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Hurricane Katrina


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Old 14-09-2005, 18:21   #121
madeldoe madeldoe is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by haku


I'm also amazed to hear that the city is actually going to be rebuilt, this is madness. With the climate change, sea levels are going to rise significantly during this century and the next one. New Orleans *will* be flooded again, it's a certainty, rebuilding a city on a land that is going to end up under water in a few decades is just crazy.

NO is WAAAAAAY too important to NOT rebuild. NO is the port to international ships and provides finance for MANY caribbean countries. and lets not forget the music, lord the music
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Old 20-09-2005, 11:31   #122
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The Rev. Jesse Jackson spoke Saturday night in New York City at an event with
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.


Monday, September 19th, 2005

JESSE JACKSON: President Chavez, we met just a few weeks ago in Caracas and there
we met with African-Venezuelans and African-Cubans, and African-Colombians and Peruvians
and African-Mexicans. Between Mexico down to Brazil, one hundred and eighty million African
people, more than in North America who got there first. All the missions of President Chavez
to pull together the great African Diaspora in South, Central and Latin America that we met.
While we're meeting and I was able to speak to the Parliament, the governing body of that
country, I was struck by the impact of hurricane Katrina.

What did Katrina do? There was devastation and homelessness. We saw an infrastructure
collapse. Levees that we refused to invest in the last twenty-five years. And when the
hurricane struck and the waters rose because of global warming, which is no longer academic
and in the margins, as we unleash carcinogens in the atmosphere and burn off the ozone
layer, as we melt the glaciers and the waters rise and become hotter, we'll have more
hurricanes in the four, five and six level. As we attack the earth, the earth fights back to
protect its own integrity. And so we saw this massive storm on the way. And while it in many
ways damaged the city and killed some people, it also washed away the facade. It washed
away the cover, the dirty little secret of race and poverty and class.

President Bush said that many Americans saw for the first time on television the dreadful
intractable impact of race and poverty and class. When the storm did come, there was
warning but there was no preparation. We looked for helicopters and national guardsmen,
and they were in Iraq trying to fortify Baghdad and leaving New Orleans exposed. There are so many ways, like putting an inner tube in a bucket of water. You see the bubbles come up.
You see where there are holes in the inner tube, the impact of tax cuts for the wealthy,
going offshore, avoiding paying taxes and getting no-bid contracts, the impact of ignoring our
own infrastructure, the impact of a war of choice in Iraq, spending $5 billion a month, losing
lives and money and honor. We found ourselves trapped in our own foolishness as the
hurricane came. We were warned, but had no defense.

I urged President Chavez to come to America at this season because we believe in the politics
of civility and dialogue, not assassination. So come on to America. When Katrina struck, while
Mr. Bush was somewhere between riding motorcycles and dodging Cindy Sheehan in his front
yard, the Secretary of State shopping for Ferragamo shoes, the waters were rising. As he
delayed within two days – we got food and water to Indonesia but not to New Orleans. And
two days after 9/11 President Bush came to ground zero, held the arms of policemen and
firemen and the mayor in that city as he should have done. He never went to ground zero in
New Orleans. No member of his Cabinet went to ground zero in New Orleans. The Red Cross
did not go to ground zero in New Orleans.

Now we saw this mass of humanity, even as they suffered, removing the facade that now
can no longer be avoided. There was no mass preparation for rescue so people suffered
before the eyes of the world. During the demonstrations, you might recall, Sister Belafonte, in
Chicago in 1968, police were beating demonstrators. Somewhere out of the crowd emerged
a saying, a phrase. "The whole world is watching." The whole world is watching. The whole
world is watching. As people swam and died in New Orleans. The whole world was watching.
Still without food and water, the whole world was watching. As the president failed to exercise his obligations to American citizens and the media called citizens refugees, the whole
world was watching.

