I seem to remember forecasts predicting it the moment it bounced off Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico. IIRC, that was a day, maybe two, before reaching land again.
That's 'forecasts', not 'obvious' as you specified in your original message - and hurricane forecasts as notoriously unreliable.
Even so, it was high Cat 4 within a couple of hours and low Cat 4 by the time the main storm hit New Orleans.
Even with five hours, though - it takes four hours and 18 minutes to fly from the UK to the US. All on-call emergency responders in the US (outside of Alaska) could have raced the hurricane and beaten it by 40 minutes.
And all of those on-call emergency responders would have become refugees or casualties had they flown to New Orleans then... (First assuming that such responders, if they existed at all (which they don't) were actually standing by at the airport. What do you think they could have done in 40 minutes with nothing but what they can carry in their bare hands? (Never mind the fact that the US doesn't have any such first responders.)
In the real world, responders come in after the disaster - flying them into the disaster area beforehand just adds to the body count. Also, before providing relief, they have to see to their own food, water, shelter, etc... Again, otherwise they just add to the body count. Furthermore it take time to establish those support bases, determine where the worst needs are, prioritize according to those needs and the equipments/personell on hand...
None of this is anywhere near as simple as you seem to think.
FEMA claims they had 50 rescue helicopters on standby. Where on standby, I don't know, as nothing happened in the first four days after.
Nothing happened in the first four days? ROTFL. Only in some fantasy version of the past week. Here in the real world, the helicopters were scattered and working hard across a vast area - there is much more involved here than New Orleans remember.
But assuming they did, what was to stop them renting a whole bunch more from the oil companies? They've plenty of helicopters for getting to and from the oil rigs, and they were not doing a whole lot at the time.
Before the hurricane, they were moving workers from the rigs with those helicopters. After the hurricane, they were moving workers and inspectors back to the rigs. They weren't available.
In short, this should have been handled a LOT better BEFORE there was a disaster.
That's the belief of folks without an inkling as to the problems and complexities involved, or with a political axe to grind.
And I'm not convinced the local authorities were much better - the superdome was an odd choice for last-ditch evacuation point and apparently didn't even have supplies to patch the roof when it ripped in the storm.
Let's see - you have an extremely large and strong building, on higher ground, within walking distance of a large number of the population. Here in the real world, that's a prime choice for a shelter. So far as the roof goes - how in hell is anyone supposed to patch a roof two hundred feer in the air? Get real.
Even in the evacuation before the hurricane struck, things were not going well. Some old folk died on a school bus from dehydration. Excuse me, but there should have been qualified nurses on board and plenty of fluids. Dehydration was inevitable and should have been dealt with by proper planning.
And where is the magic wand kept that allows a private organization, or any organization, to summon nurses from thin air? (Especially on such short notice.) Here in the real world, a hundred odd patients were saved, at the cost of four lives - a dammed impressive accomplishment.
I'm not pleased with the use of a school bus, either. They couldn't
The US government has failed its people with catastrophic consequences. Any attempt to deny that is an insult to the dead, and the suffering, and quite frankly is just utterly preposterous.
You do know that disaster response is the function (by law) of the states? You do know FEMA, the National Guard, etc... etc... exist to assist the state when the states ask? You do know that it's the state and local goverments who are responsible under the law to perform disaster relief coordination?
The Governor of Louisiana didn't activate her National Guard units until after the hurricane had passed. The Mayor of New Orleans sent thousands of people to a city owned and provided no food, and no water. (He also had to be practically ordered to evacuate.) Both of them spent more time on Tues-Thurs preening before the cameras than they spent carrying out their responsibilities to their citizens. Niether of them seemed to have carried out their statutory and moral responsibilities worth a damm.
What's insulting to the dead is individuals like yourself who willingly lie about their pain and suffering to further political ends.
Maybe the next half will be up tomorrow...and did you see the (I think) superdome. They weren't kidding when they said the roof was ripping off!
They may not have been kidding - but they certainly were exaggerating. All that was ripped off was the waterproofing membrane, the roof beneath is structurally intact.
Because until teleportation becomes practical, or the American Midwest (essentially everything outside of Texas between the Rockies and the Appalachians) becomes an uninhabited desert - we'll still need a port at the mouth of the Mississippi.
