Disaster Vulnerability

Disaster Vulnerability
The presentation this week was on a very interesting topic the vulnerability of the human condition to the extreme forces of nature, but as Katrina proved to us it is not always nature that we need to worry about. For a city like New Orleans that has been hit with several major storms in the past decades to only have the most glossed over protocol for hurricane warnings is unacceptable. As a city that is aware of their likely to face this type of challenge and one that had days of forewarning about the possibility of this hurricane striking it is unbelievable that they did not do more to assist citizens. For example one of the major problems that is always cited is that many of the poorer citizens did not have the ability to evacuate because they did not have their own transportation, well why not pull all of the buses off of their regular routes and have them each go to a lower income area and pick up people to transport them out of the city for free. For hospitals (like the nursing home) that could not be moved make attempts to pack plywood and sandbags around the buildings in an attempt to at least slow the flow of water, and in the future build these building higher off the ground to try and prevent this flooding, use the first two floors for recreation and offices and start putting patients on the 3rd floor and higher so that the likelihood of surviving a flood without moving is increased. Obviously neither of these plans are a perfect solution, but they are improvements that could have easily been made by the government to save thousands of lives in the pre-hurricane stages. The government of New Orleans failed its citizens when it failed to plan for Katrina, they need to learn from this and do more next time.