So while that was happening, President Chavez made an offer to America. He offered to send
two planes, eighteen power generators for the dark of New Orleans. The police had no light,
no communications. I went down there on ten different missions. They had no lights. He
offered eighteen water purifiers. He offered $1 million in money for down payment. He
offered two mobile hospital units. As people lay dying on the streets and babies dying in
mother's arms from dehydration and starvation, he offered 20 tons of water and 50 tons of
food! The planes are still on the runway in Caracas. It was turned away, and people suffered
and died. Even tonight, one hundred and fifty thousand citizens are in rescue camps, two
thousand children separated from their families, the dead yet uncounted. No plan for massive
rescue. No plan for acceptance or relief. No plan for relocation. Why couldn't tax-paying
citizens in Louisiana go North in their own state for housing? And use unused military bases
and state parks? Why were they turned away and left to suffer in the South of their own
state? So tonight, my brothers and my sisters, we meet the cause. We seek friends. We seek
to be friendly. No master plan for rescue. No relief, no relocation, no family reunification.

Then came finally “reconstruction.” Whenever the President sticks his hand out, there's
always something up his sleeve. Now he said, I will give $50 billion, but I want to suspend
David Bacon I want to suspend prevailing wages. So people can come in and work beneath
fair wages without health insurance. I want to suspend minority businesses and small
businesses, and so Halliburton got the first contract and Bechtel and Fluor Daniels. First $100
million no-bid contracts while corruption expanded and exploded. Somebody said “I’ll offer you
water. I’ll offer you food. I'll offer you medicine. A friendly hand is extended by this president.

There's a scripture that says, Reverend and Sister Collins, “How will we get peace?” On face
value it seems to be a rather simplistic solution in a sense it's biblical. What is the message
behind the language? The Bible says, “There will be peace in the valley, and lion lie down with
the lamb. In other words, when extremes – ferocious lions meet lambs, the big, the little, the
white, the black, the brown, the well, the sick find common ground. Who will get peace in
the valley? Well, what would make a lion cut a deal with a lamb? Lion's strong and powerful
and self-sufficient. Who will make a lamb trust a lion? Who will make lions and lambs lie
together? Well, you lie together when you find that you have something in common. What
do lions and lambs have in common? Neither wants the forest to catch on fire. Neither wants
acid rain on their backs. Neither wants a flood in the forest. Surely, if lions and lambs can lie
together, so can America and Venezuela. After all, why should we not lie together? We're
neighbors. We're in the same hemisphere. Venezuela is not back door, Venezuela is next
door. There was a Caracas before there was New York. It's not backdoor, it's next door.

How must we get along because we need each other. Venezuela needs America's market.
America needs Venezuela's product. How must we get along because Venezuela sends to
America a million and a half barrels of oil every day. The largest reserve of crude oil in
Venezuela and in the world. How must we get along? A shipment of oil comes from
Venezuela to America in four days, from Saudi Arabia in four weeks. How must we get along,
because we’re neighbors. How must we get along because Venezuela shares 13,000 miles of
border with Colombia, without Venezuela we cannot fight the drug war, cause we fight the
drug war, the energy war. We also can learn something from each other, why is it you are
paying $5 for a gallon of gas, in Venezuela they are paying $.15 cents a gallon. Because the
government’s priority is to invest in the people. They subsidize oil, gas, health care and
education, and that’s civil. We cannot subsidize our oil and education because we’re investing
in tax cuts for the wealthy and a war that does not make sense in Iraq. We need new values,
we need to go another way.



>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

source: www.democracynow.org
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I salute you!


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Old 21-09-2005, 21:33   #123
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If you haven't heard already there's another hurricane, Hurricane Rita.
It has now been upgraded to a level 5 hurricane and is headed straight for Texas.

I just wonder what the Christian extremists will say this time. According to Pat Robertson 9/11 was caused by the lesbians and "feminazi's."
Hurricane Katrina, by crime, corruption, and sexual promiscuity of New Orleans.
Hurricane Rita...

What do you guys think?
Why does God hate Texas?
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Old 21-09-2005, 22:44   #124
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Old 21-09-2005, 22:50   #125
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Or it might just be because it saw George Bush be born and grow.
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Old 22-09-2005, 08:24   #126
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good lord i nearly had a heart attack when i read about the hurrican hitting texas. my pregnant sister was going to do some training there for her job, and i thought she left already. thank god her training isnt until oct
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Old 22-09-2005, 20:26   #127
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Earlier today Rita was the third most powerful hurricane ever recorded, but it's fallen back to a Category Four. On its way across the Gulf, Katrina had been the third (now fourth) most powerful hurricane ever recorded. Maybe this is a message to the Americans about global warming.

