Rescue crews wait for Ike to pass to find victims

[pmrlcomm]

<p>[Rescue</a> crews wait for Ike to pass to find victims - Yahoo! News](<a href=“http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080913/ap_on_re_us/ike]Rescue”>http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080913/ap_on_re_us/ike)</p>

<p>Sorry. You chose not to leave. Sink or swim. Why do we continue to bail people out when they refuse to do the right thing? There was a mandatory evacuation… Why should any responder have to risk their life to save someone? Call it thinning of the herd.</p>

[pmrlcomm]

<p>Hate it when this happens…</p>

[Northstarmom]

<p>I think next time a mandatory evacuation is called anywhere, as part of the announcement, officials should say that there will be a fee assessed to each person who chooses not to evacuate, but later has to be rescued. The fee should be substantial. Money talks…</p>

[Youdon_tsay]

<p>I agree with NSM. Some kind of fee should be assessed.</p>

<p>And we should stop insuring beach houses. I’m tired of higher premiums because people want a place on the shore.</p>

[jym626]

<p>They interviewed some young couple in a rowboat being evacuated on the Today show this morning. The guy said that when he called for help he was told to grab an ice chest or soemthing else that floats, go as high up as he could, and put an identification tag on his leg in case he didnt survive. He said he was mad. the interviewer asked if he was mad at himeself or the resuce people. He said “both”. Personally, while maybe the rescue folks were too blunt, they were right and he was wrong. He has no right to be mad at them.</p>

<p>I am saddened to see how hard hit a lot of Louisiana was, like Baton Rouge, who hadn’t recovered from Gustav yet. But they are not getting the press that Galveston and other areas of Texas are. Maybe the flooding doesnt look as devastating so doesn’t play as well for the media. Sad.</p>

[marite]

<p>How many people who stayed put in Gavelston were able-bodied? Was there adequate plans for welcoming them in other areas? I read that during Katrina, some who stayed were elderly.</p>

[corranged]

<p>I was wondering that too, Marite. Did the old, sick, and disabled have ways to leave, and did they have other places to go?</p>

[Northstarmom]

<p>Yes, there were ways of evacuating the old, sick, and disabled. I saw pre hurricane pictures of them being evacuated.</p>

<p>I also think there should be very, very high insurance rates for people who choose to have homes by water that’s likely to become damaging if there’s a hurricane. No reason for others to have to subsidize such people’s choices.</p>

[razorsharp]

<p>

And we should stop insuring beach houses. I’m tired of higher premiums because people want a place on the shore.

</p>

<p>All of New Orleans is essentially a beach house (13 feet below sea level) yet the US taxpayers (not just insurance companies) had to rebuilt the city where it was instead of moving it back to safer location using better building restrictions. Just one more expense passed on to future generations.</p>

[marite]

<p>There is an article in today’s NYT discussing exactly this issue regarding NOLA.
A missed opportunity, to be sure.</p>

[jym626]

<p>Here is an interesting description of the reason New Orleans was built in its location at the mouth of the Mississippi

Situation and Site
Pierce Lewis, perhaps its most knowledgeable scholar, describes New Orleans as the “inevitable city on an impossible site.” His reasons for saying so were as obvious to early explorers as to modern geographers and geologists. A glance at the map of North America reveals that the continent’s interior is drained by a single river system–the Mississippi. From the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Rockies to the Appalachians, the Mississippi with its vast network of tributaries, particularly the Ohio and Missouri Rivers, provides a natural waterway system for moving people and goods across the midcontinent of North America and down the Mississippi to its outlet on the Gulf.</p>

<p>Another glance at the North American map reveals that there should be a city at the mouth of so splendid a transportation system. Any city so strategically situated could control the trade between the vast interior of North America and the rest of the world; and a city in so strange a situation might even determine the political future of North America. These facts were as obvious to seventeenth century French explorers as they were to Thomas Jefferson, who said of New Orleans: “There is one spot on the globe, the possessor of which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New Orleans.”</p>

