keld feldspar wrote:I think it's patently unfair that 1 disaster has come to define disaster aftermath in the US...
Only for 1 poster who desired more to make a particular black community look bad than to tell the truth. Merely venting bile.
After the Loma Prieta quake my hometown (which was the second worst-hit area after Watsonville ) was really wonderful. People took care of each other and got to work to re-build with great care and compassion. I am certain this has been so for areas struck by fire, floods, tornados &c in many places in the US.
yrs,
rubato
I didnt realize Queensland and Christchurch had large dispossessed black communities? I need to travel more.
Aside: we or more correctly I should point out that the US as a general rule does not get 'disasters' to the degree other places do. WE dont have any real good volcanos downtown anywhere (damn!) and our earthquakes just dont seem to kill em by the dozens of thousands.
WE do get lots of inconveniences however....snow storms that melt a week later, power blackouts, high gas prices etc....which cause the same 'katrina-like' bitching. The Japanese show remarkable ability to handle the curveball really really well. But then again, Im responding to someone who once complained like he was forcibly castrated for having to follow an RV in the hills of oregon for 10 miles. But on the bright side, he added the term 'ground pounder' to my vocab. Im looking at a couple Class-Cs today and tomorrow, mebbe I think vacation will be 'seek out his car and drive in front of it'....)
I was sickened by the comments I read. Not just because of the revenge theme - that the tsunami was payback for Pearl Harbor - but by the incredible ignorance of the people posting. That the Japanese "nuked" Pearl Harbor; that those 'krauts' deserved the tsunami for bombing Pearl Harbor; that Justin Timberlake is the source of the adage, "what goes around, comes around."
We really do live in an Idiocracy.
Obviously the learned folks on this board are all very aware that we nuked Japan, twice. Yes, Pearl Harbor was awful - but as LJ points out, most of the folks suffering in Japan at present weren't even alive at the time.
And for all those idiots bitching about us sending aid to Japan; Japan sent a great deal of aid to the victims of Katrina.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
~ Carl Sagan
quaddriver wrote:
I didnt realize Queensland and Christchurch had large dispossessed black communities? I need to travel more.
That is actually precisely the point. It didn't matter who was in the communities in Queensland, Christchurch and now Japan, help was given unconditionally by the rest of the community.
In Katrina, you seemed to focus on the large dispossessed black community and NOT help unconditionally. At least that is the way it appeared over here.
Getting back to the subject of the thread, I'm struck by the use of inflammatory verbage to spice up the perceived dangers of the situation.
"...workers at the plant frantically trying to restart the pumps..."
Frantically?
I read of the "risky" maneuver of pouring water on the outside of the containment shell. Risky? Might get it wet? Might turn to steam?
On 60 minutes last night they interviewed an old Gent who had lived about (I think it was) ten miles away from the plant for 50 years, and now he doesn't think he will ever be able to live there again.
And the relevance is...he's grossly misinformed? His fear is patently ridiculous, yet the good folks let it sit there as though it was a fact.
I swear the source of most peoples' understanding of this thing is the movie, "The China Syndrome." In that movie one of the characters said that if there was a meltdown, I believe it was something like, "...an area the size of Pennsylvania will be uninhabitable for fifty thousand years!"
This was and is total poppycock, but it seems to have stuck in peoples' minds. Otherwise, why the total fixation on the possiblity of a "meltdown." The worst case scenario is it will cost a lot of money and time to clean up. Nobody outside the plant grounds will be affected at all. "Deadly radiation" will not get into the water supply, the air, or anything else as the result of a meltdown, but the perception that is being fed by the media is that it would be a catastrophe for the ages.
I think it is very unfortunate that the whole US gets lumped in with the Katrina lot.
After Katrina we had huge disasters in various parts of the country which involved flooding. Huge numbers of folks were displaced and lost everything. Guess what? They did not whine or loot either, they just got busy rebuilding.
Funny how that never comes to anyone's mind: Rather we get to be judged by the worst example instead of the best.
Edited once to add "loot" and edited a second time to explain the earlier edit.
Last edited by @meric@nwom@n on Mon Mar 21, 2011 1:50 pm, edited 2 times in total.
In August 2008, the governor estimated that damage to the state was as high as $10 billion; nearly a third of the damage was to agricultural buildings, acreage, stored grain and equipment — between $2.3 and $3 billion. During the flood, 16 percent of the state’s 25 million tillable acres were under water.
Whole towns were covered in water, including Palo, northwest of Cedar Rapids, and Oakville, in southeast Iowa. 125 miles of the state’s roads were washed out.
The floods displaced 40,000 Iowans, 24,000 of them in Cedar Rapids, where the Cedar River flooded 9.2 square miles, covered 1,300 city blocks and damaged 832 businesses and 3,984 residences. The University of Iowa, Iowa City, sustained more than $231 million in damage from the flooded Iowa River.
