besides taking the warnings from scientists sersious,
there’s a lot more a hurricane or any disaster can learn us.
a lot of people died, a lot are still not rescued. it’s sad we have to learn from these mistakes.
we’re all human beings and it’s only human to make mistakes, and to forgive.
but i’m sure this disaster will bring people closer together. there’s gonna be a lot of changes.
it don’t matter where you’re from, what nationality you have and all that bull…
how much money you have, what religion you’ve got, what education you have,…
deep inside we’re all the same.
we have to learn to treat everyone with the same respect, love, understanding,…listen to our hearts.
I think I have learned not to live or work below sea level AND near the ocean at the same time. It would be fine to live near the ocean or below sea level, just not both (imagine if the Netherlands were ever hit with such a storm, a whole country could dissappear into the ocean overnight).
I almost went to New Orleans about a year ago to live. If I had, I’d probably be dead because I would have been one of the poorer (financially) folks in the city.
When the chances are there that say such and such a disaster will happen in X number of years, then it will happen. I think people tend to think “Oh, well, once in 500 years, that gives me 499 years free from disaster” but that isn’t true. That’s the chances given, but another Katrina-like storm could very well form tomorrow and head straight toward New Orleans again. That’s the nature of these things. They can be predicted as far as their likelyhood, but only to a certain extent.
Even the “best” plans don’t work (not saying that the plans in place were good…)
Don’t depend on others for your survival. Do what you have to do to get to safety and don’t wait for others to come and save you.
If you live in an area that gets hurricanes - have an idea of what to do when a hurricane hits, and have a survival kit prepared ahead of time. Same for earthquake, tornado, etc. Always have a battery powered radio.
The sad truth is no matter how prepared you think you are, no matter how safe or protected you think your home is, no matter who you listen to or whose advice you take, nature can still rise up and take away your home, your loved ones, or your life.
You can do everything right and still get wiped away; you can ignore the danger and still might get lucky.
Is it better to prepare as well as you can? Of course. Just never kid yourself–there’s never anywhere you can really hide from nature. When your time comes, there’s always lightning, if nothing else is to hand.
As witnessed by the storm that destroyed a couple of suburban streets in Birmingham earlier this year.
Birmingham is about as far from the sea as you can get in the UK, not in a flood area, not built on or near an active faultline or volcano (unlike some towns in Italy), though they have had earthquakes - just not big ones.
The Birmingham storm came out of nowhere and it could be six months or 200 years before the next one hits.
Sorry, but I have to laugh at threads like this. You make it sound like its the first time humans have encountered a bit of a storm or flood. Typhoons/monsoons/flooding routinely wipe out thousands of people in Asia every year. If we were really going to learn anything from such events the lesson would have been learned a hundred times over.
But we are human. We cling to the hope that it will never happen to us if the “it” happens to interfere with our desires. Bangladesh is routinely flushed out, but we humans just keep repopulating the area. We know that earthquakes cause major damage but we build right on top of major fault lines anyways (SoCal). We know that banks of soil beconme unstable in heavy rains but we keep putting housing developments right up to the edge and charge extra for the scenery.
If there is a lesson being learned it is being adopted by relatively few IMHO.
i’m no expert, but i wouldn’t chance to build anything in NO if it wasn’t adviced so by scientists.
i wonder how many NO citizens want to return or would rather make a living some place else, if they could choose.
Lix, have you forgotten already the flooding that has taken place up and down the Mississipi valley? Those homes are all built in a known flood plain, yet year after year, flood after flood, people go back and rebuild, as if it couldn’t possibly happen again, as if it couldn’t possibly happen to them.
I’m just addressing the type of catastrophe this hurricane was—something coming for which it is possible to give warnings a few days in advance.
I don’t think we can learn from this hurricane until we find out what exactly the emergency plan (actually I think many plans would be involved) was. We can stomp and holler all we want at various agencies, branches of government, etc., but the plan should show to whom various responsibilities were delegated and then we can follow the chain of events from that point and try to pinpoint where things went wrong.
We would have to determine a) if the plan was itself was at fault, i.e. the plan was inadequate or it was followed but did not work out properly, or b) if the means of implementing the plan were not available, i.e. the resources to put the plan into action were not available, or c) if the plan was not followed or d) if a combination of the preceeding things happened.
Once these facts are known, then we would have to determine the explanation for each failure. I don’t know if all the facts will become known. It will take a long time to analyze all this. We would learn from it and I think some improvements will be made. I doubt it will be feasible to fix all the problems though.
Well, I don’t feel that I do know that one way or the other. Certainly things did not work out well, no debate about that at all. But I don’t feel that I know whether the plan itself was at fault or if the plan was good but was not followed. I’m talking about an official plan worked out ahead of time. Not the last minute “plan” which is what it seemed like we were seeing.
If you read this plan, the striking thing is that it looks pretty good on paper to a non-expert (which doesn’t mean much, but I’m just giving an example) and virtually none of it seemed to be carried out. rebl_rn pointed out in another thread that state emergency plans, which this is, are often just guidelines. So I don’t know if this plan was the “real” plan.