The Tsunami and the Hurricane
Aug. 30th, 2005 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynSince Sunday night, when I first heard that Katrina had been upgraded to a Category 5 storm and could quite possibly obliterate New Orleans, I've been thinking about the tsunami that smashed into south Asia last December.
I gather I'm not the only one:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
howardtayler castigates Mayor A. J. Holloway of Biloxi for saying "This is our tsunami."
And it's not, of course. Katrina telegraphed her course much better than the tsunami did, giving much more advance warning. Katrina didn't affect nearly as large an area as the tsunami, which swept over thousands of miles of coastline.
What I really keep thinking about are the lives lost. We know Katrina has claimed 60+ lives already, in Louisiana and Florida and Mississippi. That figure will probably rise to the hundreds in the final count, but almost certainly not top a thousand.
The tsunami of December claimed so many lives, in so many ways, that it's hard even to find a definite number. Even now, nine months later, the figures range from 150,000 to 283,000.
Or more.
I remember the bank secretary saying "There are always disasters happening" and thinking "Not like this, there aren't."
And part of me can't help feeling that this vast discrepancy in deaths isn't all about Katrina being a less powerful disaster, one that was visible from a greater distance.
You can predict tsunamis are coming, too. Did you know that? Hawaii has an early-warning system that has allowed them to evacuate to high ground in the face of past tsunamis. (And triggered a few false alarms, but that's a comparatively small price to pay.)
A seismologist in Thailand had predicted years earlier that a tsunami would hit the country, and agitated for such an early-warning system. He was a laughingstock before December 26. They've taken him a lot more seriously since.
It's not all about nature picking on Asia and leaving us alone.
It's about a nation being so wealthy that the vast majority of New Orleans residents were able to flee by car. Being so wealthy that they have massive levees and flood pumps designed to protect them from disasters. That houses are built to rigorous enough building codes that even those who were too poor or fragile to leave still mostly escaped unharmed physically. What kind of disaster do you think a hut in Indonesia can withstand, compared to what a house in New Orleans can? And even New Orleans' building codes aren't as demanding as those of hurricane-prone Florida. If Louisiana got more hurricanes, they'd have suffered even less damage.
Even less. And don't think I mean just the cost of "things": thirty of those deaths in Biloxi were caused by the collapse of one apartment building. A more durable building probably would have saved them.
I can't help thinking that even if nature threw something as awful and terrifying as that tsunami at America, or Canada, or Europe, it wouldn't be anything like as devastating as it was in south Asia, in some of the poorest countries in the world.
Our wealth does more than by us pretty trinkets and Internet access and air conditioning: it saves our lives. In all kinds of ways.
It even saved people in Asia; probably hundreds of thousands more would have perished to contaminated water, exposure and disease if the wealthy nations of the world had not pumped in support, in the form of cash, emergency teams, and well-trained manpower.
Sometimes I think "Aren't we prosperous enough, as a nation, that it doesn't matter if the GDP grows or shrinks by a few points? What does all this money get us?"
Today, I am thinking about 200,000 dead in Asia, and the tiny fraction of that who perished to Katrina. And I am wondering: How much richer would we have to be to save them all?
I gather I'm not the only one:
howardtayler castigates Mayor A. J. Holloway of Biloxi for saying "This is our tsunami."And it's not, of course. Katrina telegraphed her course much better than the tsunami did, giving much more advance warning. Katrina didn't affect nearly as large an area as the tsunami, which swept over thousands of miles of coastline.
What I really keep thinking about are the lives lost. We know Katrina has claimed 60+ lives already, in Louisiana and Florida and Mississippi. That figure will probably rise to the hundreds in the final count, but almost certainly not top a thousand.
The tsunami of December claimed so many lives, in so many ways, that it's hard even to find a definite number. Even now, nine months later, the figures range from 150,000 to 283,000.
Or more.
I remember the bank secretary saying "There are always disasters happening" and thinking "Not like this, there aren't."
And part of me can't help feeling that this vast discrepancy in deaths isn't all about Katrina being a less powerful disaster, one that was visible from a greater distance.
You can predict tsunamis are coming, too. Did you know that? Hawaii has an early-warning system that has allowed them to evacuate to high ground in the face of past tsunamis. (And triggered a few false alarms, but that's a comparatively small price to pay.)
A seismologist in Thailand had predicted years earlier that a tsunami would hit the country, and agitated for such an early-warning system. He was a laughingstock before December 26. They've taken him a lot more seriously since.
It's not all about nature picking on Asia and leaving us alone.
It's about a nation being so wealthy that the vast majority of New Orleans residents were able to flee by car. Being so wealthy that they have massive levees and flood pumps designed to protect them from disasters. That houses are built to rigorous enough building codes that even those who were too poor or fragile to leave still mostly escaped unharmed physically. What kind of disaster do you think a hut in Indonesia can withstand, compared to what a house in New Orleans can? And even New Orleans' building codes aren't as demanding as those of hurricane-prone Florida. If Louisiana got more hurricanes, they'd have suffered even less damage.
