Slashdot Mirror
Too Many People in Nature's Way
Ant writes "Wired News report that the dead and the desperate of New Orleans now join the farmers of Aceh and the fishermen of Trincomalee, villagers in Iran and the slum dwellers of Haiti in a world being dealt ever more punishing blows by natural disasters... ... "We rely on technology and we end up thinking as human beings that we're totally safe, and we're not," said Miletti, of the University of Colorado. "The bottom line is we have a very unsafe planet."
By one critical measure, the impact on populations, statistics show the planet to be increasingly unsafe. More than 2.5 billion people were affected by floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and other natural disasters between 1994 and 2003, a 60 percent increase over the previous two 10-year periods, U.N. officials reported at a conference on disaster prevention in January.
Those numbers don't include millions displaced by last December 2004's tsunami, which killed an estimated 180,000 people as its monstrous waves swept over coastlines from Indonesia's Aceh province to Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, and beyond. By another measure -- property damage -- 2004 was the costliest year on record for global insurers, who paid out more than $40 billion on natural disasters, reports German insurance giant Munich Re. Florida's quartet of 2004 hurricanes was the big factor.
But generally it's not that more "events" are happening, rather that more people are in the way, said Thomas Loster, a Munich Re expert. "More and more people are being hit," he said..." I'd also like to point out a project here to find housing for Katrina's victims; it tries to combine lists of sites offering housing, and do a meta-search.
Insurance companies are subsidized by us, the taxpayers, to offer flood insurance in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast. It's an extremely lucrative business. Most homes of people above the poverty line (maybe 50%) were insured. And this insurance company, Munich Re, is a reinsurance company, which insures lots of retail companies around the world. So they're hit by every disaster that comes along. And of course FEMA and other federal aid is insurance paid by us, the taxpayers, that our politicians siphon off for other pet projects when they can downplay the priority of the hurricane risk.
Really, you're talking out your ass. This disaster isn't some videogame debate. So check your facts first, before you post more jive. The next disaster that strikes your house needs to be mitigated by systems like this, and you're only making it harder for us to help you, too.
--
make install -not war
But the problems are far from over... The old sand levees are old and weak in many areas due to dryness of the soil/sand. This cause them to blow away or sink. There are major concerns over the current level of protection and the governement has started to investigate emergency responses. Last week members of parliament have asked the relevant minister(s) of government to prepare a presentation to the house about the current response strategies.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
I don't think the problem was a breach of the levee. What the levees can't do is protect you from water from above. In fact, they serve to keep the water in. At least that's what I remember from a documentary I saw over a year ago, which predicted exactly this situation. Which I could remember the title.
It's interesting to read about why a settlement developed in that area - from wikipedia
"The site was selected because it was a rare bit of natural high ground along the flood-prone banks of the lower Mississippi, and was adjacent to a Native American trading route and portage between the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain via Bayou St. John (known to the natives as Bayou Choupique)."
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/opinion/02fische tti.html?n=Top%2FOpinion%2FEditorials%20and%20Op-E d%2FOp-Ed%2FContributors
http://www.coast2050.gov/watermarks/wrda.htm
but the states can't call up their national guard when the fed has taken them to iraq. so did the state of LA screw up by letting bush take the NG to iraq?
Nobody can say if Katrina was caused by global warming, but global warming will tend to impart more energy to the atmosphere (storms, high winds). I live over in Australia and had seen documentaries about New Orleans venerability over 10yrs ago, yet the nation was unprepared?
The scientific community is doing a lot of arm waving and unified declarations, basically saying Humans are an endagered species. The biggest threat ever to mankind and yet most US (and Australian) polititians would prefer not to look at it, let alone acknowlage it. How many times does the media report that the Global demand for grain has outstripped supply five years running and that reserve stocks have fallen by 50% since 2000. People are either not interested or don't understand that the biggest dangers from increased CO2 is not rising sea levels and extreme weather. The biggest and arguably most imminent[sic?] dangers are prolonged crop failures and acidic oceans.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
People talk about global warming and how it can change weather, but many steadfastly refuse to look at any weather history...
Galveston Hurricane of 1900It was a hot year in the US in 1900 with may people dying of heat stroke, the waters in the gulf were above 90 and then a huge hurricane erupted smashing in to Galveston. No one back then railed about how we need to stop burning coal. No rallies to stop people from driving there SUV's.
