Freitag, September 02, 2005

Hurricanes, Floods and Nature

You know, when a politician in one of the Southern States of the USA compared the results of Hurricane Katrin to the tsunami, saying, "This is our own tsunami." I thought at first, stupid. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the tsunami of Dec. 2004.

At the time, it wasn't really clear what exactly had happened in New Orleans and Biloxi, etc. A storm had passed, people were in shelters, electricity was gone. But everyone expected that life would return to normal.

Now we hear in the news that New Orleans is being evacuated for the next two to three months! Everything is flooded. Nothing is working: water, gas, sewer, electricity. The people who decided to ride out the storm are still there, looting. Well, what do you expect?

How can you buy food? If all the supermarkets are closed?

What about toilet paper?

What about aspirin and other medications?

You've been wearing the same clothes in the water for two days. What do you do? Well, the shelves in K-Mart still have dry things. As there are no cashiers, you just take them, right?

The United States is a huge, rich country. We can send in National troops. We can evacuate the people per helicopter. We can set up shelters in stadiums, and send busses to take them there.

In Indonesia? India? They don't have the infrastrucure to do all that. So, it really isn't fair to compare Hurricane Katrina to the tsunami of Dec. 2004.

On the other hand, there have been many tsunamis in the last decades in Japan, and even in the U.S. They weren't too bad, so we really don't remember them. The countries were better prepared. Hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, volcano eruption...

Well, this time it was the poorest area in the U.S. I'm only speculating. Not discriminating. The houses aren't built the way they are in Vermont or Michigan or Idaho. They can't afford to.

How many storms and hurricanes have passed over the region in the last 100 years? Almost too many to count. This time, it was a catastrophe.

How many people were killed? 100 or 1,000?

I'm beginning to think: "our own tsunami," is okay to say. We can't compare it to Southeast Asia, but the tragedy is much the same.

The flooding in Europe has receeded, and we have great weather right now.

And my mother-in-law says, "Oh, how horrible, it's so hot..."

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