Flood watch....

[jhetley]

Much of the great State O' Maine lies under a flood watch for today, with the remnants of Katrina wending down the St. Lawrence to the sea. In non-hurricane related weather, Patten (up in the heart of the Great North Woods) recorded eight or nine inches of rain overnight yesterday, washing out roads and such and setting the stage for today's rain with full streams and saturated ground....

In my own mundane way, I responded to this by taking the front wheel of my bike over to the shop to get respoked. Replaced one spoke earlier this season, broke another yesterday, regard this as a Sign on the subject of metal fatigue and the abusive Maine roads. Won't be needing the bike for a day or so, anyway.

Outsiders are now griping about the lack of transport for evacuating non-car (read "poor" or "black") people from New Orleans. Sorry to disappoint you folks, but long-distance mass transit does not exist in this country. There ain't enough Greyhound buses and Amtrak rail cars to haul tens of thousands of bodies outta town in the space of one day, and buses would have needed the same roads as all those bumper-to-bumper cars. See previous post about emergency planning...

And I'm waiting for the cases of typhoid to start showing up. That water folks are wading through? It's raw sewage and chemical waste, people.

Comments

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

You can't get everybody out, but you can get *more* people out. Freight cars work if you don't have Amtrak.

The thing that pisses me off is not so much the lack of an evacuation plan for the city's poor--although it would have saved lives--because they did a pretty damned good job, all things considered, and it's not like any other city in the nation would do a better job (Manhattan? My God.). It's the condescending attitude of all the damned newscasters with their six and seven figure salaries saying "Why didn't they leave?"

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Bottlenecks, Bear, bottlenecks. They had a hard time moving people _into_ the Superdome, on foot. Now they will need hundreds of buses to move them out again. Getting twenty or thirty thousand people into the freight yards would be similar, and eventually the rail lines narrow down to one set of tracks each way. And some of those tracks lead to Biloxi.

And any given evacuation, some percentage of people _will_ stay behind. Like that guy at Mt. St. Helens. Take a population-at-risk of a million, plus/minus. Ten percent no-shows leaves a hundred thousand behind.

Anyway, the problem _now_ is several hundred thousand long-term refugees. That's a rough guess of our instant homeless....

Yeah, the newscasters gall my ass. White folks are "salvaging," black folks are "looting."

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

*nod* Things were left for too long, for one thing. And I'm not saying by any means that they could have saved everybody.

But I'm seeing a lot of pictures of underwater schoolbuses.

And yes, if 20% of a city of half a million is a hundred thousand--and that's what stayed behind--there's 400,000 people just out of New Orleans out doors and another fifty thousand to come, and the entire population of Biloxi--

Say, one in every three to four hundred Americans was just made homeless, as a serious rough guess.

It's staggering.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Leaving things too late -- the further back you move the evacuation for a hurricane, the larger the area of possible impact. That's a classic disaster-planning problem. Doing a decent job, you'd have had to start the juggernaut rolling about the time Katrina was hitting the Florida coast. At that time, the entire Gulf Coast was at risk. One forecast model had the storm doubling back and hitting Florida twice.