As a testament to Iowa’s strength and perseverance, more than 50,000 Iowans volunteered to help their neighbors sandbag, clean-up or rebuild. Recovery is ongoing.
dgs49 wrote:Getting back to the subject of the thread, I'm struck by the use of inflammatory verbage to spice up the perceived dangers of the situation.
"...workers at the plant frantically trying to restart the pumps..."
Frantically?
What would you prefer?
"... workers at the plant lackadaisically trying to restart the pumps ... "
"... workers at the plant nonchalantly trying to restart the pumps ... "
My bet is that if you were one of those workers, you'd be pretty freakin' frantic, too.
I swear the source of most peoples' understanding of this thing is the movie, "The China Syndrome." In that movie one of the characters said that if there was a meltdown, I believe it was something like, "...an area the size of Pennsylvania will be uninhabitable for fifty thousand years!"
Nuclear meltdowns are like magnesium fires on aircraft carriers.
The best way to contain them is to prevent them.
With a meltdown the problem is the core will be hot (very hot) until it reaches ground water then it explodes, creating steam and smaller particles, adnauseum. Fissionable materials have half lives that are measured in epochs.
What's the distance to human habitation around Chernobal? That wasn't a meltdown that was containment, and will have to be revisited every 30 to 40 years or so.
Concrete ain't forever...
Sometimes it seems as though one has to cross the line just to figger out where it is
However, this was not a meltdown, and has come nowhere near one. The tsunami knocked out the cooling systems in the reactors, which necessitated pumping in seawater to keep the cores cool. The struggle is in manually bringing in enough water, while trying to get the pumps working again;
loCAtek wrote:However, this was not a meltdown, and has come nowhere near one. The tsunami knocked out the cooling systems in the reactors, which necessitated pumping in seawater to keep the cores cool. The struggle is in manually bringing in enough water, while trying to get the pumps working again;
That is actually precisely the point. It didn't matter who was in the communities in Queensland, Christchurch and now Japan, help was given unconditionally by the rest of the community.
In Katrina, you seemed to focus on the large dispossessed black community and NOT help unconditionally. At least that is the way it appeared over here.
The community didn't even try and help itself, it wanted everyone else to help while they watched.
The community didn't even try and help itself, it wanted everyone else to help while they watched.
Please oldr, when you have nothing, what can you do to help? Fly your own helicopters to evacuate people from the roofs? And FWIW, I saw many community members help each other in evacuating,pulling boats and other floats through 5-6 feet of water, bringing supplies around, checking on those without families, etc. Hardly watching. And despite the grandiose promises of the feds who insisted on coordinating everything, help kept on being delayed again and again, overseen by a horse's ass who W insisted was "doing a hell of a job".
According to the European Commission, one week after the disaster, on September 4, 2005, the United States officially asked the European Union for emergency help, asking for blankets, emergency medical kits, water and 500,000 food rations for victims. Help proposed by EU member states was coordinated through their crisis center. The British presidency of the EU functioned as contact with the USA.
I was surprised, even Afghanistan contributed to help the NO victims.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”
I have found it fascinating that UK reporting has been heavily biassed towards the nuclear power stations - relatively little has been said about the thousands who have died and are suffering due to the tsunami. And as Jim says, it says a lot about their society that they have bourne this with tremendous fortitude. Respect.
If a man speaks in the forest and there are no women around to hear is he still wrong?
The community didn't even try and help itself, it wanted everyone else to help while they watched.
Please oldr, when you have nothing, what can you do to help? Fly your own helicopters to evacuate people from the roofs? And FWIW, I saw many community members help each other in evacuating,pulling boats and other floats through 5-6 feet of water, bringing supplies around, checking on those without families, etc. Hardly watching. And despite the grandiose promises of the feds who insisted on coordinating everything, help kept on being delayed again and again, overseen by a horse's ass who W insisted was "doing a hell of a job".
In the New Orleans, fishing being a popular activity there are quite a few boat retailers. I heard of no attempt of the city of new Orleans to requisition those boats. Perhaps the city lacked the authority for such an action. But I don’t believe that the city requested it from the state. Both entities’ acted in a disgraceful manner; to slow to act and when they did act they gave the impression of being mostly helpless buffoons begging and waiting for the federal government to do their job for them. Blanco deserved to be replaced in the next election; she delayed federal assistance by her failure to make a decision, but the mayor of New Orleans was reelected.
The primary responsibility was that of state and local officials; they blew it and both were democrats, but receive no criticism form the national media.
I expected to be placed in an air force combat position such as security police, forward air control, pararescue or E.O.D. I would have liked dog handler. I had heard about the dog Nemo and was highly impressed. “SFB” is sad I didn’t end up in E.O.D.
