Re: New Orleans: 80 percent of the city under water
In reply to Jed Rothwell's message of Fri, 02 Sep 2005 13:19:26 -0400: Hi, The Australian CSIRO has determined that Relenza (See http://www.fda.gov/cder/news/relenza/default.htm ) is effective against avian flue. [snip] Things like polio and tsunamis are natural in origin, obviously, but the fact that they still kill large numbers of people nowadays is entirely our fault. Avian flu cannot be prevented. It will probably cross over to our species eventually. It will kill hundreds of thousands of people -- mainly sick, old people, we hope. That is normal for any new form of influenza, and it cannot be prevented. But if it kills millions of healthy young people that will be our fault. That can probably be prevented with proper public health measures and intense research now, while there is still time. [snip] Regards, Robin van Spaandonk In a town full of candlestick makers, everyone lives in the light, In a town full of thieves, there is only one candle, and everyone lives in the night.
Re: New Orleans: 80 percent of the city under water
I did't know you had a rural section of the coastline. I look at google sat maps from earlier this year and its just a string of suburbs from Texus to florida. http://maps.google.com/maps?oi=mapq=New+Orleans,+LA has an up to date sat photo of the damaged CBD. Click on 'Katrina'. Jed Rothwell wrote: Stephen A. Lawrence wrote: This storm was powerful and the effects were awful, but not unprecedented. It was partly bad luck. I'm not sure bad luck is the right term for it. I meant bad luck in the sense that it hit New Orleans, rather than a rural section of the coastline. It has been known for a long time that the levees and pumps in New Orleans need repairs and upgrades, and that the city is exceptionally vulnerable to hurricane damage. Of course it was bound to be hit sooner or later. As people learn more about nature and our control over nature increases, the notion of luck becomes less and less applicable to natural disasters. Things like polio and tsunamis are natural in origin, obviously, but the fact that they still kill large numbers of people nowadays is entirely our fault. Avian flu cannot be prevented. It will probably cross over to our species eventually. It will kill hundreds of thousands of people -- mainly sick, old people, we hope. That is normal for any new form of influenza, and it cannot be prevented. But if it kills millions of healthy young people that will be our fault. That can probably be prevented with proper public health measures and intense research now, while there is still time. The rapid evolution and spread of avian flu is caused by bad sanitation and thousands of chickens crammed together. The high toll from the 1918 influenza pandemic was caused by human activity: mainly war and the famine it triggered, and improved transportation. - Jed
Re: New Orleans: 80 percent of the city under water
Jed Rothwell wrote: John Coviello wrote: 1st time martial law has been declared since WW2. Martial law has been declared many times, especially during the rioting in the 1960s. I do not know whether it has been declared after natural disasters, but I expect it has been. This storm was powerful and the effects were awful, but not unprecedented. It was partly bad luck. I'm not sure bad luck is the right term for it. I haven't double checked any of this, but here are some interesting quotes. It may be that those who feel we've been spending too much money abroad are right, and, of course, the lion's share of that has been sent to Iraq. At any rate problems with the levees have apparently been known for quite a while, and funding apparently was lacking to fix them as the engineers wanted to see them fixed. But you may draw your own conclusions; I'm not really sufficiently well informed on this issue to judge what information I have available. /It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us./ -- *Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2004.* And here's a lengthy excerpt from a much-forwarded article (can't figure out what the original journal is from the email, sorry, and sorry about the length): New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA. Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside. Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security -- coming at the same time as federal tax cuts -- was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars. (Much of the research here is from Nexis, which is why some articles aren't linked.) In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to this Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness: /The $750 million Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection project is another major Corps project, which remains about 20% incomplete due to lack of funds, said Al Naomi, project manager. That project consists of building up levees and protection for pumping stations on the east bank of the Mississippi River in Orleans, St. Bernard, St. Charles and Jefferson parishes./ /The Lake Pontchartrain project is slated to receive $3.9 million in the president's 2005 budget. Naomi said about $20 million is needed./ /The longer we wait without funding, the more we sink, he said. I've got at least six levee construction contracts that need to be done to raise the levee protection back to where it should be (because of settling). Right now I owe my contractors about $5 million. And we're going to have to pay them interest./ That June, with the 2004 hurricane seasion starting, the Corps' Naomi went before a local agency, the East Jefferson Levee Authority, and essentially begged for $2 million for urgent work that Washington was now unable to pay for. From the June 18, 2004 Times-Picayune: /The system is in great shape, but the levees are sinking. Everything is sinking, and if we don’t get the money fast enough to raise them, then we can’t stay ahead of the settlement, he said. The problem that we have isn’t that the levee is low, but that the federal funds have dried up so that we can’t raise them./ The panel authorized that money, and on July 1, 2004, it had to pony up another $250,000 when it learned that stretches of the levee in Metairie had sunk by four feet. The agency had to pay for the work with higher property taxes. The levee board noted in October 2004 that the feds were also now not paying for a hoped-for $15 million project to better shore up the banks of Lake Pontchartrain. The 2004 hurricane season, as you