<p>The French had established themselves in the norther part of North America (Canada) in the mid-seventeenth century by securing control of the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes. Paris sought to limit the English to the eastern coast of the continent by claiming the Mississippi and its tributaries, thereby gaining control of the interior of North America. The key to securing the Mississippi was to control access to its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico, but the French explorers discovered there was a problem. From the mouth of the Mississippi to a point about 200 miles upstream (Baton Rouge), there was no ground high enough to provide a natural site for a city. While the great river demanded a splendid port city, it seemed to provide no place for one.
The Problem
The problem of finding a site for the “inevitable city” has to do with the nature of the lower Mississippi itself. The Mississippi is unusual for North American rivers in that it has a large delta and is not embayed, i.e., the sea does not enter and flood the river’s mouth. Rivers that are embayed provide natural sites for cities. London, New York, Hamburg, Quebec City are all located at a narrow inland neck of an estuary, the first site where ships could go no further and where land traffic could cross the river.</p>

<p>The Mississippi, however, lacks any such well defined head of navigation before Minneapolis; and south of Cairo, Illinois, the Mississippi is almost uniformly wide, with no one spot easier to cross than any other. Moreover, the river is most shallow and treacherous at the sandbars crossing its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. Where the river meets the gulf is nothing but marsh and watery muck, a desolate scene that extends so far out into the gulf, it created more difficulties for both seagoing and coastal vessels. With no distinguishing features except mud banks and salt marsh tufts, the river’s several mouths and labyrinth of bayous made the three true entrances difficult to find. Moreover, with no way to enter, save through one of the mouths, an with no way to cross the river upstream, coastal ships had to leave the sheltered coastal waterways and enter the Gulf to round the delta.</p>

<p>Early mariners were forced, then, to ask three basic questions as to where their vessels could go and where a city could be located. The basic questions were: Was there a way for deep-water vessels to reach the river other than by entering its mouth far out in the Gulf? Was there a sheltered way through the delta for coastal vessels to avoid the open waters of the Gulf? Was there a place in the delta’s featureless slimy muck where goods could be unloaded and stored without risk of frequent flooding?</p>

<p>The answer to each question, the French found, was “yes,” but a tentative yes. There was a site for a city, but there were numerous problems associated with it. The site where New Orleans would be founded and eventually flourish can best be described as “wretched.” The geologists Kolb and Van Topik describe it as “a land between earth and sea, belonging to neither and alternately claimed by both.” The Mississippi’s delta is noted not only for its swampy, geologic terrain, but also for its difficult environment. The delta is a region prone to excessive heat, annual floods, heavy rain, hurricanes, mosquitoes and disease. The delta environment has shoe-horned New Orleans into a constricted site and forced the city into strange shapes and curious, even eccentric internal patterns of growth. The environment, like the city’s personality, is an off-spring of the Mississippi River and a direct result of its behavior in its lower course over the last several thousand years. Like the city it spawned and nourishes, the Mississippi is unusual, not just for its size and delta, but for other eccentricities.

</p>

<p>There are risks to any location-- there are thousands of oil platforms in the Gulf, there are cities built in the shadow of active volcanoes, on fault lines, in flood plains, on islands in the path of hurricanes, etc. Gee, Hawaii has the double whammy of being an active volcano and in the potential path of a hurricane. And lets not even talk about the great state of California. I guess with the earthquakes, forestfires, mudslides, windstorms, etc, I guess we should just forget about building or insuring buildings there too. The comparison of NOLA to a “beach house” is, no surprise, insulting.</p>

[MomofWildChild]

<p>razorsharp- I don’t understand your logic. There are risks to tall buildings, too. LOTS of risks.</p>

[Youdon_tsay]

<p>marite, absolutely there were ways for anyone who wanted to get out to get out. Both of my sons’ schools are housing evacuaees, as are most secondary schools in my town and others. On the way back from a football game Thursday, we passed a caravan of school buses carrying evacuees. There were special plans for how to house people’s pets (presumably one reason people didn’t flee Katrina; they didn’t want to leave pets behind). There were special sites for special needs/critical care cases. I have a friend whose surgery was cancelled Friday in case hospital space was needed for those coming in.</p>

<p>There was absolutely no reason for people to stay.</p>

[Treetopleaf]

<p>I agree with the idea of a fine (fee) for those who decide to stay behind. It’s selfish of them.</p>