Even less. And don't think I mean just the cost of "things": thirty of those deaths in Biloxi were caused by the collapse of one apartment building. A more durable building probably would have saved them.
I can't help thinking that even if nature threw something as awful and terrifying as that tsunami at America, or Canada, or Europe, it wouldn't be anything like as devastating as it was in south Asia, in some of the poorest countries in the world.
Our wealth does more than by us pretty trinkets and Internet access and air conditioning: it saves our lives. In all kinds of ways.
It even saved people in Asia; probably hundreds of thousands more would have perished to contaminated water, exposure and disease if the wealthy nations of the world had not pumped in support, in the form of cash, emergency teams, and well-trained manpower.
Sometimes I think "Aren't we prosperous enough, as a nation, that it doesn't matter if the GDP grows or shrinks by a few points? What does all this money get us?"
Today, I am thinking about 200,000 dead in Asia, and the tiny fraction of that who perished to Katrina. And I am wondering: How much richer would we have to be to save them all?
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no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 01:23 am (UTC)I admire you so much.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 03:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 01:30 pm (UTC)That last line is really powerful--it just stays with me.
Thanks again.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 05:39 pm (UTC)Sure, that's fine. Just include a link back to the original post ( http://www.livejournal.com/users/rowyn/212662.html ) with it, if you send it via email.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 05:03 am (UTC)So I suppose you're even more right. Our tech did detect it, but their infrastructure was too poor for us to even warn them. A tragedy. Those guys must have been devastated.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 05:09 am (UTC)I think that as appalling as the human cost will end up being, the cost in... just stuff will be greater, and will eventually have its own human toll. New Orleans' decades-long battle against nature may have been definitively lost. Everything that tens or hundreds of thousands of people need to resume their lives is broken and under dirty, verminous water. I'm probably going to have a weather refugee showing up on my doorstep -- someone I care about very much and whose company I'll be happy of, so I'm not suffering at all, but finding a place for all those people is going to be a burden to everyone nearby. That place is going to end up being at least semi-permanent for most. There just isn't much to go back to. I wonder if this isn't the greatest American disaster since the Depression.
Just musing out loud, forgive me...
no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 06:28 pm (UTC)Cities have been leveled before; both Galveston (by hurricane) and Seattle (by fire) were utterly destroyed around the turn of the century. But it's not something that's happened in America in many decades, so far as I know, and of course we've got so many more people in the country today that having it happen now naturally affects a lot more people. :/
I keep thinking of odd silver linings. Many people have worried that the real estate market is in a bubble for the last several years, and there's been a recent slowdown in sales of new-homes, suggesting that there is (or at least, was) a glut of new-home construction. Home sales are a major driver of the economy; a weakness in this market will trigger problems with the entire rest of the economy. I'm not sure if that incipient glut will help the displaced residents or not; I guess it partly depends on how many of them are willing to be displaced any farther, or longer, than necessary. But an overcapacity for construction is certainly going to be useful for the next year or two. :/
I'm glad you'll be able to take Peggy in. Good luck to all of you. *hug*
no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 07:08 pm (UTC)I hope that the rebuilding is smart rather than overambitious: as tragic as it is, the smart money was on something like Katrina happening sooner or later -- the city that Peggy grew up in was essentially locked in a conflict with nature, and nature always wins that kind of battle eventually. Let nature take its course, encourage the growth of some wetlands and islands to protect the city from storms, figure out how to make a truce with the river and the weather, which bids to be only more dangerous in the next few decades.
Anyway, I ramble. Thanks for the good wishes.
no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 07:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-08-31 07:31 am (UTC)Two aspects of this occur to me. They each showed hope for the future, in a sense, that was not borne out by events:
-- In 1900 low-lying Galveston was essentially destroyed by a hurricane; it had been predicted that the four great cities of the US would be New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Galveston. Galveston, with more than ten thousand killed directly (and estimates totalling 26,000 ultimately out of a population of only 38,000), was out of the running.
They decided to rebuild -- and the entire city was raised 17 feet on ground dredged and pumped from the Gulf of Mexico. They were hit again, after this, and lost a comparatively improved 2,000 people.
New Orleans observed this, noted their own below-sea-level construction, and decided it wasn't worth the trouble. For a hundred years, they've been right.
Hmm... Wikipedia has it.
-- In 2002 the United Nations proposed building a tsunami warning system for the Indian Ocean like the one built many years earlier in the Pacific. There are conflicting stories on what happened next, and why this didn't get funded, but the UN now says that the countries involved showed no interest. (I've seen other docs that indicate that the UN didn't rank it of high importance. Both are belivable, and may even both be true.) This time, the disinterested parties only had two years...
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