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The Hurricane’s Coming,
The Hurricane’s Coming! by James Glaser September 2, 2008 Our whole country comes to a standstill as we watch and wait for the storm to come ashore. Will it be a category four, or will it hit land as a two? Will New Orleans be the target, or will it land west of there? It doesn't matter if the storm is big or small, if it hits the city dead-on or takes a left turn while still out to sea. Any way that storm makes land-fall, we will have already spent hundreds of millions of dollars getting everyone out of South Louisiana. What happens if a hurricane comes ashore in a big Florida city or maybe South Georgia or in the Carolinas? Do we move everyone out, or does a region have to suffer a Katrina type disaster first? The reports tell us that 2 million people left Louisiana, and tens of thousands more left the rest of the Gulf Coast before Gustav got here. From the news reports on television, many of those people were replaced by camera crews and talking heads. Because the storm turned out to be such a bust, the news people were forced to drive around the wet streets telling us about all the new equipment developed for bringing this disaster right into our home. Americans love disasters, and corporations pay to advertise during the coverage of any disaster the media can bring to us. What do you think the evacuation for Gustav cost? Have you ever watched the little cartoons the media puts on trying to explain why we have to get the people out of New Orleans? New Orleans has a lake on one side and the Mississippi river on the other. Get this, both of these bodies of water are a lot higher than the city, so they have to build walls to keep the water out. During Katrina in 2005, the walls broke and parts of the city filled with water. So, what did they do after the city dried out? They moved back in and started repairing those broken walls with billions of dollars. They didn't actually stuff money into the breach, but they might as well have, because even after spending billions and billions of dollars, the government still can't trust those walls. So, with the first sign of a storm headed that way, they moved the people out. And next time there is a storm, they will do the same thing, and the government (you and I) will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to move the people out again. New Orleans is in a hole that happens to be below sea level, and after Katrina, no elected official will say the city is safe in a storm. When the clouds move in, federal dollars will move the people out. The rest of the people in that portion of the Gulf Coast live at sea level or a few feet above. A storm surge can be over twenty feet high, so those people can't wait out a storm either. That means millions more moving those people away, too. Something tells me that if you live in an unsafe place, and if no amount of money will make that place safe to live in, it is just out and out wrong to keep asking everyone else to take care of you because you want to keep living there. Some day the rest of America is going to wake up and say, sorry but we can't keep helping you every time there is a storm. You are going to have to move to higher ground. Harsh isn't it? Somebody in Washington is going to have to have the guts to stand up and tell America we don't have the money to repeatedly bail out the same population over and over again. That isn't harsh, that is sensible. |
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