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It's Bush's fault.
"Years from now there will be no Iowans in FEMA camps.
Sure there will be. Volunteers in the camps in New Orleans.
I just googled Iowa floods and found this, so it's not really a great point, but a good one. After watching the news last night on everything going on up there, I instantly thought of the differences between these storms (floods, tornado's) and Katrina. While the severity of the storms are a bit different, the basic outcome was one in the same. It's the response to the storms that are the major difference.
So my question is this, when will this be blamed on Bush?
The flooding in eastern Iowa has reached the point of catastrophe. Towns are overwhelmed, businesses destroyed, and crops are gone. A fifth of the corn and soybeans are gone. Fox News is calling it "Iowa's Katrina." Here is a gallery of aerial phtographs at the web site of the newspaper I used to deliver every afternoon, the Iowa City Press-Citizen.
The thing is, though, the people of eastern Iowa seem to be stepping up in the Iowa stubborn way. I have seen any number of man-on-the-street interviews, and nobody is complaining. They all seem to be working to solve their problem, which is not surprising because Iowans do not complain about tragedy. They complain about hot weather and dry weather, but not tragedy. And I have looked for reports of looting and come up empty so far.
Katrina has become a metaphor for many things beyond natural disaster, including governmental and individual incompetence (depending on your point of view). In Iowa there is a 500 year flood, but the people are not paralyzed, whining, or looting. There will be no massive relief effort from around the world, and nobody will step up to help Iowans except for other Iowans. Yet years from now, there will be no Iowans still in FEMA camps.
The difference is not in the severity of the flood, but in the people who confront the flood.
UPDATE (late Sunday afternoon): This post obviously touched a nerve. Oops. I certainly could have chosen my words more carefully. Sorry if I ruined Father's Day for any of you.
It's Bush's fault.
"Years from now there will be no Iowans in FEMA camps.
Sure there will be. Volunteers in the camps in New Orleans.
Are there thousands of Iowans trapped in a sports arena without food or water?
It depends on the federal response. I don't think a horse judge is in charge of FEMA anymore...
One of the major differences between this and Katrina is that this kind of flooding was seen in '93, and many homes and businesses destroyed then were never rebuilt. Flooding around the mississipi is also a bit more periodic, expected, and controlled.
Another difference is that a major hurricane didn't flatten a huge area and overwhelm the state.
I just don't see much in the way of valid comparisons here.
What is your point?
why would anyone go directly to Bush's rescue when there is no blame to be defended from?
Don't blame me.
It depends on the federal response. I don't think a horse judge is in charge of FEMA anymore...
One of the major differences between this and Katrina is that this kind of flooding was seen in '93, and many homes and businesses destroyed then were never rebuilt. Flooding around the mississipi is also a bit more periodic, expected, and controlled.
Another difference is that a major hurricane didn't flatten a huge area and overwhelm the state.
I just don't see much in the way of valid comparisons here.
What is your point?
allready a hole in your propaganda talking points.
That's a GREAT point! I never heard ANY warnings about New Orleans being beneath sea level, and in grave danger if there were to be a major hurricane hit it before Katrina. Complete and utter surprise. NO one could have predicted that!It depends on the federal response. I don't think a horse judge is in charge of FEMA anymore...
One of the major differences between this and Katrina is that this kind of flooding was seen in '93, and many homes and businesses destroyed then were never rebuilt. Flooding around the mississipi is also a bit more periodic, expected, and controlled.
Another difference is that a major hurricane didn't flatten a huge area and overwhelm the state.
I just don't see much in the way of valid comparisons here.
What is your point?
I'm sure we've all learned from Katrina so any natural disasters will be handled differently based on the situation.
Gone With the Water
National Geographic Magazine, October 2004
By Joel K. Bourne, Jr.
Photographs by Robert Caputo and Tyrone Turner
The Louisiana bayou, hardest working marsh in America, is in big trouble—with dire consequences for residents, the nearby city of New Orleans, and seafood lovers everywhere.
It was a broiling August afternoon in New Orleans, Louisiana, the Big Easy, the City That Care Forgot. Those who ventured outside moved as if they were swimming in tupelo honey. Those inside paid silent homage to the man who invented air-conditioning as they watched TV "storm teams" warn of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. Nothing surprising there: Hurricanes in August are as much a part of life in this town as hangovers on Ash Wednesday.
But the next day the storm gathered steam and drew a bead on the city. As the whirling maelstrom approached the coast, more than a million people evacuated to higher ground. Some 200,000 remained, however—the car-less, the homeless, the aged and infirm, and those die-hard New Orleanians who look for any excuse to throw a party.
