Haiti Earthquake May Have Killed More Americans Than 9/11, Iraq or Afghanistan

[kpete]

Source: Washington Independent

Haiti Earthquake May Have Killed More Americans Than 9/11, Iraq or Afghanistan
Tweet Digg Reddit Facebook StumbleUpon Yahoo! Buzz By Spencer Ackerman 1/19/10 2:47 PM

From the Naval blogger Raymond Pritchett, aka Galrahn, a stunning observation:

The State Department told NBC news on Tuesday that there are still 5,500 missing Americans in Haiti. What the article does not mention is that no Americans have been pulled out of rubble alive in 2 days, and the odds of finding more survivors is very low.

Missing does not mean dead.

There are still no fixed estimates how many people were killed in the earthquake, but the UN is now saying they have already buried 50,000 bodies. That does not count the many thousands who died and are buried inside collapsed buildings.

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Read more: http://washingtonindependent.com/74227/haiti-earthquake-may-have-killed-more-americans-than-911-iraq-or-afghanistan

[rcrush]

1. Time to start the War on Earthquakes.

[Goldstein1984]

2. I think the War on Earthquakes is already part of the

War on Nature

[damntexdem]

8. Hey wait! Don't we already have a war on Terra?

What is that if not a war on earthquakes? ;-)

[Javaman]

12. Personally, I welcome our new earthquake overlords. nt

[dipsydoodle]

3. Maybe they didn't account for them

when they turned round the humanitarian flights with search and rescue teams a few times. :sarcasm:

[dgibby]

4. Haitian PM said today that there are 70,000 confirmed dead,

many more still unaccounted for.

Source: CNN's Gary Tuckman

[jlradio]

5. Why we donate

We live in an age where anyone’s opinion can be sent out in an instant to everyone they know and millions of more people they don’t. Never before has so much been said by so many about any topic you could name. Politics, religion, sex, sports, TV, music & movies, just to name a few, are talked about (or typed about) ad nauseam. The lack of a face-to-face confrontation in the line of communication also frees people to say what they really feel, and in some cases to be more obnoxious. The irony is the lace of a face in front of you lets you be more “in your face”.

As everyone knows Haiti was hit with a major earthquake last week that killed thousands upon thousands of people and devastated a country that had 80% of the population living under the poverty line and 54% in abject poverty before the quake. Since the disaster hit the people of the United States have donated millions of dollars to relief organizations. The President has recruited the previous two Presidents (one from each political party) to lead the fund raising efforts.

In the trail of this good will, is the inevitable blowback from critics both in the media and in everyday life. Major personalities have said in all forms of media things like this is “God’s retribution” and “I’ve donated by paying my taxes”, but I am more interested in the things I have seen from family, friends & co-workers.

I have seen many a email, blog, tweet and facebook post responding negatively and some times angrily towards the fund raising efforts. To list just a few, people want to know why Americans should donate to other countries when we have our own problems here, how come other countries don’t help us in our times of need?, the money we spend waging war in another country could be spent fixing the problem. These points and others could be, have been and will be argued and debated over and over again, but they do not answer the question “why do we donate?” .

The simplest answer (and as usual the best answer) I can think of is, IT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO. Nothing more and nothing less. I am not a particularly religious person, but at the core of just about every faith, is the golden rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. That is the “right” answer, but it may not be the true answer.

The real reason we donate is it makes us feel better about ourself. Greed can be a powerful motivator, and what is more valuable to anyone than selfworth? Doing something to undo a tragic event that we have no control over make us feel a little less helpless. On a more positive side of thinking maybe, just maybe in will make you a little bit of a better person. We can hope.

Just my thoughts. If you disagree you can email me at [e-mail]

[FarCenter]

6. That estimate sounds high

If there were 100,000 Haitian dead out of 3,000,000 in the Port au Prince area, that is 1 in 30.

I've heard estimates of about 50,000 Americans in Haiti. If they were all in the Port au Prince area, then we should expect 50,000/30 or 1,667 dead Americans.

Of course, the Americans may have tended to be living in more heavily constructed building and not hillside hovels with tin roofs. Therefore, they might have died at higher rates than the average Haitian.

[WilmywoodNCparalegal]

7. With all due respect to Haiti and Haitians, and others who died,

9/11 was not a natural disaster; it was man-made and hence a heinous and cowardly act by self-absorbed middle-class pricks engaged in some sort of pseudo-religious war.

Earthquakes are still a natural event, sci-fi notwithstanding.

I think it's an apples v. oranges comparison and doing so cheapens both 9/11 and the tragic earthquake in Haiti.

[saigon68]

11. Not just an act by self-absorbed middle-class pricks

It was 19 nut jobs armed with box cutters who changed the face of amerika and made hundreds of "Security Millionaires"

[sam sarrha]

9. then we better invade and start kill'n civilians, what do we do in Iraq check the paper for weddings

???? it's been really tough on the civilians there, between us and and their Muslim Feuds.

they arent likely to forget any time soon..

[Blandocyte]

10. Traffic accidents kill 10X more Americans annually than 9-11 did

Yet there's no war on driving like a dumbass.