The way that the municipal and federal government have handled the city of New Orleans after the disaster is a disaster initself. It is a joke. The city of New Orleans is so far below sea level that the possibility of flooding from strorms is inevitable. So many experts knew that this was going to happen, and the city officials essentially left the citizens to drown. It is a joke the way that the New Orleans people were prepared for disaster in terms of protection and evacuation. The question of whether or not the amount of damage that occurred could have been prevented is in no doubt in my mind 100% that it could have been prevented. The levee system along the Gulf Coast was only enforced to stop category three hurricanes, where Hurricane Katrina was a category 5. The worse thing is that this was not a surprise hurricane, as so many people predicted this storm coming. There have also been several hurricanes to hit New Orleans over the past few decades, and for the city levee's not to be built to protect from category 5 hurricanes is non-excusable. And even now while rebuilding the levee's after Katrina, they are only building them to category 3 hurricane once again. The fact that the city has no money to rebuild these levee's is also a joke, as they rebuilt the NFL stadium immediately, and Canal street, one of the largest tourist attractions has also been rebuilt. They are putting the joke tourism industry of New Orleans as first priority and leaving thousands of people homeless and with nothing.
The federal government should quit it with these billion dollar bail-out investments into large corporations like the auto-industry, and put the money into restoring the city of New Orleans and other cities along the Gulf Coast. They cannot allow this to happen again, and should never have happened in the first place. Whatta Joke.
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I couldn't agree more. Especially knowing they're in an area that gets hurricanes on the regular. What were they waiting for to rebuild it? Apparently this. And I suppose one could argue the point that the reason they are investing in the tourism sector is in order to get the money they need to sufficiently restore the city to normal but come on, are they really smart enough to use this excuse? Not that it's a good one, but it'd be the best they'd have. Either way, I'm sure they could have taken a bit more out of that budget to do more than what they're doing now/have done.
ReplyDeleteI would agree with you about questioning why they would chose to build category 3 levies despite amply evidence that they will be hit with storms of this magnitude or worse. Isn't it better to be over prepared rather than under? I wonder if there is some structural or architectural reasoning behind this decision that is not purely financial, because if there is I would like to hear it. If the decision was made on financial reasoning, well just look at the extreme economic costs of repairing obviously building to a higher grade of safety would be preferable to the extreme conditions that were happening after the story and are still happening to this day.
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