Development and disaster: Katrina IS as bad as the Asian Tsunami

[HamdenRice]

By saying that the flooding of New Orleans is as bad as the Asian tsunami, I just want to remind people of one of the most important lessons of disaster relief and disaster planning that the international community has learned over the last 20 years: namely that equally devastating natural disasters have unequal consequences depending on the level of infrastructure development.

Obviously hundreds of thousands were killed across Asia in the tsuname, and we hope that only a few score were killed on the Gulf Coast. But the difference was the infrastructure, not necessarily in the actual physical, natural event. In fact they were remarkably similar to the extent that flooding caused the most damage, and arguably Katrina was worse, because it involved a horrifically powerful and destructive storm before the flood.

Could you imagine Katrina, the levee breaks and flooding occurring in an area where people lived in stick, mud and thatch homes; where there was no satellite weather system; where the mayor was not in a position to know 24 hours in advance to call for complete evacuation; where there were no television, radio, or internet to get the message to the vulnerable population; where there were no roads for people to drive away on, and where few people had cars; where the people too poor to get away did not have a structure like the Superdome; where there was no police force to guide the evacuating population out, direct traffic and shepherd people who could not get away into the safest structures; where there was no capacity to helicopter stranded people from the rooftops of homes?

If Gulf Coast citizens did not live in a developed society with a strong public sector and public infracture, easily hundreds of thousands would have been killed.

So next time some RW freeper suggests we need to cut public expenditure just imagine what disaster a publicly impoverished society would have faced in the circumstances of a hurricane like Katrina.

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[geomon666]

1. The water continues to rise in the French Quarter

It's half way up cars now.

[Eloriel]

2. I had a sense yesterday that this was our "tsunami"

And so it is.

[KittyWampus]

3. Devastation Almost Increases Exponentially When Wetlands/Coastal

areas involved.