Re: New Orleans: 80 percent of the city under water
Stephen A. Lawrence wrote: This storm was powerful and the effects were awful, but not unprecedented. It was partly bad luck. I'm not sure bad luck is the right term for it. I meant bad luck in the sense that it hit New Orleans, rather than a rural section of the coastline. It has been known for a long time that the levees and pumps in New Orleans need repairs and upgrades, and that the city is exceptionally vulnerable to hurricane damage. Of course it was bound to be hit sooner or later. As people learn more about nature and our control over nature increases, the notion of luck becomes less and less applicable to natural disasters. Things like polio and tsunamis are natural in origin, obviously, but the fact that they still kill large numbers of people nowadays is entirely our fault. Avian flu cannot be prevented. It will probably cross over to our species eventually. It will kill hundreds of thousands of people -- mainly sick, old people, we hope. That is normal for any new form of influenza, and it cannot be prevented. But if it kills millions of healthy young people that will be our fault. That can probably be prevented with proper public health measures and intense research now, while there is still time. The rapid evolution and spread of avian flu is caused by bad sanitation and thousands of chickens crammed together. The high toll from the 1918 influenza pandemic was caused by human activity: mainly war and the famine it triggered, and improved transportation. - Jed
Re: New Orleans: 80 percent of the city under water
John Coviello wrote: 1st time martial law has been declared since WW2. Martial law has been declared many times, especially during the rioting in the 1960s. I do not know whether it has been declared after natural disasters, but I expect it has been. This storm was powerful and the effects were awful, but not unprecedented. It was partly bad luck. If the dikes in New Orleans had held, the damage would have been moderate. I am a little surprised there has been nothing in the national news claiming this was caused in part by global warming. I expect it was. The number of hurricanes and the average power of them has been increasing rapidly in the US and Japan. Yesterday, the Japanese Ministry of environment released a study claiming that global warming has changed the nature of the monsoon and typhoons in Japan. Rain has increased 10% and the power of the storms has increased by about 20%. I will translate more of this later on. - Jed
Re: New Orleans: 80 percent of the city under water
Jed Rothwell wrote: John Coviello wrote: 1st time martial law has been declared since WW2. Martial law has been declared many times, especially during the rioting in the 1960s. I do not know whether it has been declared after natural disasters, but I expect it has been. This storm was powerful and the effects were awful, but not unprecedented. It was partly bad luck. If the dikes in New Orleans had held, the damage would have been moderate. I am a little surprised there has been nothing in the national news claiming this was caused in part by global warming. I expect it was. The number of hurricanes and the average power of them has been increasing rapidly in the US and Japan. Yesterday, the Japanese Ministry of environment released a study claiming that global warming has changed the nature of the monsoon and typhoons in Japan. Rain has increased 10% and the power of the storms has increased by about 20%. I will translate more of this later on. - Jed I think the global warming claim has reached the point where it often goes assumed but unstated. There is a 50 year cycle in climatology that confuses the issue a little. The last big storm of this intensity and size was in the 40's and got overshaddowed in the news by the war. I really wish I had a franchise on amphibious cars in the gulf states right now. I know of two companies in that game. You would make a mint selling them to rescuers and others today and tomorrow. I know the Aussy Boyd Wyatt in Queensland (he's waiting for the fusion powerplants I told him we're hoping to make); http://www.ozamphibian.com/ http://www.gizmag.com.au/go/3814/ the malaysian project. http://www.inventqjaya.com/enterprise_revamp.htm Where are those great big hovercraft the marines use? Did we leave them in the other gulf?
New Orleans: 80 percent of the city under water
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/30/katrina/index.html
Re: New Orleans: 80 percent of the city under water
The latest news is that they are planning on evacuating the entire city of New Orleans. This is the worst thing I've seen in my life in the United States. 1st time martial law has been declared since WW2. - Original Message - From: Steven Krivit [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: vortex-l@eskimo.com Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2005 9:49 PM Subject: New Orleans: 80 percent of the city under water http://www.cnn.com/2005/WEATHER/08/30/katrina/index.html