Not intended as flamebait (I contributed $100 to the Red Cross), but people just refuse to learn to move away from flood-prone areas, even after they are destroyed.
In the real world - it's just not that simple. Even if the move the entire population of New Orleans - within a few years, a decade at most, Newer Orleans will spring up in it's place. We still need a port at the mouth of the Missisippi and the people who work at the port will need housing, grocery stores, etc... In the real world factors other than safety determine where cities situate themselves.
The author survived the 1972 Rapid City flood in which 237 people were killed and adopted the philosophy of never rebuilding homes in the flood plain. Rapid City learned its lesson, and only commercial and industrial buildings are allowed in the flood plain. There are also a lot of parks and public use areas on the flood plain.
Rapid City could do that because the bulk of it's jobs in 1972 were not on the flood plain, but at Ellsworth AFB. (And pretty much, that's still the case.) Such a specific instance speaks little about the general case.
Nobody expected things to be fixed in 20 minutes. However, the whole point of disaster response is the response part. There is absolutely no reason why there should be a 5 day period of no response other than pretty words.
Well, out here in the real world - there wasn't such a five day period. The Coast Guard was on scene on the first day (Tues). By the second day National Guard forces were already trying to evacuate the Superdome and the hospitals. By the *third* day convoys were already arriving with food and other aid. (Today is day 5... and my tenant just arrived in New Orleans - in the *third* wave of assistance forces his company has sent.)
The interstate highway system in this country was developed for EXACTLY this kind of mobilization. Highways and bridges were built wide enough to allow military vehicles to cross the country in an organized fashion.
Those facilities were designed *when intact* to do that. They aren't intact.
As far as 'comparing' disasters, which is woefully innapriopriate, well lets compare them. What was the reposnse time for national guard troops being deployed to all the above incidents you cited? New York, less than one day. San Fran, also less than one day. LA, less than one day. How exactly does this compare to 5 days?
And how widespread was the disaster in NY? Not very. The National Guard could be drawn from the heavily populated area around the few city blocks that were damaged. San Franciso? Same deal, small area damaged within a much larger area. Ditto LA.
New Orleans is one small area in the middle of a *huge* and heavily damaged area - and far from other significant population concentrations.
Yet they started arriving there in force on the third day.
Bush deserves every bit of blame he's getting, and probably more. He has done virtually nothing to make a horrible situation better, and aruably has made it worse by not reacting in a timely fashion.
ROTFL. And just what could he have done? Gone down there and piloted a helicopter himself?
It takes *time* to get relief organized on this scale. It takes *time* to move people and equipment. The President doesn't have some magic wand he can wave and make everything all better - but a lot of people do have very unrealistic expectations as to how fast things can be done.
(And very few people seem to realize the New Orleans is about 2% of the population and about.01% of the land area involved.)
The funniest thing of all is that the amount of bandwidth fuddruckers was taking up was 5% or less, judging by the graph on his site. I mean, sheesh, what a loser this guy is - not only does he get upset that someone thought his work worthwhile enough to link to, but then he actually thinks his response was not only justified but also pretty damn clever.
So you wouldn't be upset if I siphoned off 5% of your gas after each fill up?
It didn't start below sea level. The location of New Orleans was chosen because it was an island in the swampy delta. (Well, a less swampy chunk of a swamp anyhow.) However, two centuries of draining the swamps and pumping out the ground water have sunk it below sea level.
Fucking ignorant asshole. Just have to pretend you are right instead of admitting the US government chose to throw away the lives of the victims by not taking obvious and easy preparation years ago.
Oh? And what obvious and easy preparations were those? Moving the city? Nearly impossible as I stated before. Building up the levees? That's been in progress for over a century.
The pumps dont need a supply big enough to drain the city to have been a help, even keeping the water level down for longer would have allowed more of the stubborn bastards who didnt leave before the storm to get out after, the water level would have peaked much later.
The pumps in New Orleans can remove between an inch and two inches of water a day - the net savings in time amounts to about an hour over the last three days. (In fact, it amounts to less than that because most of the pumps discharge into the lake - which is where the flooding is coming from in the first place.)
Cat 5 hurricanes are NOT rare, they have been happening more and more often in the last 15 years.
And compared to the last century - we haven't even hit the average. For hurricanes that hit the US in total - the last ten years have been 60% or *less* of the century average, and that number has been declining across the last ten years.
