New Orleans = Fucked

myk said:

Yeah, I bet they're gay and godless, to boot.

But then again, perhaps we should talk next time, when your city is finally destroyed by a catastrophe. Perhaps an earthquake, a meteor, or even Homer's misplaced donuts box. Then from experience you could tell us how much better you behaved than other assholes in a similar situation.

I would have left long before it ever got there. It isn't just looting, I mean I was disappointed by the looting, but shooting at the rescue helicopters, someone killing a cop because of looting and visa versa, breaking into hospitals to steal drugs forcing doctors to hide themselves in any way they can, etc. I don't want to believe that's how bad it's gotten, much less it being any worse. That is why I'm appalled.

i personally dont mind if people take what they need, like food, water, and whatever special things they also require, but when people take advantage of the situation to go out and steal televisions, etc, and cause even more chaos, thats the problem.

I think the guy wading thru four feet of water with a 70lb. television has far greater problems than worrying about food for survival.

Ralphis said:
I can't really be bothered looking for it, but they mentioned it on the news the other night. I believe it may have been in the 70s.

In January 1953 large parts of one of the provinces of the Netherlands (Zeeland) was flooded after dykes broke during a massive storm surge. We call it the "Watersnoodramp", which very roughly translates to "surge disaster". It killed 1835 people. The same storm flooded Essex (GB) as well, killing 300 more.

The current events in the USA pale in comparison to that one, in terms of human lives lost. But of course, Americans make the comparison anyway ;)

Piezo said:
I would have left long before it ever got there.

Does it matter what you think you would do? Not much. What you would do would depend on many factors, starting from being someone who was there.

There are always thieves and people in marginal and hostile situations, in any city. The area has been destroyed by a natural disaster, all normal economical and social activity, including standard authority, have been subverted by the events. Why would you expect brimming solidarity and tempered organization in a culture where competitiveness and success are in the foreground, when a whole area has been devastated?

I don't want to believe that's how bad it's gotten, much less it being any worse. That is why I'm appalled.

Belief is a lie in place of observation; in an unusual event one would better consider the circumstances and judge according to the social conditions events take place in.

There is no place for one's "beliefs," which are going to be there anyway, never mind if we base our observations on them. The different media outlets present their "beliefs" by pinpointing what they consider newsworthy, presenting it in the way they consider it best; are we going to take that for granted and sit there "appalled" or whatever, or will we sit back, observe and make relations of what is happening and the workings of society?

Of course, we aren't even involved, so we can sit there and idly be moved by what we see on TV; but even then one would think we'd use the opportunity to observe and not judge full-on through partial visions and preconceptions.

There are two things you can do here, basically. Complain about behavior related to the event, or observe what could or could not be done to sort things out, and how it's turning out. As idle observers, we can glipse things about how society works; but we can't simply judge others through our veiled TV eyes. We can pretent to, but it's still bullshit.

The one thing all disaster movies have in common is showing the "heroes" foraging for food, opening malls and supermarkets and taking what they need. I remember seeing some photo's on yahoo news the other day of the disaster, one pic showed a white man and woman carrying stocks back from a trip out, underneath the caption read "Disaster victims find food"
A later pics shows two black guys doing the same, with the caption "Looting is rife in New Orleans"
Whites "find", blacks "loot" it seems

Mordeth said:

In January 1953 large parts of one of the provinces of the Netherlands (Zeeland) was flooded after dykes broke during a massive storm surge. We call it the "Watersnoodramp", which very roughly translates to "surge disaster". It killed 1835 people. The same storm flooded Essex (GB) as well, killing 300 more.

The current events in the USA pale in comparison to that one, in terms of human lives lost. But of course, Americans make the comparison anyway ;)

There's a possibility that more people died in the Kathrina disaster than in the Netherlands in 1953. A lot of bodies have yet to be collected and some officials believe that well over a 1000 people died. In any case, property damage is on a much larger scale now, compared to the flood of 1953.

I can't believe the state of Louisiana deemed such a cheap system of levees sufficient for protecting a city with over a million citizens. There would have been so much less damage and casualties if the levees were anywhere near decent.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/katrina/looters.asp

^heh I saw that picture on ytmnd only an hour ago, what a coincidence, although katrina is all the hype on ytmnd right now.

heh yeah I've seen it also there, but i think its just one of those pics that started floating around the net

myk said:

There are two things you can do here, basically. Complain about behavior related to the event, or observe what could or could not be done to sort things out, and how it's turning out. As idle observers, we can glipse things about how society works; but we can't simply judge others through our veiled TV eyes. We can pretent to, but it's still bullshit.

I'm pretty sure I know what I would do since I've had three hurricanes come through here last year. If I lived in New Orleans, I would be approximately eight hours away from my old house in Texas. Being given time off of work to prepare for the hurricane I would very likely have quickly taken advantage of the situation to go home. But either way it's all hearsay.
I'm not really complaining about what's going on, I'm just reacting to what I've been told and what little I've seen on TV. What I've been told is of course what other people have seen on TV, so of course I can't draw good conclusions about the people there based on our heavily filtered (and apparently racist :P) media.

I just watched some more news. Apparantly the deathtoll is much, much higher than the official 59 people. They expect "thousands" of bodies to be recovered from flooded area's.

Watching the news further, I see two disasters... one was the hurricane itself, but the second disaster is humanmade. I'm talking about the extremely poor response to the hurricane and its aftermath. There really is no excuse.