<p>Did you see the clown on a CNN interview who came out just before it hit w/his daughters on jet skis, saying the surf was great?</p>

[britbrat1961]

<p>To address whether or not the infirmed were evauated? I am in SoCal and my paramedic step-daughter from here spent 3 days evacuating people.</p>

<p>When she called yesterday she was in 200 ambulance convoy traveling to Houston for more search and rescue operations.</p>

<p>Sometimes it becomes a logistical nightmare when you have to find hospitals and facilites to transfer hospital patients to, as they cannot be just taken to a shelter.</p>

<p>Fortunately this incident is much better managed than 3 years ago when my husband did 3 weeks of search and rescue in New Orleans.</p>

<p>It is a shame that it takes an incident such as Katrina and Rita to wake up some of the “officials” in order to make some real changes.</p>

<p>I am sure that we have a ways to go, but each disaster has it’s own problems.</p>

<p>I completely understand why they have to make sure that it is safe before they send in search and rescue or it creates a “disaster within a disaster”.</p>

<p>People need to listen and heed the warnings. These people REALLY do know what they are talking about!</p>

[jym626]

<p>Marite- is this the article/blog to which you were referring? It is actually qwuite interesting,e speciaaly the comments posted after the article. I hadn’t remembered that 27% of Holland is below sea level, or that the hurricane patterns were cyclic and acting like those of the 50-60’s, not to mention the impact of global warming and rising ocean levels. <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/national/nationalspecial/31charm.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/national/nationalspecial/31charm.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

[pmrlcomm]

<p>

It is a shame that it takes an incident such as Katrina and Rita to wake up some of the “officials” in order to make some real changes.

</p>

<p>There was a mandatory evacuation with Katrina and people ignored it. There were buses leaving the city empty because people didn’t want to go. What more were “officials” supposed to do? Heaven forbid a rescuer is killed during rescue ops…I would be ok with charging the rescuees with involuntary manslaughter. There has to be more personal accountability.</p>

[britbrat1961]

<p>I absolutely agree, but after hearing stories that my hubbie has told, I don’t think that will ever happen…charging a fee.</p>

<p>When he was on the firefighting helipcopter and his dept. was instrumental in saving an entire neighborhood of very expensive homes, the fire dept. was later sued for the cost of repainting the houses after some of the fire retardant spashed onto the houses. The homeowners won the lawsuit after the fire dept. saved their homes.</p>

<p>What is wrong with society today? Complete sense of entitlement!!!</p>

[jym626]

<p>britbrat-
Thats incredible!! Next time they should let the houses burn down, eh??? Sheesh!</p>

[marite]

<p>jym: this is the article I read this morning:</p>

<p>

For Americans watching events unfold on television late last month, the arduous evacuation of New Orleans and the grandeur of the Olympic Games couldn’t have made for a starker contrast.</p>

<p>However one feels about its other policies, the Chinese government is clearly not afraid to invest in the future of its cities. The array of architecture it created for the Beijing Olympics was only part of a mosaic of roads, bridges, tunnels, canals, subway lines and other projects that have transformed a medieval city of wood and brick into a modern metropolis overnight.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, three full years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, much of the city remains a wasteland. As Hurricane Gustav raced toward the Gulf Coast, it became clear that the city’s patchwork levee system could not guarantee the safety of its citizens. The evacuation of tens of thousands of residents was cheered as some sort of victory.</p>

<p>But for those with a sense of urban history, the tragedy of New Orleans is not just about governmental disregard for the welfare of the city’s inhabitants. It is about a lost opportunity. All of the great challenges that confront the 21st-century city — from class, race and environmental issues to the continuing duel between history and modernity — are crystallized in New Orleans.</p>

<p>Yet the kind of visionary urban plan that could address these issues in a bold and thoughtful way has yet to materialize. Instead, some of the country’s greatest architectural minds are inventing the future in cities like Beijing, Shenzhen and Dubai, where their talents are more appreciated.

</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/weekinreview/14ouroussoff.html?ref=world[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/weekinreview/14ouroussoff.html?ref=world&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>The evacuation of NOLA should have provided an opportunity to rethink the city without the kind of draconian measures the PRC undertook.</p>