You are living in the fantasy world. The flood was absolutely enevitable and an absolutely known and understood risk on a scale that scientists have screamed about for decades. Most everywhere else in the developed world you can not build in areas of such risk...
ROTFLMAO. Let's just start with the Netherlands - then most of the Rhine valley, then most of the Rhone valley, the Paris and the Seine, then Venice and the areas around it. And that's just in Europe!.
exept that you still chose to ignore the fact that the flood was absolutely known to be enevitable, and they absolutely knew they were not prepared... and chose to stay unprepared.
Only in some fantasy dream world of yours.
A federal official had proposed that now they should try to locate school busses to be brought in to help evacuate people... NO PLANS had been made before hand to deal with the logistics of bringing in not only the school busses, but every available bus of every type from surrounding states. Damn! Here in Vancouver BC, we had full logistics settled and garaunteed by the bus companies for the 100,000's of visitors for the 2010 olympics TWO YEARS before we even knew we would host the olympics!
When you can get anyone two years of advance notice of exactly where busses will survive and where the roads will be intact after a major storm - you'll have a point.
Our Prime Minister has called Bush, telling him to ask for anything and we will send it... troops, food, medicine, water, clothes... and Bush said 'No, I'd like to wait and see how it goes'.
The UN has also offered to send aid, troops, etc... and Bush has said no. He'd rather not be put in the position of having to respect the UN for the first time in his life.
Unlike you, I've actually dealt with emergency situations and studied emergency management, and just like President Bush, I'd have done the same thing. The last thing you need in a mass casualty is people who you don't know, can't house, can't support, and don't know how you are going to use in the first place crowding into an already limited area. It takes time to identify what is needed and to get it into place. Those teams are far more useful standing by than sucking up already scarce resources standing around the disaster area.
Canada was allowed to send a unique core of search and rescue troops fr
I'm no engineer but I know damn well that they could easily have built cement Kasons with walls higher than the levees, to house the pumps with back up generators with a large fuel supply, allowing them to be at the right elevation, independantly powered, and be immune to flooding.
You should have stopped right after 'engineer'. Do you have any clue how much fuel it would take to run those pumps long enough to empty the city? (Think tanks the size of a small blimp - per pump.)
Dubyafucker said on TV yesturday that 'no one could have anticipated a disaster like this'
And he's correct. This was a cat 5 storm - which is *very* rare. Furthermore, the sections of the levees that failed were those least expected to - every one of them recently reinforced.
That century you speak of is the time period where they could have built the damn city elsewhere!
In some fantasy world, yes. Here in the real world the needs of commerce and economics drive where cities are located. If we moved New Orleans elsewhere, Newer Orleans would have been built in it's place.
In fact I find it hard to have any sympathy for the victims, they've simply repeated the actions of millions of others througout history that knew their destruction was waiting around the corner and chose to ignore it.
Welcome to the real world - there's no place immune to disasters of one form or another.
you want facts?
You don't seem to have any to spare - your shortage is obvious.
Can some one tell me how a similar catastrophe would be any different in a third world country?
There wouldn't be thousands of National Guard on the scene. The wouldn't be thousands of volunteers on hand. (And thats just to date!) There wouldn't be orders of magnitude *more* help on the way over the next few days...
This isn't a disaster movie - this is real life. Problems aren't solved in time for the last commercial break. Too many people in the US seem to have utterly no clue to just how difficult it is to respond to a disaster of this magnitude. It seems instant gratification extends even to disasters.
Heck, they don't even seem to realize how big a disaster this. Andrew, Hugo, etc... Pikers. Mere wannabees. You could drop both of them into southern Louisiana without them even being noticed. The last time a region this size was devasted to this level... Heck, not since WWII if not before. (The destruction of Tokyo, Berlin, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki together might add up to about what the gulf coast is experiencing today.)
We may know it's complex, but unless we're intimitely involved we cannot accurately critique the relief efforts. It'd be comparable to Brian Williams analyzing the Linux kernel structure, or attempting to explain fighter tactics. Without first-hand knowledge, opinions on sophisticated matters are worthless. As slashdotters who regularly tear apart the mass media on technical inaccuracies, we all should know this well
This only confirms what's been known to smart folks for a long time - Google is an advertising company, not a tech company. If (as is not entirely unlikely) we have an economic crash because of Katrina - Google will suffer, badly.
