Rikimaru: read
this thread please. Seems like you still don't get it.
Anyways, I think its rather nausiating to blame it all on the people themselves.
FEMA was created to anticipate and prepare for any and all emergency's in the US. You say these people knew for 40 years or more that this was going
to happen, so FEMA definatly did too, no?
The Administrations, local, state and federal knew this was a dangerzone right, if the people did so surely like you say, then they definatly
should've known, no? Yet all 3 levels mucked up way before this even happend, funding for the waterworks and levee's has been cut down year after
year. Response and emergency plans have been despicable. You say its all the people's fault, well, governing bodies aren't created to control
peoples everyday lives, but they are created so that people don't have to fend for themselves at times like this, to make sure that if disaster or
other bad things strike, the people have something to rely on.
In February 1953 the Netherlands faced disaster when the dikes protecting the southwest of the country were breached by the joint onslaught of
a hurricane-force northwesterly wind and exceptionally high spring tides. The flood came in the night without warning, a fateful combination of freak
high tides and gale-force winds that killed 1,835 people. Almost 200,000 hectares of land was swamped, 3,000 homes and 300 farms destroyed, and 47,000
heads of cattle drowned. It was The Netherlands' worst disaster for 300 years.
Flooding caused by storm surges were nothing new to the Netherlands, but this time the nation was stunned by the extent of a disaster unparalleled for
centuries.
Emergency aid flowed in from all over the world to help soften the blow to a country only just recovering from war. Ironically enough, the Ministry of
Transport, Public Works and Water Management had published a policy document only a few days previously detailing plans to prevent precisely this sort
of disaster. The document proposed that all the tidal inlets and estuaries in the provinces of Zeeland and South Holland should be dammed. In the
light of the disaster, urgent action was taken to implement this plan, known as the 'Delta Project'.
Here you had a goverment activly planning and executing reclamation of land and protecting the rest of the nation from flooding for centuries.
The Netherlands have been reclaiming land from the sea for 100's of years and are well aware of the dangers of doing so, they know that freak
accidents can mess up even the best engineered waterworks.
They have a goverment too and this goverment is aware of the dangers and knows its tasked with protecting the area's that are below sealevel, just
like all 3 levels of the goverment concerning New Orleans did. And man do they put some work into it. I'm actualy confident that if the same happens
that happend in 1953, that A: the dykes now are built to withstand the extreme conditions of 1953, B: evacuation plans and safetyzones are in place to
help the people if a freak flooding would happen eventhough the Dykes should have held. C: the required interventionspeed will be a bit more
impressive then 4 bloody days! and D: national disaster funds are in place and well stocked to help rebuilding and compensation after the events.
Yet, instead of doing all in their power to strengthen the waterworks around New Orleans, funding for the various projects has been cut down for
years, responce time on all levels of goverment plainly sucked, the waterworks around new orleans failed in so many ways they shouldn't have its
despicable, FEMA, which is there for disaster management, was late, badly organized and didn't have the slightest plan for NO, which was probably one
of the top 5 populated locations in the US most prone to natural disaster.
Some of the people in NO are at fault indeed, but the vast majority of them, especialy the ones that died, was because of missmanagement and
incompetent response by the goverments, local, state and federal.
Again, goverments are there to manage and organize and help the people when disaster strikes. Not to plan a 1000 ways to soup up the money they get
from taxpayers on lining the pockets of the rich while doing nothing to plan for posible disasters then creating an organization like FEMA that soups
up even more money doing nothing.
