worste natural disaster in US history - because we've had a major urban center destroyed. No wait it was more than that, it was a major US port of trade. One of the big three. Even bigger than Miami. No matter where you live, you will feel the ramnifications of this baby. New Orleans as we knew it, is gone. And as Mom put it, hurricane season ain't even over yet. Not only that but they are predicting even worse hurricanes to come barreling through in the next decade.
I'm donating a portion of my paycheck each week to the Red Cross, that's about all I can do at the moment. Wish I could do more. It's not just a tragedy though, it's a national crisis. A tragedy - you grieve. A crisis - you have to figure out a way to solve. Over a million displaced refugees....ugga bugga. Sort of puts things in perspective, don't it?
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Date: 2005-09-01 04:26 pm (UTC)