Here Comes Another One!

[SugarBee]

http://weather.yahoo.com/img/east_cen_sat_440x297.html

[Amadeus]

http://weather.yahoo.com/img/east_cen_sat_440x297.html

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Cough Cough...

 

I guess that's why they call it the "Hurricane Season"...

[SugarBee]

Yeppers, hurricane season....

 

Any of y'all ever experienced one?

[Mission]

Aye.

[Lonan3]

Anyone else watch the TV special on the tornado that hit Birmingham? They made the claim that, if you take all such events into account - even the small ones - the British mainland actually suffers more of them than anywhere else in the world!

They also pointed out that, sooner or later, one of the bigger ones is bound to hit an unprotected and highly populated area with all the tragic consequences that such things produce. Scary stuff.

[Pat Ayres]

Two things enter my head;

As Texas is the likely target and Bushbaby is a texan, will the whoeful response given to New Orleans be repeated?

Secondly this snippet;-

Last year the Federal Emergency ManagementAgency, FEMA, farmed out responsibility for hurricane prevention to a consortium led by a Louisiana firm called Innovative Emergency Management, IEM, under a $500,000 contract. Following a simulation exercise, IEM produced a worrying report last December. A follow-up conference took placein, August,. Too late. Although, in fairness, there was little IEM could dowithout the cash committment from FEMA.

As journalists worldwide googled for new angles to the disaster, the Baton Rouge based consultancy made a swift edit of its website, but it wasn't cunning enough to avoid the bloggers (www.leninology.blogspot.com) who captured images of the site before and after the edits.

References to IEM's work in New Orleans were suddenly purged, including a 2004 press release headed "IEM team to develop catastrophic disaster plan for New Orleans and Southeast Louisiana" which boasted of it's CEO Madhu Beriwal's special merit award for hurricane preparedness.

Several days later the press release was back on line, except that a footnote had been added with the caveat that one company in the 'team' listed, emergency management firm James Lee Witt Associates, did not actually participate in the project. James Lee Witt was director of FEMA during the Clinton administration. Over at the JLW Associates website, the form has already publicly distenced from the catastrophic catastrophe planning, noting that after the initial IERM proposals to FEMA it was "not approached again by IEM" and had "no involvement whatsoever in the project".

Meanwhile, IEM is responsible for reviewing emergency preparedness systems at several commercial nuclear power plants in the US, for chemical, biological and nuclear preparedness in several states and for developing emergency management systems for the US's chemical weapons stockpile. Crumbs!

[P.E. sept 05]

[Amadeus]

As Texas is the likely target and Bushbaby is a texan, will the whoeful response given to New Orleans be repeated?

I thought the same - here are the odds:

 

Lightening fast response by Dubya himself: 1/5

so/so effort (could have been a bit faster): 9/2

A response like we saw it in New Orleans: 10/1

[Pat Ayres]

Good news, all the national guard are safe and well in Texas even though they are needed in New Orleans which is under 10ft of water again.

[Lonan3]

"In Louisiana, flood surges have already broken through one of the levees repaired in New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina hit last month.

But US army engineers said the real damage had been done by the earlier hurricane and there was little in the abandoned city left to lose."

 

Source: BBC News.

 

That being the case, it would appear that the national guard's presence in Texas - where lives are much more likely to be at risk - is the right decision in this case.