My heart goes out to people in the affected areas, but there is this little voice in the back of my head that says 'you built a city under sea-level and used budget contractors to build levies around it-- what were you thinking?!'
Well, as for the quality of the levees, I don't think we can actually fault N.O. for that - they had been awarded a grant to patch them up, IIRC, in 2004, that was rescinded. I don't have a link but a lot of people have been complaining about it and saying this is going to look pretty bad for Bush's administration.
But as for your deeper point about where the city is - a lot of people have been saying things like that, and it's true, and I don't deny that building a city on the Gulf Coast below sea level is stupid... but you have to keep in mind that nearly every place in this country is prone to some kind of natural disaster. The size of that problem seems smaller when it's a risk you live with every day. Just look at the progression in the Midwest from newbie ("the tornado siren went off?! everyone in the basement NOW!!") to moron ("ooh, another tornado, I think I'll go outside and watch!"). And before we castigate people for building in a particular spot I think it's important to come up with some metric for how much worse a given spot is than the others, and to keep in mind that nowhere is actually safe.
no subject
Well, as for the quality of the levees, I don't think we can actually fault N.O. for that - they had been awarded a grant to patch them up, IIRC, in 2004, that was rescinded. I don't have a link but a lot of people have been complaining about it and saying this is going to look pretty bad for Bush's administration.
But as for your deeper point about where the city is - a lot of people have been saying things like that, and it's true, and I don't deny that building a city on the Gulf Coast below sea level is stupid... but you have to keep in mind that nearly every place in this country is prone to some kind of natural disaster. The size of that problem seems smaller when it's a risk you live with every day. Just look at the progression in the Midwest from newbie ("the tornado siren went off?! everyone in the basement NOW!!") to moron ("ooh, another tornado, I think I'll go outside and watch!"). And before we castigate people for building in a particular spot I think it's important to come up with some metric for how much worse a given spot is than the others, and to keep in mind that nowhere is actually safe.