we interrupt this travelogue...

...to bring you some disjointed thoughts on Hurricane Katrina.

Sylviaaaaaaaaaaaaaah

First, those of you who knew that Sylvia P moved to Baton Rouge will be relieved to hear that she is fine. I provide herewith our email discussion for your entertainment.

on 8/30/05 6:03 AM, [birdfarm] wrote:

>> Are you alive? I'll call you when it's a reasonable hour. Yeesh.
>> Welcome to Louisiana.

[Sylvia responded]:

> Yes, I'm fine. Baton Rouge has some power outages (not me) and a lot of
> debris, but we weren't in the path of the real hurricane. I did have an
> awful lot of rain water coming into my apartment, though, much of it on top
> of my television.

[birdfarm responded to that]:

Glad you're okay. How did rainwater get into your apartment? Are you on the top floor, or did it blow in through a big hole in the wall, or what? And why didn't you move your television? Inquiring minds want to know.

No response as yet. But I'll keep you posted.

Duh, I never thought of that...

There was a guy on TV saying "we didn't evacuate because we don't have anyplace to go." Until I saw that, I used to regard the folks who waved for help from their rooftops with some derision--"Stupid person, why didn't s/he evacuate when s/he was told to do so?"

But I realized it never occurred to me to wonder what a poor family would do if they didn't have relatives to go to--or didn't have a car, or didn't have money for another means of transport, or if all the busses had stopped running, etc. I mean, what are they going to do--walk through wind & rain until they figure they're on a big enough hill, and then what? Just sit down and hope the wind doesn't blow the baby away?

Obviously, it also didn't occur to the state of Louisiana to wonder what a poor family would do, and that's what pisses me off.

I mean, even if the state has no sympathy or consideration for poor people, consider how much more money they're going to spend helicoptering people off of rooftops, than they would have spent on a decent evacuation plan.

In Japan...

In Japan, before the typhoon that hit the night before we left, the police rounded people up in vulnerable areas of Shizuoka (where it hit worst) and took them to a school gym somewhere. It appeared that basic meals were even provided. The news had the evacuees on TV... a grandmother said she was a bit annoyed at the inconvenience, but commented that "It's just one night, so I guess it's no big deal."

So when the vulnerable areas of Shizuoka flooded, nobody died, and there were no dramatic helicopter rescues off rooftops. (The only person who died was smashed by a billboard that blew over... what a way to go).

OK, granted the typhoon was smaller than Katrina, but after being in Japan for three weeks I am quite confident that they could have handled a bigger typhoon in a similarly efficient manner. But I'll come back to that in a later post.

But c'mon, people, it just doesn't have to be so haphazard. How crazy is it to have 10,000 people in a sports arena without any running water--including people who need serious medical attention? How crazy is it for a city 8 feet below sea level to be so ill-prepared for something like this?

How many people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are going to die needlessly? It's insane.