Meanwhile, I'm posting this article from the US magazine The New Republic, arguing that New Orleans shouldn't be rebuilt. An argument is misses is that future global warming is going to intensify hurricanes significantly, making a Big One even more likely to hit New Orleans.

Quote:
Sunken Cost
by Adam B. Kushner

Post date 09.22.05 | Issue date 10.03.05

Americans do not capitulate easily to adversity, which is why President Bush's elegy last week--and his stirring promise to rebuild--comforted us. "Americans want the Gulf Coast not just to survive, but to thrive; not just to cope, but to overcome," he said, standing in front of the St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, my hometown. "We want evacuees to come home for the best of reasons--because they have a real chance at a better life in a place they love." It sounds uplifting. But, sadly, it is wrong. New Orleans should not be remade. Not the way it was.

Dennis Hastert made the point first, three days after the storm, telling the Daily Herald, a suburban Chicago newspaper, that rebuilding "doesn't make sense to me. ... A lot of that place could be bulldozed." He was shouted down as an insensitive defeatist. Jack Shafer soon explained in Slate that poverty, public school failures, the placid acceptance of urban crime, the insurance debacle, and the challenge of protecting a city built in a ten-foot hole would vitiate any settlement there. All fine reasons not to replicate pre-Katrina New Orleans, but none of them truly compelling, because they are secondary.

The primary case against restoring New Orleans isn't technocratic; it is moral. Eventually, the "Big One"--the Category Five killer scientists have warned residents to expect for 40 years--will make Katrina look tame. And, if we cannot see that major tracts of New Orleans are still unsafe, it will kill many more people. Those areas should be closed to development. Officials were negligent enough in not preparing for a storm of Katrina's power; why should they let New Orleanians return to harm's way?

Although Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans, it was not the Big One. It weakened and passed 30 miles to the east. And, although New Orleans flooded, the cause was not a storm surge that "overtopped" levees--which the Cassandras have always predicted would drown the city--but rather levee collapses along the canals that link the river with Lake Pontchartrain, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Those breaches allowed the lake's storm surge (rather than the river's) to flood directly into town. Now New Orleanians are likely to think the worst has come and gone.

Not so. When the Big One finally creeps up the Mississippi River delta, it will push a wall of water with it that spills over even the highest river levee. And New Orleans is only becoming more vulnerable, because the wetlands and barrier islands of southern Louisiana--the ones that have always borne the direct onslaught of storms--are eroding at the rate of one acre every 24 minutes, leaving little ground to sap hurricane surges. That makes the Mississippi levee system the only bulwark against the water, which it was never intended to be. In the wake of Katrina, there's talk of raising the levees to prevent overtopping. But the higher the Army Corps builds them, the faster they will sink into the soft terrain. And, as Columbia University geophysicist Klaus Jacob wrote in The Washington Post, "The higher the defenses, the deeper the floods that will inevitably follow."

Idealistic officials think they can devise better evacuation plans. But meteorologists cannot know until just before landfall where a storm will hit, and unnecessary evacuations have a Chicken Little effect, increasing the likelihood that residents will ignore the emergency order when the Big One really does arrive. That's why the mayor didn't evacuate New Orleans until just 21 hours before the storm landed. Furthermore, there is no way to shepherd away the 100,000 New Orleanians who don't own cars in so little time. Pundits have flayed the local, state, and federal governments for not caravanning these people to safety, but there will never be time to conjure 2,500 buses and 2,500 drivers in the tiny window between the knowledge of a storm's path and its arrival. Many New Orleanians survived Katrina on the lucky break that the flooding began only after the storm had passed. They won't be so fortunate again.

Nor can other schemes stop the Big One's surge, at least not during the current cycle of vicious hurricane seasons, which is supposed to last another 20 years. The best strategy for reconstituting the prophylactic wetlands is called Coast 2050, because that's the year planners expect it to be done. It calls for rerouting entire estuaries of the Mississippi delta. One civil engineer suggested a Dutch-style network of dams and dykes, but Holland's modern system covers 1,560 miles and was 50 years in the making. Plus, its seawalls do not need to sit in beds of pliant silt or withstand 175-mph squalls. Jacob actually suggested rebuilding New Orleans on a Venetian network of bridges and platforms. These people are fooling themselves, and the obstacle is not cash: Nature simply will not be cowed so easily or so soon.

