Nice viewpoints. Here a link to some US newscasts on aid from Europe (page 13 EU Nations Rush Storm Aid to U.S.): http://www.washingtonpost.com/
wp...SS_09062005.pdf. Looks like Europe is licking ass, or not?
It's charity, but not quite, what Europe is doing/proposing.
Shipping gasoline to the US when prices are at an alltime high is good business. Both for the US and for Europe.
And professional disaster relief/human rescue teams etc. get paid wether they work or not.
Still, the US seems to need it.
Thanks for these enlightening entries!
I want to forward this one to anyone who thinks that the disaster in Louisiana "couldn't be helped. (The disaster on the Gulf Coast is another matter.)
While I believe the state performed extremely badly in responding to Hurricane Katrina, I think it's important to have a valid understanding of why it was bad and how it could be better. Frank Tiggelaar's letter is revealing, and the 1995 flood episode is worth analysis for comparison, but as I've noted here, I don't think most people are making the effort to do that.
In way, I notice the common reaction among (e.g.) Europeans is very closely analogous to that of apologists for the Bush Administration: while the apologists say, "Look, Rita was an identical situation but Texas 'proves' [sic.] that it can be handled successfully," European op/eds are likely to say "the 1995 Rhine-Meuse incident 'proves' that Europeans can handle a natural disaster successfully."
Digging deeper to find some explanation beyond "national character" seems distasteful to both political categories.
Couldn't agree more.
It's just that most of the solutions (both in flood prevention and in disaster management) seem so obvious.
If you know evactuation might be necessary, how can you not have a plan for people without cars?
If you know the levees can break, how can you not have the things in place you need to fix them rapidly?
After the flood in Zeeland in 1953 it took weeks to close some of the breaches in the dikes. When you close a breach with sandbags etc., the current will increase as the breach gets smaller. The Dutch learned by trial and error that you could build a temporary dike behind the breach (stemming the flow), and they developed caissons with sliding doors that would remain open until the entire breach was filled and then closed all at once. Back in 1953 the Dutch performed poorly because they had to reinvent the wheel (the trick with the temporary dike must have been around since, I don't know, the Egyptians?). It's hard not to think of Santayana in this context.
And in 2005, there were no caissons with sliding doors stored in or near New Orleans.
I agree that you shouldn't compare the success of dealing with something as tame as the 1995 floods with something as fierce as a hurricane. What I find important in the comparison is the amount of planning and inventiveness. I get the feeling that lots of aspects of disaster management post-Katrina didn't just fail, they had been absent.
I posted it somewhere in comments (www.billmon.org?), the Dutch first learned their dikes weren't up to par from a 1929 report. The plan to deal with this was drafted in 1937. It was started in 1950, but they started with the cheap bits and the 1953 storm hit elsewhere. People died because the government pissed away 31 years (1929-1950). But at least the Dutch had some good excuses, such as the Depression, a foreign occupation and war (Germans occupying us), another foreign occupation and war (us occupying Indonesia) and our government having absolutely no money from the 1930s until they finally got started in 1950.
How can a hurricane that's been expected for 60 years or more hit while those in charge still manage to be unprepared? Not just incompetent (that too), but unprepared?
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