Unless we drop our planet in to ice age conditions we are going to have hurricanes, thats just part of living on an eastery coast line. Armchair Envro-ecologist are addressing the wrong problem. Let me yell this to get the point across
[voice: yell] CARBON EMISSION IS NOT THE ISSUE, BEACH AND WETLAND EROSION IS. [/voice]Saying this hurricane was caused by or made stronger by global warming shows your misunderstanding about the nature of mans destruction of nature. Greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is the least of our worries. Building huge levees the distance of our rivers should be a greater concern, it stops yearly flooding, but aggrivates the great floods, channeling billion of gallons of water at high speed down river. At the first weak place in one of the levees, destruction is certian.
The faster moving channeled water also carries sediment far out into the gulf, barrier wetlands and islands suffer. The wetlands subside and wash away in to the ocean, and all of the sudden you have ocean front property where you shouldn't, and that property has NO protection from storm surge.
So I recommend we keep blaming global warming, and not focusing on the real problems, so when the next natural disaster occurs we can have thousands more dead.
Um, floods of Nile were not disasters to Egyptians. They fertilized and watered their farmlands. Those floods came each year at the same time and rose to the same height; they were the source of Egypts power and riches, not negative in any way.
Or did you perhaps mean some other kind of flood ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
955,609 (about 36%) of our total Active Duty/Reserve/National Guard forces of 2,656,300 have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan during this period. 651,622 (24.5%) have one deployment during this period, and 303,987 (11.4%) have deployed more than once.
For active duty, 708,428 (48.2%) of the force has deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. 494,482 (33.6%) have deployed once, while 213.946 (14.6%) have deployed more than once.
For the National Guard and Reserves, 247,181 (20.8%) have deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.
Sound like 10% to you? No. We're at 40% commitment over the next 3 years (including rotations). Start using a more reliable source.
"The more corrupt a society, the more numerous are its laws." -Tacticus
What governmental disaster relief?
The New Orleans Times-Picayune (which in 2002: published this report which predicted much of the current disaster.) has a scathing open letter to the president that spells out a lot of the FEMA incompetence.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Photos of entire subdivisions with each house sporting what appears to be a bank vault that serves as a safe room demonstrate what can happen when people actually care about what might happen.
:)
So the people so poor that they're living paycheck to paycheck, unable to build a "bank vault" to protect themselves in, or even have the common decency to own a car and be able to fill it with expensive gas didn't care enough to live?
Those bank vault storm shelters were completely paid for by the goverment, their either subsidized or paid for in full by the residents of the suburbs, am I right?
New Orleans itself is in the same situation, living "paycheck to paycheck". They've been begging for federal funds for years before this happened to upgrade the levees. Those funds got redirected to Iraq for the past two years.
(Rant considerably more nasty before editing, consider yourself lucky...
China also has 1.3 billion people, bringing the total pollution output to approximately half of the U.S. Your figures are also outdated, the last measurement I've seen is 2.72 per capita in 2002. China's emissions have grown 30% in the last decade, and they are exempt from the Kyoto Protocol. It is a runaway situation and while U.S. companies continue to acquiesce to EPA emissions requirements, China is fast approaching a situation where they will be the top polluter and no way to halt the pollution without a massive economical effect. Ignoring China at this stage is pure folly.
Flood insurance is basically government welfare. In the U.S. private insurance companies don't provide flood coverage only the government provides it [ National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) ] at highly subsidized rates.
Nothing pisses me off more than a Republican in a McMansion living on a flood plain bitching about the "welfare queens".
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
a) The descendant of slaves requires M instead of m
b) You obviously aren't a Bugs Bunny fan
c) Anybody who goes looking for, or is quicker than the average individual to spot and or claim racism is a racist, having made one's skin color a more important factor than those around him.
"Then what explains Bill Clinton's failure to fix these problems?"
...
It can safely be said the Clinton administration funded the levees way better than the Bush administration did. The Bush administration has slashed EVERY Army Corps of Engineer funding request for the levees since they came to power. They've been to busy funding Iraq, squandering money on biowarfare gear for fire departments in Podunk, Wyoming and directing pork to their rich, white Republican friends.
I especially love the fact the Bush administration allocated $100 million, and transfered a key Army engineer in Louisiana, to restore the marshlands in Iraq. $100 million for the wetlands in Iraq this year versus $87 million for New Orleans levees. Really screwed up priorities there, with 20/20 hindsight.