True, not all of New Orleans is in jeopardy, and residents on high ground should not be barred from their homes. The real threat is to the lowest neighborhoods, such as the Ninth Ward and New Orleans East; they are unlike other disaster zones, where structural modifications and insurance policies can mitigate the damage. These neighborhoods are also the poorest and the blackest in the city. It is here that the moral case against consigning imperiled residents to their deaths is strongest. And yet New Orleans cannot exist without workers for the tourism and food-service industries, the ports, and the casinos. So, if there's no safe place to put the city's poor, there's no moral way to rebuild a viable economy. Some talk of relocating the poor nearby--perhaps across the river--and erecting a vast infrastructure of housing and transportation, enabling them to work in the city if they want. But Katrina's legacy shouldn't be a rich, white New Orleans mirrored by a poor, black shantytown. Cruelly, the storm gave the people with the fewest choices no choice at all; the government must resettle them elsewhere and force those living on high ground to endure the diminished economy or leave.

Millions of Americans live in dangerous places, and major cities often undertake risks knowingly. But it is one thing to know of a danger and argue that a fully developed, fully functional place like San Francisco should move away from a fault line; it is something else entirely to face the facts about a city now largely in ruins. It is no easy thing to wish your birthplace out of existence for its own good; the American habit, like with any challenge, is to fight back. But, in the end, demonstrations of perseverance aren't worth nearly as much as the lives they are meant to uplift.

Adam B. Kushner is assistant managing editor at TNR.
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Old 15-10-2005, 13:47   #128
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An interesting article in today's Independent about the truth behind the stories of mayhem in New Orleans during the flood.

Quote:
New Orleans: After the flood, the hard truths

Sharks in Canal Street? Snipers on rooftops? Terror in the Superdome? David Usborne sorts the reality from the myth to find out what really happened when Hurricane Katrina hit the Big Easy
Published: 15 October 2005

There was a fridge lying on a pavement of the French Quarter a couple of days ago. There are scrapped fridges everywhere in New Orleans right now, their doors taped shut to keep foul odours from seeping out. This one had writing scrawled across it. "Voodoo Party Tonight", it said in marker pen, giving a time and place.

Today, taking a break in a Bourbon Street bar, the talk turns to the same fridge. What was that all about? somebody asks. "Oh," replies another patron. "That was bullshit. Some freaky old man with a shopping trolley wrote that. I saw him do it." There was no voodoo party. (Or was there?)

Rumour and myth were always common currency in New Orleans. Black magic and ghost tours were touted to tourists, while the city's hanging moss and above-ground cemeteries inspired its once-resident celebrity author Anne Rice to write her vampire books. The image was deliberately cultivated of a metropolis that was not quite normal - a little out there - as well as vaguely scurrilous and irresponsible.

No wonder, perhaps, that just days after Hurricane Katrina roared across the Louisiana coastline weird and unlikely tales began to emerge. Remember the crocodiles roaming the Ninth Ward? Pictures of them were even posted on the internet, but it turned out they were taken years ago in Congo. There was also something about sharks cruising down Canal Street - ghoulish and obviously absurd.

Questions are now urgently being asked about some of the other stories that were circulating in the first days of the tragedy, which together created a picture of a city in outright anarchy, succumbing not just to Katrina but also to humankind's basest instincts. There were rapes and murders in the Superdome, bodies piled high in the basement of the Convention Centre and snipers firing on rescue helicopters.

Six weeks later, it seems many of the claims that were trafficked in New Orleans and amplified by the media had little or no evidence to support them. As manifold investigations into the storm and its aftermath get under way in the months ahead, both at the state and federal levels, part of the spotlight will be on finding out how much of what was reported was legend and how much was truth.

Whether anyone will be able fairly to apportion blame, however, is another thing. Was it the media that ran amok in the frenzy of those first post-Katrina days? Or were some of the evacuees themselves at fault for getting carried away, especially when put before a television camera? Or were local officials most guilty of exaggeration? Wasn't it 10,000 bodies that Mayor Ray Nagin said would be found when the waters receded? How come the latest death toll is just over 1,000, a tenth of his early estimate?

