Iowa Floods As Devastating As Katrina ?

That's where you're off base. I live in one of the affected cities. On Thursday, it rained 4 inches. On Tuesday, there was no evidence of water spilling into the city. By Thursday afternoon, an entire downtown area (plus nearby residential areas with old housing) was underwater.

For Katrina, you knew the Hurricane was coming. Even knew the hour it would hit. People didn't get out town.

 

I'm sorry, but when you have people who can take their video cameras and show the gradual destruction of their homes, it's a big difference between what they faced and those overwhelmed by a flash flood after thinking the worst had past when surviving a HURRICANE.

either way, I'm not delusional or paranoid to know what some of the post in this thread is all about.

 

Exactly. Did anybody not see where this thread was headed from the first post? Yeah, me neither. But at least we had some fun and got to take the old BS arguments out of the closet again. Those poor, black people were stupid and deserved what was coming to them, while the gallant Mid West farming folk (who embody all that is wonderful about our country) are courageous heroes. Yay!

 

Having lived through Katrina, I find it nauseating when people try to compare things like devastation. I'm bothered when folks in Mississippi try to say we had it worse than people in Louisiana, and vice versa. People, if Mother Nature decides to wreck your world, it sucks. It's not the end of the world, but it sucks hard. I did several live blogs during lesser hurricanes before Katrina, and folks would ask if the storms were bad. My standard reply was that while we might have escaped widespread damage, if you live in a house that a tree smashed, and it was the only house on the block damaged, that made it a very, very bad day for you.

In Katrina, lots of people had bad days. In Iowa, lots of people are having bad days. (Including a friend of mine who lost everything in Katrina, moved back home to Iowa, got married and whose husband's house is half-filled with water. I told her to move to a desert.) Trying to quantify the biggest victim is simply absurd.

Don Hammack
Gulfport, Miss.
Still out on the board, and still proud

 

You knew it was coming? Two days before it hit New Orleans, there was just as good of a chance that it would hit Pensacola or even Beaumont. Many a storm flirted with New Orleans before, only to wind up in Pensacola, Morgan City or somewhere else. Every time, New Orleanians left at great personal expense, only to come back, money lost, with no weather to show for it. Should those cities have evacuated too? Would it have been "smart" if 5 million people in a five-state region upped and left because they "knew" it was coming?

Plus, you probably don't remember that Katrina was not the first hurricane to hit New Orleans in 2005. Cindy hit about a month before Katrina, causing a blackout that lasted for days and doing some real infrastructure damage and some flooding. Yet there was no looting or crime (well, no more than usual). Perhaps in the ensuing month, New Orleanians lost their way.

You've got a city of about 470k people and all but 20-25k left. That meant 450,000 people left in about a two-day period. That does not include the people from the suburbs like Metairie, St. Tammany Parish, St. Bernard. The total number of evacuees was probably close to 1 million people in two or three-day window. And if you've ever been to New Orleans, you might be aware of how it's basically an island with limited roads leading out. You have I-10 going east and west and 61 going west and 90 going east. East wasn't a viable option because it took you right to the Mississippi coast, which was also evacuating in droves. going on 10, after 30 miles or so either way you can get to some north-south arteries like I-55 and I-59 or back highways like 25 and 21 through Franklinton and Bogalusa (which may still need a sports editor, by the way).

If you want to see how tough a hurricane evacuation is, look at the clusterfuck that was the Houston evacuation for Hurricane Rita. If Rita hit Houston (it wound up hitting Beaumont-Lake Charles-Port Arthur) it would have been an unmitigated nightmare with all the gridlock on the freeways, people running out of gas, etc.

There's a huge difference between targeted evacuations of specific areas and mass evacuations of large metro areas.

 

Hold on just a second, who mentioned anything about race? You seem be be the one wanting to make it about race.

What this is about is 2 devistating storms in 2 cities and the aftermath.

Cedar Rapids Iowa does not appear to have eny problems while New Orleans seemed to have problem after problem.

I don't think its unreasonable to study why everything was so orderly in Cedar Rapids.


From what I have read I would attibute it to better leadership in GOVT.

 

Valiant attempts, Firsttime, Brian and Fudgie. I'm afraid they went for naught.

For people who reason like 6-year-old children, this thread is panacea.

Speaking of which ...

Shiftless and lazy

The murders? A bunch of people raping people on the street?

Yes, our departed friend, Jesus wept.

 

Why the fuck are people even bothering to post on this thread. Instead of a legitimate thread on the floods, we get this ridiculous fucking question.

Here, Boom, compare something in Iowa to this:

http://cryptome.quintessenz.at/mirror/katdead-01/katrina-dead-01.htm

 

And your point is what? If you are suggesting that bad leadership in NO caused a lot of unecessary deaths I would agree with you.

It also makes the point that good govt in Iowa most likely saved a lot of lives.

 

Dude, you need some counseling or something. Let me spell it out for you. There were nearly 2,000 people killed by Hurricane Katrina. The floods have killed only 15 people in Iowa and five others across the Midwest. You can rebuild houses. You can't rebuild people.

 

Now hold on just a minute.

 

How many actually killed by Katrina and how many killed when levee gave way 20 hours after warnings went out?