The storm hit Breton Sound with the fury of a nuclear warhead, pushing a deadly storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain. The water crept to the top of the massive berm that holds back the lake and then spilled over. Nearly 80 percent of New Orleans lies below sea level—more than eight feet below in places—so the water poured in. A liquid brown wall washed over the brick ranch homes of Gentilly, over the clapboard houses of the Ninth Ward, over the white-columned porches of the Garden District, until it raced through the bars and strip joints on Bourbon Street like the pale rider of the Apocalypse. As it reached 25 feet (eight meters) over parts of the city, people climbed onto roofs to escape it.
Thousands drowned in the murky brew that was soon contaminated by sewage and industrial waste. Thousands more who survived the flood later perished from dehydration and disease as they waited to be rescued. It took two months to pump the city dry, and by then the Big Easy was buried under a blanket of putrid sediment, a million people were homeless, and 50,000 were dead. It was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States.
Drowning New Orleans; October 2001; Scientific American Magazine; by Mark Fischetti; 10 Page(s)
The boxes are stacked eight feet high and line the walls of the large, windowless room. Inside them are new body bags, 10,000 in all. If a big, slow-moving hurricane crossed the Gulf of Mexico on the right track, it would drive a sea surge that would drown New Orleans under 20 feet of water. "As the water recedes," says Walter Maestri, a local emergency management director, "we expect to find a lot of dead bodies."
New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen. The city lies below sea level, in a bowl bordered by levees that fend off Lake Pontchartrain to the north and the Mississippi River to the south and west. And because of a damning confluence of factors, the city is sinking further, putting it at increasing flood risk after even minor storms. The low-lying Mississippi Delta, which buffers the city from the gulf, is also rapidly disappearing. A year from now another 25 to 30 square miles of delta marsh-an area the size of Manhattan-will have vanished. An acre disappears every 24 minutes. Each loss gives a storm surge a clearer path to wash over the delta and pour into the bowl, trapping one million people inside and another million in surrounding communities. Extensive evacuation would be impossible because the surging water would cut off the few escape routes. Scientists at Louisiana State University (L.S.U.), who have modeled hundreds of possible storm tracks on advanced computers, predict that more than 100,000 people could die. The body bags wouldn't go very far.
Speaking of disaster predictions, records for flood damage set by Katrina in New Orleans will be approached or broken by the inevitable next big flood in west St. Louis County, Missouri in the next 10 to 20 years.
Nowhere near that many of us died in Katrina. 100,000 people my butt. But, yes, we have been aware of the levee issue for many years now. But it's not like we're the only city that depends upon engineering to exist -- we're (re)learning that now in Iowa.
And they're due for another big quake, too. The last one made the Mississippi flow backward and caused the river to change course. And it resulted in minor quirks where a small bit of Tennessee is on the west bank, a teensy bit of Kentucky is on the east bank, etc.
My biggest issue with all of this (and the Bush thing was a joke) is the media coverage of all of it. It's not a "sexy hurricane", there are no racial issues to be looked at, and the people of Iowa, rather then EXPECTING help from the federal government, are currently taking mother natures best punch and telling the to off while they fix their own problems.
So where's the media? That's right, they only extensively cover "shock value, the worlds coming to an end, it's a republicans fault" kind of stuff.
Obama will save us!!!
THank god Iowans don't have democrat mayors and Liberal governors to to tell iowans to that again.
That's not what I meant and you know it. Floods and the Mississipi are a bit more frequent than Cat 5 hurricane strikes.
I fully recognize that there were such warnings in NO.
That was a 2001 article predicting what could happen. Not what would or did.
I wonder what the factors for Iowa were.
Did community infrastructure like bridges limit the natural; flood widt of streams and rivers?
Did people build in know flood plains without planning for such things?
I can come up with more. Like I said during Katrina, I have little sympathy for people who choose to put themselves in harms way.
The glancing blow New Orleans received was Cat 3 at the most.
I'd say that's because the people are not asking for increased government. They are bailing themselves out instead of acting like victims.
Wrong. The wind speed may have been at CAT 3 levels but the storm surge (the most destructive part of Katrina) was not only at CAT 5 levels but at record CAT 5 levels.
That is correct. The Times-Picayune that Monday morning read, "New Orleans dodges a bullet."
Little did they know that the levees were failing!
Yep, it was larger before hitting New Orleans, but a Catagory 3 when it hit.
Its a LOT easier to handle this type of flooding than it is to handle a CAT 5 hurricane barreling down on your city. This is much much much much slower. It really should not be compared in the least.
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