Fortunately for the Bush administration it probably can't be established if the breeches would have been prevented if they hadn't gutted Army Corp funding and personel for levee maintenance and upgrade though an independent investigation will be interesting. Its a certainty that slashing funding for them didn't help. The fact is levees, especially at the extent they exist around New Orleans, are expensive to maintain. Either you have to committ to maintain them, abandon New Orleans or do what the Bush administration did, let them deteriorate in the face of a surge in hurricanes and their intensity and have a catastrophic disaster.
Follows is a great run down from from factchecks.org which is a pretty nonpartisan outfit:
"In the past five years, the amount of money spent on all Corps construction projects in the New Orleans district has declined by 44 percent, according to the New Orleans CityBusiness newspaper, from $147 million in 2001 to $82 million in the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30."
A long history of complaints
Local officials had long complained that funding for hurricane protection projects was inadequate:
October 13, 2001: The New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that federal officials are postponing new projects of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Control Program, or SELA, fearing that federal budget constraints and the cost of the war on terrorism may create a financial pinch for the program. The paper went on to report that President Bushs budget proposed $52 million for SELA in the 2002 fiscal year. The House approved $57 million and the Senate approved $62 million. Still, the $62 million would be well below the $80 million that corps officials estimate is needed to pay for the next 12 months of construction, as well as design expenses for future projects.
April 24, 2004: The Times-Picayune reported that less money is available to the Army Corps of Engineers to build levees and water projects in the Missisippi River valley this year and next year. Meanwhile, an engineer who had direct the Louisiana Coastal Area Ecosystem Restoration Study a study of how to restore coastal wetlands areas in order to provide a buffer from hurricane storm surges was sent to Iraq "to oversee the restoration of the Garden of Eden wetlands at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, for which President Bushs 2005 budget gave $100 million.
June 8, 2004: Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, told the Times-Picayune:
Walter Maestri: It appears that the money has been moved in the presidents budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq , and I suppose thats the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees cant be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.
September 22, 2004: The Times-Picayune reported that a pilot study on raising the height of the levees surrounding New Orleans had been completed and generated enough information for a second study necessary to estimate the cost of doing so. The Bush administration ordered the New Orleans district office of the Army Corps of Engineers no
@de_machina
Well, I did look it up. See http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/07/99071 2080500.htm
And I found you were wrong. It is a natural phenomenon. You are a complete moron.
I wasted 45 seconds of my life to find this for you.That's 45 seconds you owe me!
No, they are not entirely dependent on oil. In the USA, oil powers only 14% of your power plants, which is a large chunk of your energy usage. Many countries use less oil than the US, relying instead on water, wind, coal or nuclear. Cars can be converted to run off ethanol, biofuels, and even electric power. Admittedly right now it's at a slightly higher cost than oil, but it's not a stupidly higher cost. It's close enough that even now you have some people in extreme situations choosing non-gasoline vehicles.
There are plenty of energy sources waiting in the wings. Oil rules the roost now because it's cheap, not because it's indispensible. Alarmist predictions about the end of the world once oil runs out are plain silly.
in less than a generation.. Globally.. Its already almost there in most of the developed world. If we can only survive the next 30 years or so, we will turn the corner and technology will start to catch up with the world's population.. Assuming we dont have a war.. If we do, we could be annihilated.. All of us.. And then some... Even the 75% of the people on Earth who know or care next to nothing about the US could end up dying..
That may be for an odd-ball project like sticking a manufactured home on top of something else, but for a normally framed house, steel studs are a great way to go, only slightly higher in cost than wood studs. One of the local Habitat for Humanity affilates has done steel stud construction, and Habitat builds houses very inexpensively (not even counting the whole volunteer labor thing).
Yep. As I posted about earlier, I'm in the process of building an addition to my house, and I used insulated concrete forms (ICFs) for the foundation. If I were building a house from scratch, I'd build the whole thing that way. Reinforced concrete is a great way to go, and easy to build with using ICFs.
They're resistant to hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, fires, termites, even bullets (well, not the windows or roof, but the rest sure is). And they create a very well insulated structure. If you're in a more extreme climate, you can use thicker ICFs and walls and make an R-50 insulated wall (compared with R-13 or less for normal walls).
And with some planning on the design end, you can make them safer in floods, too, by keeping the ground floor as garage and storage, and living quarters higher up. But even that won't help with a 30 foot storm surge or if you build 20 feet below sea level, but you can make a lot safer, more comfortable, more energy efficient house using reinforced concrete than with traditional stick framing. And concrete is pretty darn cheap, too.