In the area around San Diego, an area about twice the size of the city of New Orleans has burned since Sunday. But folks there -- even the over 20,000 people evacuated to Qualcomm Stadium -- are partying on, the Washington Post reports:
"Nobody does disasters better than California," said R. David Paulison, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, after visiting Qualcomm Stadium with the Republican governor.
While, as the Post recounts, the California evacuees (not refugees, mind you, because these are people with resources) enjoy ice cream and free massages, fresh Starbucks coffee, and are turning away donated pizzas because too much is coming into the stadium in donations.
 "This is a neighbor-helping-neighbor situation," San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders said at Qualcomm, drawing a round of applause from his constituents....George Biagi, deputy press secretary to Sanders, said no visions of New Orleans danced in his head. "That was a whole region," he said. "With this, a lot of people can stay with friends. This is just a part of the city. And neighbors are helping each other out."
There's a profound ignorance of the scale of this issue. New Orleans Parish is 350.2 sq mi. San Diego County is 4199.89 sq. mi. Saying that this is "just part of the city" discounts that 1300-1800 homes have been lost over an area many times the size of New Orleans. In New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina (and human error) devastated about 105,000 buildings.
If you look at this fire map, the area represented in square miles of that entire rectangle is just about exactly that of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, with Cape Cod cut off to the east. Just look at how much is on fire. Image that as most all of the Berkshires, down through Springfield.
The comparisons and understanding of folks between this and Katrina are insane. No one is looking at the numbers.
The US Census reported household income in San Diego County as $47,067. In New Orleans, it was $27,133. In SD, 8.9% of the families live at or below the poverty line; in NO, that's 23.7%.
The implication that San Diego isn't suffering because it's one big happy neighborhood, or because the people are nicer to each other, is insane and insulting.
New Orleans was a tight community -- but it didn't have the reserves or resources to do what San Diego has been doing. No one expected ice cream and free massages in the Superdome, where there were about the same number of folks put up on a tiny fraction of the resources.
Truth is, no one cared about New Orleans, but the folks in San Diego are more engaged, more media savvy, and most of all, more wealthy. And everyone knows that rich people aren't going to loot, riot, or need to see National Guards or police brandishing guns to keep order.
Doesn't the framing of this entire thing sound a little fishy to anyone else?
Pardon my flames, as it were.
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Shava Nerad, News and Opinion Correspondent:
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Comments: 22
Lets watch and listen to the comments as they roll off the tongues of spin doctors.
All of this to somehow in a twisted way justify or distract from government negligence. It's easy to blame a poverty on the poor, and believe that poverty comes from lack of character, but anyone who's known a lot of poor families might have a different opinion -- for that matter, if you know enough well-off families, it would be clear that money is no guarantee of character.
Yet, San Diegans are being treated like saints, as much as New Orleans folks were treated like irredeemable sinners.
It has more to do with money, and perhaps more with the color of their skins than the content of their character.
Actually, that's a little more complicated than you think. Although the streets were open to DHS and state/local authorities, federal and local authorities refused access for the Red Cross to come to the Superdome, citing that the city was not safe and supplying the refugees before they could be evacuated out of the city would only encourage others to return.
Read the sources cited by mediamatters, including Congressional testimony. It's all there on the public record. It was later strongly documented that federal and regional martial authorities turned the trucks of supplies away.
In other situations, the Guard would have escorted the trucks if street safety were an issue; in other situations the Guard would have driven the trucks themselves. But it was determined somewhere in the chain of command that it was better to leave 20,000 without supplies than to encourage people to re-enter a city bounded by security personnel.
The Red Cross were diplomatic about it. They have to cooperate with the feds and all on a continuing basis.
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/23/glenn-beck-people-wh.html
Thanks, Xeni!
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/22/southern-ca-wildfire.html
I love Boing Boing, even if it isn't bOING bOING anymore...
