| |
10/15/08
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
September 12, 2005 (written Aug. 31, 05) Now that the nitwits of CNN’s “Hurricane Headquarters” have left their comedic posts standing in the face of hundred mph winds and driving rain to show people with electricity the wonders of a powerful hurricane that somehow they can withstand while others should evacuate or “hunker down,” the sober tragedy of the aftermath is being covered in frightening and tragic detail, mostly by other reporters. And it still isn’t the peak of this year’s hurricane season. The devastation and human suffering is horrific. And ironically, you have to pay strict attention to separate the simultaneous reports of the tragedy in New Orleans from that in Iraq where almost a thousand Iraqis fleeing a religious gathering in fear of a suicide bomber fell off a bridge or were trampled to death. The pictures and report looked pretty much like the hundreds of people in New Orleans huddled on and under bridges to escape the flood, including prisoners under armed guard who were let out of jails to survive. On Wednesday, as the cameras flitterred from one story to the other, it was difficult to tell which was Iraq and which was New Orleans . It doesn’t do any good to talk about how the city of New Orleans could have been better prepared for the inevitable or how thousands could have walked or been transported out of the city while hurricane Katrina was still out on the ocean. Such talk is now about as useless as the many studies done in the Fifties that proved we couldn’t evacuate most of our major cities even with considerable advanced warning of a nuclear attack. Another was the cold hearted willingness of military strategists and advisors to talk about “collateral damage” to the population in the event of a nuclear war and which side would be likely to come out ahead in the end. That sort of talk has always turned my stomach and made me wonder about the sort of people that would spend their energies planning how to cope with these possibilities instead of how to prevent them from happening. It’s the main reason we have treaties between nations isn’t it? And where does our Christian nation stand on these treaties today? Is that another reason for divine intervention? I hesitate to draw the comparisons, but I’m going to do it anyway. We’ve now got a major city under siege and it’s not a joke or a movie. Somewhere between fifty and one hundred thousand people are trapped inside a coastal city that was built below sea level and always existed below sea level. A city that’s really not as close to the ocean as are Miami, Portsmouth, San Diego, New York or other coastal ports largely because it’s at the mouth of the Mississippi River which has been building silt deposits like spewing vomit for thousands of years and increases a swampy land mass far to the South of the city. My old business partner likes to play with statistics like this and he says that if you could block off the Gulf of Mexico , the entire Caribbean Sea , and drain it – the Mississippi River would fill it back up again in about three weeks. That gives you some idea of how much water a river averaging five miles per hour and fourteen thousand miles, including tributaries, of flowing water can produce. One of the greatest engineering minds of our time, the late Buckminster Fuller, once said that New York City went beyond the point of no return in November of 1972. That it was no longer feasible to support the basic infrastructure and life support systems of the Big Apple without costs exceeding practicality. At an interview, the moderator asked Fuller what he recommended be done since in other areas he was such an optimist and developer of practical solutions. To this, Fuller answered; “There is one possible solution. Give it to Walt Disney.” At the time, somewhere in the Seventies, Disney was planning to build EPCOT, the Experimental Prototype City Of Tomorrow and Fuller was not joking. Well, EPCOT wasn’t really ever finished. What was completed became Disney World in Florida and some of the original ideas, like an underground system of utilities and supply, were put partially into effect. Somewhere in this mix of extreme ideas lies the solution to our present crisis. Good city planners have to be considering extreme solutions of how to rebuild New Orleans now that its historic and nostalgic value has been effectively washed away. These ideas can range from our best attempts at a perfectly safe modern city to not rebuilding it at all but letting the Mississippi extend its mouth and building a larger seaport around it. A new seaport city with things like the electric grid encapsulated underground which is something we could all use. The one thing I can’t for the life of me understand is how the Army Corps of Engineers has come up with the idea that not immediately, even if temporarily, fixing the dikes that have given way will eventually work to their advantage. The flow of water from Lake Pontchartrain has “stabilized” meaning that the city and the lake are now at the same level. Without a current flowing off the lake, it seems the best time to drop those three thousand pound sandbags in the gap, but no, they’re saying that when the city drains “naturally” the gaps will somehow make the water flow back into the lake or something crazy like that. Lake Pontchartrain is one foot above sea level while the city averages eight or nine feet below sea level. Since water doesn't flow up, it sounds ridiculous to me and one of the worst excuses for inaction I’ve ever heard. It even sounds like Bush’s “stay the course” policy. What about the trains that have always come in and out of one of the largest seaports in the country? The Port of New Orleans boasts of six class one railroad lines transporting its goods all over the country. Surely, these trains can get as close to the city as trucks and buses. You can even back a long train into water until its rear cars are submerged and the locomotive is still on dry land. Why aren’t they being used to evacuate people? Is it because bridges or train trestles are washed out? The news on this subject and alternative is terribly lacking. Have you seen any parachute drops of food and water to the people television cameras are able to show us huddled on the streets, bridges, and so forth of New Orleans ? Where are the planes and helicopters that could be dropping these necessary life and death supplies to people on the ground, even dropping military medics? President Bush served in the Air National Guard didn’t he? Certainly, he has some glimmering of how these supplies could be air dropped. How far away are the helicopters from Fort Hood that were once so readily available to Waco? How about tanks and all terrain vehicles? Couldn’t they make it through the debris and water? Where are the SeaBees? How about the ships and yachts from as close as the Galveston Port Arthur area? They weren’t hit by Katrina. Instead, what we hear about are the typical meetings, speeches, and discussions about what might be done – and damn little in the way of action. People are dying and this is an example of our Homeland Security rushing tentatively to the rescue. We can transport wounded troops out of Iraq to hospitals in Germany, but we can’t move our own people a few hundred miles to safe facilities all over America . There’s
something very wrong here at home. Send a message to your elected representatives. Click here to start. Be sure to send a copy to Ed Henry.
|
Lost Pensions Plaguing Workers Prepare For An Onslaught Of Garbage PBGC - Do You Know What That Is? Deep Throat Reveals Pension Fraud Steal-As-You-Go, The Self-Perpetuating Fraud Pusillanimous News That's Fit To Snit Expulsis Piratis Restituta Probitas A Single Day Of Stealing In Debt Perils Of Social Security Reform Questions In The Age Of Distraction Cult differences In Truth & Financial Responsibility The Real Deficit - Without Crooking The Books The Job Market - Is It Really Getting Better? Going, Going, Gone - The Saga of Financial Responsibility Special Bonds In "Special" Trusts Complete Archives for Ed Henry | ||||||||||||||
 |
Submit
Feedback
|
|
||||||||||||||
|
|
