"It's fifty-fifty every day,"

[Modem Butterfly]

My cousin said these words to me as we sat in his apartment in Santa Cruz, waiting for the first game of the World Series in 1989. We were joking about "flat landers" (people not from California) who didn't understand that you can't live your life waiting for the next earthquake. My cousin said, "The big one is always out there. It's fifty-fifty every day,". And not ten minutes later, the ground started moving and didn't stop for a full minute. We spent the rest of that night trying to help out our neighbors, turning off gas and water mains and administering first aid as best we could in the dark. I was seventeen years old.

I've been through a lot of earthquakes. I've been through a small tsunami. I've been through fires and a few tornadoes and even a couple of hurricanes and a tropical storm. Given a choice, I'd much rather have disaster show up at my door, unannounced, than to be waiting for days, as the people on the Gulf have. I guess I'd rather not see it coming.

[Dogmudgeon]

1. OTOH, if you see it coming, you can get out of its way

I've been through a couple of disasters myself. They've all hit me all-at-once. The only one that didn't -- a severe flu -- made me delerious, and I didn't have the presence of mind to get to a hospital. The "warning" of a day or two of sickness with a lower fever didn't help.

The thing about how the evacuation in New Orleans was handled is that the people who were stranded there didn't have to be. They were predominantly the poor people, and no provisions had been made for them except for a few shelters and the Superdome.

There's also the general scandal of the Bush administration cutting the Gulf Coast FEMA budget so deeply, especially hurricane preparedness for New Orleans.

I hope a lot of these stories of malfeasance are exposed during the clean-up. There's really no reason to skimp on disaster planning, but nobody seems to understand that it's cheap insurance until the disaster actually happens.

--p!