This blog contains posts and comments written by students in Dr. Tufte's economics classes at Southern Utah University.
9/08/2005
Where's Our Relief ?
A long awaited disaster that all New Orlean citizens knew would eventually come. After affects of the hurricane show that a country so equipped in technology and military support can hit ground zero and closely relate to a third world country in seconds. People are starving, there is contaminated water, sewer in the streets, looters, rapes, killings, and much more. So where is our relief? It seems to be that after days of no sign of any kind of relief in New Orleans sends signals that we may not have what we need to protect our country. While we have one of the strongest military support systems in the world, it sure seems strange that when a disaster at the scale of Katrina hits that we are a little under supported here where we need it the most. Chaos in a disaster is expected, but the extent of third world chaos is unacceptable and should be prevented. Of course the people of New Orleans are acting the way they are, they are starving. Looting or killing to protect theirselves is the only way to survive. This all seems far off from what it should be when we are supposed to be living in a country where we take care of our citizens. MSN news has many news reports on the disaster and the chaos that is going on in New Orleans. www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9160453/ Lets just hope that this is an eye opener so that we might conscentrate a little more on protecting our own butts here in the US instead of out saving the whole world.
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1 comment:
-3 on Liz's post for spelling errors, a sentence fragment, and a poorly formatted link.
-1 on Bob's comment for spelling errors.
-1 on Logan's comment for multiple spelling errors.
The post and comments are interesting, but I'd like to see more ManEc.
I think the point about all this that has been poorly made in the media is that the scope of this disaster is far larger than anything we've ever dealt with before. Rough estimates are that Katrina's damage is 3 times larger than 9/11, and 15-20 times larger than our second biggest disaster (the 1994 earthquake in Los Angeles). I think most people are just clueless about the scale of this.
Also (as a 9 year resident of New Orleans) my wife makes sure to point out to everyone who'll listen that everyone knew that the levees could be overtopped by surge from a bigger storm (which did not happen), but no one knew that they would catastrophically fail in a smaller storm. Prior to this storm, the ability of the levees to withstand a storm of this size was an educated guess - there was a possibility that they were not strong enough, but a high probability was not placed on that possisbility. And ... we won't know for a long time whether or not this was a fluke.
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