Does the Baton Rouge floodway take enough water out of the riverbed so that the canals and riverbed running through New Orleans could be used to transfer water away from the city?
It can't possibly do so - because you have an ocean at the other end that will happily make up the lack. The floodway is meant to divert floodwaters coming down, not to reduce the normal level of the river.
I took a quick look and I could not find the Baton Rouge canal on the map I am using. Would you please give me an idea of it's starting and ending locations?
I'll try to look it up again but a quick question -- is the Baton Rouge floodway on the north-west side of New Orleans? and does it run south of Lake Salvador?
You can't find it because it's a riverbed/swamp - not a canal. (The Atcha______ river.) The river was dammed decades ago (and the water mostly diverted to the main stream) to prevent it from cutting a new channel from the river to the Gulf - thus allowing the current bed to silt up and destroying the commercial value of New Orleans.
I suggested a floodway that runs below the southern Lakes which would reduce the water levels of the riverbed. Then the riverbed running through New Oreleans could then be used in conjunction with the canals and new dikes/floodways to relieve the water presure from the northern lake.
Um - the two lakes that threaten New Orleans are *North* of the river. There's no place to drain them to *except* the river if you go to the south. There's already drainage to the Southeast into the river below the city. All of that water is essentially at sea level - there's nowhere to drain it *to* really.
I have just quickly looked at some maps of New Orleans and the surrounding area - it seems to me that a floodway starting west of Lutcher and curving south around the bottom of the city would allow water from the Mississippi river to be diverted into a large reservoir or possibly connect the floodway directly into Little Lake and then out into Barataria Bay.
There's already such a floodway near Baton Rouge - it's been in place for decades.
And No, I'm not talking about diverting the whole river - just redirecting water during potential floods. I think it still would be necessary to build dikes for other areas of New Orleans.
It's not the river that's causing the current flooding - it's the Lake. The proximate cause of the flooding is the failure of the walls of the floodways meant to drain said lake.
And why the HELL can a war outside the US affect the STATE'S national guard? Those are supposed to be for the state's defense, not wars in other countries!
That stopped being true about a century ago when our neighbors stopped being threats. Here in the 21st century we have a standing army and transport that can cross the globe (let alone a continent or a state) in hours.
If it were legal for a state that wants it's own forces is free to stop accepting the Federal money that arms, trains, and pays for the National Guard - I suspect almost none would be willing.
Instead of a half TRILLION dollar deficit every year... and MANY TRILLIONS of DEBT that your childred can never hope to pay off... plus thousands dead in a war that has just made you more enemies... perhaps you would have had money available to deal with the New Orlean's problem before the inevitable happened.
Probably not. The systems New Orleans need to really and truly protect themselves will take decades to build. (They've been at it a century already - without what was already built, the flooding would be *much* worse.)
We now stop putting facts into the discussion and return you to your rants.
And why is image comparision even needed in this case? If an object of person size is on the bottom and not moving for more than X seconds (where X is some small number) then something is wrong.
And what exactly is a person size object? The last time I took a dip in a pool my fellow swimmers ranged from a 4 year old to myself. (42 yrs old and 250lbs.) And from what angle are you viewing that person sized object? From near 'straight above' (like the young girl in the clip), many humans appear pretty small - but look at the same person on the level and their apperant size is *quite* different.
Slashdot Mirror
That's 'forecasts', not 'obvious' as you specified in your original message - and hurricane forecasts as notoriously unreliable.
Even so, it was high Cat 4 within a couple of hours and low Cat 4 by the time the main storm hit New Orleans.
And all of those on-call emergency responders would have become refugees or casualties had they flown to New Orleans then... (First assuming that such responders, if they existed at all (which they don't) were actually standing by at the airport. What do you think they could have done in 40 minutes with nothing but what they can carry in their bare hands? (Never mind the fact that the US doesn't have any such first responders.)
In the real world, responders come in after the disaster - flying them into the disaster area beforehand just adds to the body count. Also, before providing relief, they have to see to their own food, water, shelter, etc... Again, otherwise they just add to the body count. Furthermore it take time to establish those support bases, determine where the worst needs are, prioritize according to those needs and the equipments/personell on hand...
None of this is anywhere near as simple as you seem to think.
