Katrina is NOT the greatest natural disaster in the history of the US

[gardenista]

in 1900, 6000 people were killed in the Galveston hurricane. Whenever Bush mentions Katrina, he refers to is as a storm of extraordinary proportions, which could never have been predicted.

Galveston is just one of the natural distasters that is bigger than, and fortold, Katrina.

http://www.1900storm.com/

[El Supremo]

1. The cost estimates place it way above any other disaster. n/t

[Dervill Crow]

4. And that's how * measures things, not in human terms. n/t

[gardenista]

10. Adjusted for inflation, I doubt that would hold up.

And I guess all that really matters to the Bush admin is $$$.

[SheilaT]

2. I'm not sure just looking at the raw numbers

of dead is adequate in this case. side from the fact the death toll from katrina still is not complete, how many hundreds of thousands of people have had their homes destroyed from Katrina? A half million? More.

The Galveston hurricane did completely change Galveston from a major deep water port to something of a backwater. Rice University wound up in Houston, and the city of Houston set out on the road to becoming the major city that it is today.

It's much too soon to know what the ultimate outcome of Hurricane Katrina will be for any of the cities and towns wrecked by her.

[pitohui]

3. clearly katrina is going to claim more lives than 6K

not to pop your bubble but there are 10s of thousands of missing ppl on the lists, actually over 100,000 last time i checked

new orleans to pascagoula is a much, much larger area much more heavily populated than galveston in the early 20th c.


ppl are made uncomfortable by the size of this disaster, i do understand, but it is what it is & no cover-up will stand, eventually it will be clear that many of the missing are gone forever, 10s of thousands of them

[gardenista]

11. No concerns re:bubble popping... Just pointing out that Bush's excuses

don't hold up.

This could have been a much better scenario if the levees had been maintained properly.

[bloom]

5. We don't know how many died from Katrina

and I think we never will know.

[CrispyQ]

8. I suspect the official count will not top 9/11.

Can't have this disaster, where the dim son & his cronies preformed so incredibly poorly, look like a bigger disaster than terra, terra, terra.

Although how anyone can believe it is beyond me. But then, it's been beyond me how the sheeple continue to believe anything that comes from shrubbish's mouth.

[MADem]

6. The dead have all not yet been counted for Katrina

The flooded areas of New Orleans continued shrinking, but crews were still searching by boat on Sunday for the dead. The state Department of Health and Hospitals said the hurricane death toll in Louisiana had risen to 646. The toll across the Gulf Coast was 883, and that number was still expected to rise.

http://www.in-forum.com/ap/index.cfm?page=view&id=D8CMSP50R

[HysteryDiagnosis]

7. Two other storms.... and a monument to some of their victims....

To the people who died in the 1935 Labor Day hurricane. The monument contains the remains of more than 300 cremated citizens

San Felipe-Okeechobee Hurricane 1928: Two years later, another Category 4 hurricane hit Florida, causing Lake Okeechobee to surge up to 9 feet. It drowned more than 1800 people predominantly African Americans, who were ill served by the rudimentary emergency management of those segregated times.

The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 struck the middle Keys at the bottom of the Depression and compounded the economic catastrophe with a natural one. As quoted by Barnes (1998), it began as "shifting gales and probably winds of hurricane force" in the Straits of Florida on September 1st. In light of modern understanding, we can reconstruct that it deepened rapidly to become a compact, extreme Category 5 hurricane before it rampaged across Upper and Lower Metacumbe Keys. Contemporary reports describe winds approaching 200 mph during the night of September 2nd. The record low sea-level pressure measured on Lower Metacumbe Key, 1992 mb (26.35 in), stood until 1988, when a NOAA Research Aircraft extrapolated 888 mb (26.23 in) in Hurricane Gilbert in the Western Caribbean.

A train sent to rescue both World War I veterans working to construct the Overseas Highway started too late. On the return trip, hurricane winds and storm surge swept the cars from the tracks and then uprooted the rail bed. Officially, the 1935 Keys Hurricane ended 408 lives. Scenarios in which an identical storm strikes the modern Keys indicate that we might not fair so well, even with early in the 21st Century forecasting, communications, and mobility.

[Blue_In_AK]

9. I watched a doc about this just last night

on the History Channel. It was amazing. People who survived these horrible storms really have some stories to tell ... people in our government should pay attention to history in this as in all things.