San Diego and California in general have been living with wild fires on almost a yearly basis. So they also have the fresh experience of this disaster whereas New Orleans has not had to deal with yearly hurricanes.
talks about frequency
http://www.hurricane.alabama.gov/deadliest_storms.htm
talks about severity.
Louisiana has seen a lot of bad storms, and frequent ones.
Just as San Diego has frequent but not as severe fires, New Orleans has frequent but not as severe storms. That's where the hurricane party comes from...:)
In that sense, they are not that different. Los Angeles and San Francisco live on seismic faults. Let's just scrap LA because they are unsustainable in the long run because of the San Andreas Fault. Or LA and Las Vegas, because they aren't sustainable on water.
I mean, there may be a time where we have to make those decisions. Let's make them equitably?
Through 2004 Cape Hatteras on the outer banks of NC got hit more than any other US city. It's hit approximately every 2.53 years.
Delray Beach, FL is 2nd out of 29.
Grand Isle, LA is 3rd out of 29.
Elizabeth City, NC is 16th out of 29.
Morgan City, LA is 18th out of 29.
Norfolk, VA is 27th out of 29.
Morehead City, NC Is the 29th most hit us city.
The other 22 most hit cities are all in FL.
Katrina may have been the most costly but it was by far not the most deadly That sad honor belongs to Galveston Hurricane of 1900 killing 6,000 people.
To me the biggest failing in New Orleans was that the Mayor waited too long and was too worried about whether what he was doing was right or wrong.(ie. could he use those busses or not)
There is no place on this planet that is safe and to think so is foolish.
Such a storm as I remember from an investigation 2 years ago would be likely to do more damage to property, and possibly to life, as the bombing of the WTC. The east coast, even north, isn't immune, just a bit safer. I'm in Boston, myself.
Nothing in life is safe. It's all managed risk.
You also forget that in Katrina, they had to evacuate the entire region surrounding the city. In San Diego, suburbs of a large city are being evacuated. In Katrina, the people had to be evacuated to at least Houston, which is several hunded miles away. For example, if your house caught fire in a suburb, firemen would probably be there pretty quickly, but if your house caught fire in the middle of the woods, it would take significantly longer for firefighters to arrive.
It never made any sense to me that the people in the Superdome did not receive supplies. Our country certainly had the resources to have airlifted supplies to them. Just think about how many helicopters there are in our country.
The flooding of NO could also have been avoided. It was known for many years that the levees were not strong enough or high enough to defend the city from a Level 5 hurricane, and local folks had been appealing for the levees to be reinforced in anticipation of a predicted one hundred year event.
Likewise, the rebuilding of the levees has been dictated to only reconstruct them to their pre-Katrina status; thus guaranteeing that the city would remain in its ongoing perilous situation.
San Diego, on the other hand, will be totally taken care of; despite the fact that they will always be at risk for catastrophic wild fires.
The higher incomes of San Diego makes those people more important to the government than the impoverished of New Orleans. Not to mention that the costs of rebuilding the blighted San Diego areas will be infinitely cheaper than rebuilding New Orleans.
With the higher incomes of San Diego, I expect the majority of the effected residents had been able to carry adequate insurance policies.
If America really wanted to display itself as a premier country, We would rebuild New Orleans AND make it hurricane/flood proof. We DO have the technology, we just don't have the will.
Good article Shava. 10
Oh, and you know, I was thinking about it today. We have incredible engineering -- we can create canals, bridges, skyscrapers. We can make skyscrapers *earthquake proof* in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and think about it very little.
So if we can do that, why can't we storm-surge proof New Orleans with levees? What makes that so different?
Perhaps a civil engineer can help me out on why it's such a big deal?
http://geography.about.com/od/specificplacesofinterest/a/dykes.htm
So, whenever someone says that New Orleans isn't worth reclaiming, tell them you have some very expensive swampland in the Netherlands to sell them.
I don't make these things up...:)
The locals in New Orleans had been denied funding by the Bush administration for infrastructure they had no jurisdiction over. They wouldn't have been *allowed* to fix the levees, any more than Port St. Lucie could decide to patch a pothole in I95.