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Views From Your Windows
Hurricane Katrina is bearing down on the Gulf Coast region right now, and with residents trying to leave the area and news crews trying to report from the area (it's all about soaking reporters). Since Katrina became such a beast so quickly, words like "toxic gumbo" (get it - it's hitting New Orleans!) and phrases like "this could be our tsunami" have been tossed around with images of people taking shelter in the Superdome to hammer home how crazy the storm is. And why should New Yorkers, as well as other non-Mississippi Delta residents, care, aside from having rains later this week? Well, as the news anchors have been excitedly telling us, gas prices will go up and the country might go into a recession.
NOAA has the latest on Katrina, and if you want only the finest in so hysterical-but-yet-from-a-government agency, check out NOAA's Current Conditions update: "POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS...AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED. WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS."
Image from NOAA
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"Katrina may be 'our Asian tsunami'"
Whoever said that is a retard. 150,000+ People died in that Tsunami and caused alot more damage then any Hurricane has ever done.
Ease up, Kojak. Whoever said that might be right. You're focusing on the collective toll of lost lives and property from the tsunami, but if the levees are breached, and even if they're merely swamped, the scenes in New Orleans may look every bit as bad as those walls of water roaring down Southeast Asian streets. New Orleans could look just like Banda Aceh, once all the water went down, which may take weeks. And Banda Aceh didn't have a toxic stew to deal with.
I'm from Florida, and have weathered some hurricanes. I can say that hurricanes are very devastating. But the main difference between a hurricane and a tsunami is the warning time.
A hurricane politely lets us know a couple of days ahead of time to get the hell out of the way. A tsunami gives us a couple of MINUTES of warning. Please--there's no comparison. Almost anyone who gets killed in a hurricane dies because they were stupid enough to ignore evacuation warnings.
You're from Florida, so your situation was completely different. You weren't in a city that sits below sea level and is completely surrounded by water. You didn't have levees holding back that water. Even if the levees hold, the high storm surge may go right over them. Then the levees would act like a tub, holding the water in, along with assorted raw sewage, petrochemicals and coffins from the cemetaries. Banda Aceh's crops are rebounding nicely since the water drained away almost as quickly as it roared in. The same couldn't be said if New Orleans had become New Venice.
And it's pretty obvious that whoever compared it to the tsunami was comparing the potential for devastation, not lost lives. Luckily, it looks like the worst is over and New Orleans has been spared.