After reading Chapter Five of Dyson all I can say is, "Are you f****** kidding me?" What did the U.S. Government need, a sky writer to spell out that New Orleans would crumble at the feet of almost any Hurricane?
I come from San Diego, California and while living there was well aware that at any time an earthquake could shake my home and state to its very foundation. Yet, we do things to make this inevitable disaster much less tragic. We build homes, bridges, and roads to earthquake resistant standards, we run drills from childhood that teach us what we are to do in the event of an earthquake and we have kits that hold vital supplies we will need after tragedy has struck. I know that there will be people who are ill prepared and could possible parish if California is rocked off the Richter scale. I also know that even some who prepared as they were told could and probably will die. The point is that we prepare and when we think we have prepared enough, the state tells us to prepare again.
Maybe it is the fact that we can't predict earth quakes, like we can hurricanes, that leads to a break down in saftey drills, and kits. But, we as the people of the United States can definitively say that a safety meltdown occurred when it came to Hurricane Katrina and Louisiana.
When I started this course, I thought that maybe the U.S. government was unaware of how unprepared the Gulf coast was when it came to Hurricane safety. After reading Dyson's chapter 5 I can say will some authority that hell no they had to know. After what seemed like a list of seventeen-hundred articles, even living under a rock is no longer an excuse. The White House, the Louisiana Government, George Bush, and FEMA, dropped the ball in a huge way. A ball that was wrapped in hundred of news articles shouting one day we are going to say I told you so.
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