Nothing happened in the first four days? ROTFL. Only in some fantasy version of the past week. Here in the real world, the helicopters were scattered and working hard across a vast area - there is much more involved here than New Orleans remember.
Before the hurricane, they were moving workers from the rigs with those helicopters. After the hurricane, they were moving workers and inspectors back to the rigs. They weren't available.
That's the belief of folks without an inkling as to the problems and complexities involved, or with a political axe to grind.
Let's see - you have an extremely large and strong building, on higher ground, within walking distance of a large number of the population. Here in the real world, that's a prime choice for a shelter. So far as the roof goes - how in hell is anyone supposed to patch a roof two hundred feer in the air? Get real.
And where is the magic wand kept that allows a private organization, or any organization, to summon nurses from thin air? (Especially on such short notice.) Here in the real world, a hundred odd patients were saved, at the cost of four lives - a dammed impressive accomplishment.
The Governor of Louisiana didn't activate her National Guard units until after the hurricane had passed. The Mayor of New Orleans sent thousands of people to a city owned and provided no food, and no water. (He also had to be practically ordered to evacuate.) Both of them spent more time on Tues-Thurs preening before the cameras than they spent carrying out their responsibilities to their citizens. Niether of them seemed to have carried out their statutory and moral responsibilities worth a damm.
What's insulting to the dead is individuals like yourself who willingly lie about their pain and suffering to further political ends.
New Orleans is one small area in the middle of a *huge* and heavily damaged area - and far from other significant population concentrations.
Yet they started arriving there in force on the third day.
It takes *time* to get relief organized on this scale. It takes *time* to move people and equipment. The President doesn't have some magic wand he can wave and make everything all better - but a lot of people do have very unrealistic expectations as to how fast things can be done.
(And very few people seem to realize the New Orleans is about 2% of the population and about .01% of the land area involved.)
Oh? And what obvious and easy preparations were those? Moving the city? Nearly impossible as I stated before. Building up the levees? That's been in progress for over a century.
The pumps in New Orleans can remove between an inch and two inches of water a day - the net savings in time amounts to about an hour over the last three days. (In fact, it amounts to less than that because most of the pumps discharge into the lake - which is where the flooding is coming from in the first place.)
And compared to the last century - we haven't even hit the average. For hurricanes that hit the US in total - the last ten years have been 60% or *less* of the century average, and that number has been declining across the last ten years.
ROTFLMAO. Let's just start with the Netherlands - then most of the Rhine valley, then most of the Rhone valley, the Paris and the Seine, then Venice and the areas around it. And that's just in Europe!.
Only in some fantasy dream world of yours.
When you can get anyone two years of advance notice of exactly where busses will survive and where the roads will be intact after a major storm - you'll have a point.
Unlike you, I've actually dealt with emergency situations and studied emergency management, and just like President Bush, I'd have done the same thing. The last thing you need in a mass casualty is people who you don't know, can't house, can't support, and don't know how you are going to use in the first place crowding into an already limited area. It takes time to identify what is needed and to get it into place. Those teams are far more useful standing by than sucking up already scarce resources standing around the disaster area.
This isn't a disaster movie - this is real life. Problems aren't solved in time for the last commercial break. Too many people in the US seem to have utterly no clue to just how difficult it is to respond to a disaster of this magnitude. It seems instant gratification extends even to disasters.
Heck, they don't even seem to realize how big a disaster this. Andrew, Hugo, etc... Pikers. Mere wannabees. You could drop both of them into southern Louisiana without them even being noticed. The last time a region this size was devasted to this level... Heck, not since WWII if not before. (The destruction of Tokyo, Berlin, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki together might add up to about what the gulf coast is experiencing today.)
+5 Really Gets It.
Amen brother, Amen.
+5 Really Gets It.
This only confirms what's been known to smart folks for a long time - Google is an advertising company, not a tech company. If (as is not entirely unlikely) we have an economic crash because of Katrina - Google will suffer, badly.
Did it never occur to you that there's some pretty serious economic incentives to make them build in such a crappy place to begin with?
Commerce determines where a city is best built - not safety.
If it were legal for a state that wants it's own forces is free to stop accepting the Federal money that arms, trains, and pays for the National Guard - I suspect almost none would be willing.
We now stop putting facts into the discussion and return you to your rants.
It's not that simple.