Okay, this is really eerie:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/katrina/foretold.asp

cartoon

Good 3d game

Danarchy said:

Okay, this is really eerie:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/katrina/foretold.asp

Yeah, Howard Stern went on about all that back in 2002. You'd think people can predict the future.

Up to 40,000 expected dead :(
http://www.t-g.com/story/1116806.html

I feel terribly sorry for the people of New Orleans. Its awful.

And George Bush is a fucking faggort! It took him about a week to get off his ass and do something about it! Fuckin bastard!

Its hard to change something that has been built up over a couple hundred years. they knew this could/was going to happen. discovery channel had something on about new orleans a year or so ago. it was described as "an engineering disaster waiting to happen" or something to that effect (the building of the levees/gradual sinking of new orleans over this last century) but the main thing that stuck out in most peoples minds (from what i gather) is that they escaped hurricane tragedy several times in the last decade alone and it was getting harder to fathom something of this magnitude actualy happening, witch it ultimately did and now we have the end result, the reality of it.

fodders said:

Up to 40,000 expected dead :(
http://www.t-g.com/story/1116806.html

Oh my god! That's more than 911 times 43.9!

Heinrich said:

I feel terribly sorry for the people of New Orleans. Its awful.

And George Bush is a fucking faggort! It took him about a week to get off his ass and do something about it! Fuckin bastard!

YEA WHAT A FUCKING IDIOT

ITS A SHAME THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CANT ASSIST UNLESS THE STATE ASKS FOR AID, WHICH LOUSIANNA DIDN'T UNTIL 3 DAYS AFTER THE FLOOD. WHAT A FUCKING COCK SUCJKER

fodders said:

Up to 40,000 expected dead :(
http://www.t-g.com/story/1116806.html

Yeah, but if you remember correctly, they ordered like 10-20 thousand body bags when the World Trade Center went down, and "only" 2-3 thousand people ended up dead.

Ralphis said:

YEA WHAT A FUCKING IDIOT

ITS A SHAME THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CANT ASSIST UNLESS THE STATE ASKS FOR AID, WHICH LOUSIANNA DIDN'T UNTIL 3 DAYS AFTER THE FLOOD. WHAT A FUCKING COCK SUCJKER

In its Sunday edition, the Washington Post quoted a "senior Bush official" who said that "as of Saturday [Louisiana Governor] Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency." This, of course, was meant to make the governor look foolish and spread the blame around for the disastrous response to the disaster, though it was hard to imagine on what grounds the newspaper would quote an unnamed source in this case.
"A Sept. 4 article on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina incorrectly said that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) had not declared a state of emergency. She declared an emergency on Aug. 26." http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001054596

And now there is a possiblity of yet another hit in the same place. as of (9-07-05) as I make this post. I hope not. I'm talking about T.S Ophelia which could become a hurricane soon. As of now they expect it to cross Florida and be in the Gulf of Mexico. We will see if it makes it anywhere near New Orleans.

Ralphis said:

YEA WHAT A FUCKING IDIOT

ITS A SHAME THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CANT ASSIST UNLESS THE STATE ASKS FOR AID, WHICH LOUSIANNA DIDN'T UNTIL 3 DAYS AFTER THE FLOOD. WHAT A FUCKING COCK SUCJKER

At least cock suckers give pleasure.

Governor Blanco's letter to President Bush requesting Federal assistance due to Hurricane Katrina.

Scuba Steve said:

and the national guard, which is capable of mobilization and deployment in a matter of hours should have been ready to deliver at least 2 days later at the most. Instead it's been... what four, five days?

Bush sent most of the National Guard to Iraq to fight his "war" for him even though it totally defeated the purpose of the National Guard. Whether or not that should make a difference regarding mobilization speed I don't know, but just saying.

Mordeth said:

The current events in the USA pale in comparison to that one, in terms of human lives lost. But of course, Americans make the comparison anyway ;)

Well, everyone's already pointed out that up to ten times as many people may have died as a result from Katrina, so I won't bother beating that horse any more.

But I will say that the comparison that irks me is when people call this America's "tsunami." The tsunami killed 250,000 or so people, but since they were mostly from third world countries, they didn't matter as much I guess.

Kid Airbag said:
Well, everyone's already pointed out that up to ten times as many people may have died as a result from Katrina, so I won't bother beating that horse any more.

At time of writing official bodycount was still set at 59, so Americans comparing that to the deathtoll of one of my nation's natural disasters ticked me off a bit. Just FYI.

Now the mayor of New Orleans claims there might be as many as 10,000 victims. Mindboggling. This entire situation pretty much sums up what is wrong with the USA. I could point this out in detail, but I'm currently a bit too worried about Ty and his family to do that.

Mordeth said:

At time of writing official bodycount was still set at 59, so Americans comparing that to the deathtoll of one of my nation's natural disasters ticked me off a bit. Just FYI.

At the time of your writing BBC was reporting 100 dead in a nursing home and 30 dead somewhere else.

fodders said:
At the time of your writing BBC was reporting 100 dead in a nursing home and 30 dead somewhere else.

That's still not quite 1835. Plus I based myself off CNN. Of course, now they really have a point there, do they :/

Before your post, the mayor of New Orleans had already made his "Minimum, hundreds. Most likely, thousands" statement. And IIRC, the number of confirmed dead in the state of Mississippi was already over 100 (and expected to climb considerably).

In the early days of a mass-casualty event, the number of confirmed dead will never be too meaningful as an indication of the final death toll.