And wasn't it Mayor Nagin who went on national television three days after the storm and declared that the crowds left behind in New Orleans were somehow degenerating into an "almost animalistic state"? He said on The Oprah Winfrey Show that people left behind in the Superdome had for days been "watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."

Leading the effort now to separate fact from fiction has been the New Orleans hometown newspaper, the Times-Picayune, which just last week was able to return from exile in Baton Rouge, an hour to the west, and re-inhabit its former headquarters.

"Few of the widely reported atrocities have been backed with evidence," was the conclusion of a recent investigation in the paper. "The piles of bodies never materialised, and soldiers, police officers and rescue personnel on the front lines say that although anarchy reigned at times and people suffered unimaginable indignities, most of the worst crimes reported at the time didn't happen."

To the best anyone can find out, there were six deaths inside the Superdome before the last evacuee was eventually shipped out by bus. Four of those seemingly were from natural causes and a fifth from a drug overdose. The sixth death was a suicide. Indeed, one story repeated with consistency by many of those who were inside was of a man standing on one of the arena's balconies and leaping off.

At the Convention Centre, four bodies were later discovered, of which one may have been the victim of a crime. It now seems, in fact, that there were four murders in all of New Orleans during the seven-day period after Katrina struck, about average for a city well accustomed to violence.

No one - not the editors at the Times-Picayune nor federal and state officials in New Orleans - will pretend now that they have a full accounting of what happened. There was no official record-keeper of the behaviour, criminal or otherwise, that went on inside the Superdome or anywhere else in the city for that matter. But few would disagree now that overstatements of the mayhem were made.

"Reports of bloodshed on the streets of the city were grossly inaccurate," the New Orleans District Attorney, Eddie Jordan, said this week. "And it's unfortunate that was the picture being represented to the public." The pattern appears the same when you examine all that was reported about shootings in the city, especially gunfire that was allegedly aimed at the rescue teams. So persuasive were some of the claims that rescue operations had to be halted at least once and precious time was lost for desperate victims, because pilots became fearful for their lives and their superiors ordered them back to base.

A spokesperson for the Coast Guard at the city emergency-operations centre told reporters on 1 September: "Hospitals are trying to evacuate. At every one of them, there are reports that as the helicopters come in, people are shooting at them." The same story was aired on CNN and across the world's media.

Yet today, officials at all the main agencies involved in plucking residents from rooftops - the Air Force, Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security and Louisiana Air National Guard - say they have been unable to confirm a single case of their helicopters being fired upon. "We don't know of any shots ever fired directly at us," Captain Bob Mueller, commander of the Coast Guard in New Orleans, said.

Conversations over the past week with many of those who were in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane - rescuers and survivors - all carried a common theme. Among the things left behind by the storm's 140mph winds was a total information vacuum, created by a near complete breakdown of traditional means of communication. It was a handicap everyone struggled with.

That, for example, is what drove Roy Maggio bonkers, a resident who stayed with his large house on Esplanade Avenue through the storm and even after it passed. He was desperate to know just one thing, but there was no one to tell him. "I just wanted someone to give me an idea where sea-level was," he explained, standing on his front steps the other afternoon, gesturing horizontally with his right hand. "Was it here, here or here?" He had figured that the water would stop rising once it reached sea-level.

More critically, rescue personnel often could not communicate with each other or with their superiors. That, says David Banelli, a spokesman for the police union here, partly explains why there were so many stories of his members deserting their posts, which also, he insists, were exaggerated.

"We did have a couple of officers who got scared," he explained, but many simply got lost in the pandemonium.

"I was in Vietnam and the conditions here in New Orleans over those few days were worse than a year over there. Our people didn't have electricity to charge their radio batteries, so their communications were completely out. In many cases they lost track of their own units and joined other units. And then no one was able to radio anyone else to say where they were."

