The Next Window

I am constantly amazed at the news media and television talking heads, let alone the politicians who are trying to shoot at anyone involved in the Hurricane Katrina situation — whether they were involved in preparations or response.

One of the headlines at Yahoo! News today reads “U.S. Unprepared for Katrina.” This article summarized a Republican attack on the U.S. preparations and response.

Wow, isn’t that news? It’s now February and someone has figured out that the U.S. wasn’t prepared and could have done better on responses?

Of course, they haven’t figured out that no one could be prepared for a disaster on the scale of Katrina. After a disaster of this magnitude, mistakes and inefficiencies in the response will occur.

ONLY IN THE MIND OF A POLITICIAN COULD EVERYTHING BE PERFECT IN PLANNING AND EMERGENCY RESPONSE — especially if they can potshot at the people who did the planning and response, and without themselves having to worry about funding the programs that would have been necessary for perfect planning and perfect response!

It wasn’t just the wind or the storm surge or whether the levees should have held up — it was where the storm hit and how hard.

Think about it from the total mirror-side, though. What if the U.S. was prepared for Katrina?

Just how do you expect that we would pay for such preparations? We’re not taking about minor flooding and a coastal town that got washed away.

We’re talking about the whole coastal region of eastern Louisiana, the Mississippi Gulf Coast and parts of Alabama — and six weeks of flooded houses and buildings in one of the most populated cities in the country.

The sheer scope of this hurricane damage is such that no one could be prepared to prevent or mitigate that much damage.

And, if we as a nation, tried to prepare for such significant damage for every type calamity that might hit, just how are we going to pay for it? With European-style 90% tax rates — would that be enough?

Just looking at hurricanes, we would have the whole of the Gulf coast and the East Coast — all the way up to Maine — to prepare.

Just how do you provide spare housing to take on a population the size of New Orleans? Where are you going to put it? How do you get the people there? How do you rebuild after six weeks of flooding? Where do you find enough building materials for the rebuilding? Where do you find the skilled craftsmen/craftswomen to rebuild?

Our friends in California, of course, would love to help pay for that – as long as we’re preparing for the same scale responses to earthquakes in California. Oh, yeah, they’ve got the mud-slides problem too, so let’s not forget that regular problem.

Tornadoes in the Mid-West, and other problems in other parts of the country. Some are severe and affect small areas — most of the time — just like hurricanes do. As New Orleans learned, just because it hasn’t happened before, doesn’t mean it won’t.

Meanwhile, I’m reserving my disgust for the politicians who want to take potshots at those who had to react to the hurricane’s impacts.

Sure, they can make a headline or get a sound-bite by bashing anyone and anything related to Katrina — it’s much easier than helping solve problems.