When the first evacuees from the Superdome reached the Astrodome in Houston at the end of the first week after the storm, many complained not just of the squalor but also of an information vacuum that left them in the dark as to what was going on, inside and outside. It is no surprise that many relied on the gossip of others to construct their versions of what had happened over those few days, multiple rapes and murders included

In this maelstrom of misinformation how much fault lies with the media? Senior reporters with the networks here said afterwards that it had been harder to cover events in New Orleans in those first days than the Iraq war. There was no petrol for their vehicles and even their satellite phones were useless.

Three days after the hurricane, Brian Williams, the anchorman for NBC News, did the evening bulletin live from the city after being able to discuss the line-up with his producers back in New York only once during the whole day.

Journalists are trained to check and double-check facts before passing them on to the public. But check where, with whom? This reporter was among those to pass on the experiences of evacuees in the Superdome as described to him on arrival in Texas. I reported only those claims that I heard from several sources. They included tales of a baby being discovered in a rubbish bin and of a young girl being raped and her chest slit open by a knife. Today, both horrors seem not to have happened.

Mayor Nagin's statement about a death toll of 10,000 became a headline around the world. As an assertion it was uncheckable. Defenders of the media will also point out that a senior official saying such a thing is an event in itself that nobody could have ignored. Nagin was not a lunatic, as far as anyone knew.

The New Orleans police superintendent, Eddie Compass, who has since resigned, also made comments that in hindsight fanned the hyperbole. "We have individuals who are getting raped; we have individuals who are getting beaten," he said on television about conditions in the evacuation centres. He also spoke on the record of "little babies being raped". Speaking to the Times-Picayune after stepping down, Mr Compass defended his words. "The information I had at the time, I thought it was credible," he said.

Why does all this matter? After all, New Orleans was hell in those few days, regardless of the actual numbers of rapes and murders. Nagin's overblown assertions arguably helped stir the federal government into finally delivering the scale of assistance that should have been there in the first place.

But here is another question, and a sensitive one, because it touches on matters of race. If the same hurricane had struck another big American city, wreaking the same degree of damage, would so many tall stories have been uttered and written about?

Jim Amoss, the editor of the Times-Picayune, stirred controversy recently when he said not. "If the dome and Convention Centre had harboured large numbers of middle-class white people, it would not have been a fertile ground for his kind of rumour-mongering."

Was the media content to go along with the unsubstantiated allegations of violence - even of baby rape (never mind crocodiles on Canal Street) - because it fitted a partially race-driven stereotype already scripted for New Orleans? If so, the press did the city and its people a terrible disservice, black or white.

"The mainstream media are only ever concerned with the negative stuff," contends Mr Banelli of the police union.

"The police were keeping this city alive during its darkest days under absolutely horrible conditions. But that's not what the media wanted to focus on."

Last edited by haku; 15-10-2005 at 15:21.
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Old 15-10-2005, 17:09   #129
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Thanks for the article simon

Quote:
How come the latest death toll is just over 1,000, a tenth of his early estimate?
Because he's a sick attention seeker?

Seriously though, it's good news for the local people that the death toll is much lower than what was previously announced. It does make the ealier statements that this disaster was of the same scale as the tsunami in south-east Asia look somewhat ridiculous now, if not insulting considering that the tsunami caused at least a hundred times more casualties.

The saddest thing is that because of those false reports, some of the poorest countries on the planet felt like they had to donate money to the richest country in the world while they themselves have so much misery on their soil.
In the end i wouldn't be surprised if the area affected by Katrina gets more money than the area affected by the tsunami even though the level of destruction is a hundred times lower.
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Old 15-10-2005, 21:50   #130
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4344332.stm

I just read that article and it made me shiver. It is so sad.

38,000 dead and they'll probably not recieve as much help as the USA did for hurricane Katrina, when Pakistan is really the place that needs help. Nothing like hurricane Katrina should even be compared to a disaster like the Asian earthquake and the Tsunami that happened last year. Of course a thousand deaths in America is still a tradegy, but it's not on the same magnitude as other disasters.

This earthquake will be forgotten by the majority of the world within a few weeks, yet hurricane Katrina will still be talked about. People seem to forget very easily when it comes to poor countries.
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Old 16-10-2005, 20:08   #131
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not to mention Hurricane Stan that hit Mexico..*shakes head*
~~~~~~~~~~~
"im fly as hell. swagga right. brown skin poppin like, dynamite"
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