quote:

---

Hundreds of thousands of people began trudging home on Friday after typhoon Talim's whipping rain and winds walloped China's east coast and Taiwan, killing at least five people and injuring more than 100.

Chinese authorities moved nearly 5,00,000 people to safety in Fujian and another 2,91,000 from neighbouring Zhejiang province, according to local officials, while some 30,000 fishing vessels returned to harbour.

---

And I'll bet not a single black person was left on a roof top.

[ 02 September 2005: Message edited by: No Yards ]

Interesting to note that the Chinese seem to know what to do with boats -- send them out on to the ocean, if possible. They are in much greater danger and they become dangerous when docked as a storm hits.

quote:

---

Originally posted by anne cameron:
But at least smart vicious bastards...no people trapped in hospitals without food, water medicine or power...no pregnant women in labour while swimming to some sort of dubious safety...so with China, Russia, and Amurikkka considered "vicious bastards", who, beside your own sweet self, do you find worthy of approval? A breathless nation wants to know...

---

And you know this how? before media can report a story in china it goes through a political screening and only after this can it be released if at all. If you read chinese media it will tell you that china is a great place where people enjoy the greatest freedoms in the world. And of course tianemen square

I see from CNN tonight that there are people who are still refusing to evacuate the city.

quote:

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...the divides in the city were evident in things as simple as access to a car. The 35 percent of black households that didn't have one, compared with just 15 percent among whites.

"The evacuation plan was really based on people driving out," said Craig E. Colten, a geologist at Louisiana State University and an expert on the city's vulnerable topography. "They didn't have buses. They didn't have trains."

---

quote:

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There is always a choice...When my car broke down outside of golden I hitch hiked.

---

So a single mother with four kids and no money is going to hitchhike her way out of the city, while an evacuation is going on? Yeah, I bet she would have gotten lots of rides. And with no idea where she's going or how she'll feed and shelter her children when she gets there? What a great plan! You're not really this dumb, are you?

quote:

---

Originally posted by Sourapple:
There is always a choice...When my car broke down outside of golden I hitch hiked. As for 35% of Blacks don't own a car. Those are statistics on registered vehicles. It is a lot more common in the usa to drive with a unregistered vehicle.

---

It's one thing to read stuff like this from some random person on the Internet; I don't mind that so much. But when the director of FEMA makes the same point ("I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans"), you really start to worry. It's not just the lack of empathy; that's par for the course for Republicans. It's that many of them actually seem not to even realize that tens of thousands of people in New Orleans were unable to comply with a mandatory evacuation order which relied entirely on the assumption that 100% of people could evacuate by private automobile.

quote:

---

As for the 35% who don't own a vehicle how many of them have spouses who do own, or fathers, brothers, sisters yada yada ...

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Jacob Two-Two:

So a single mother with four kids and no money is going to hitchhike her way out of the city, while an evacuation is going on? Yeah, I bet she would have gotten lots of rides. And with no idea where she's going or how she'll feed and shelter her children when she gets there? What a great plan! You're not really this dumb, are you?

It may seem stupid to you that many people were staying put and just hoping that the storm wouldn't be too bad, but the fact is many had no choice. They had no resources, and there was, of course, no assistance. Before the worst happened and there was still a chance that the city might come through all right, leaving seemed as risky a proposition as staying for the poor and disadvantaged.

---

"Single mom with four kids hitchhiking taking chances... what a great plan"

quote:

---

Originally posted by Fidel:

Ya right. And of the largest gulag population in the world, half of them are African American's. Over 2 000 000 African American's are denied the basic human right that exists in about 80 other countries - the right to vote in elections.

---

Voting and elections???? Are we not talking about Hurricans and disaster prepardness/ response.

quote:

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As I said before there is many more cars in the u.s. that are unregisterd and on the road than in canada.

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quote:

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Yeah staying in the city with a category 5 huricanee heading at you as you live in a city on the coast below sea level while being trapped in your attic sounds like a superior option.

---

quote:

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Are you telling them that most of these people knew no one who had a car?

---

quote:

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As I said before there is many more cars in the u.s. that are unregisterd and on the road than in canada.

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quote:

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There is always a choice...When my car broke down outside of golden I hitch hiked.

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quote:

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50% of the people in my family who do drive do not have a car for themselves however this hasn't limited our ability to get out of where we live if we need to.

---

quote:

---

But when the director of FEMA makes the same point ("I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans"), you really start to worry. It's not just the lack of empathy; that's par for the course for Republicans. It's that many of them actually seem not to even realize that tens of thousands of people in New Orleans were unable to comply with a mandatory evacuation order which relied entirely on the assumption that 100% of people could evacuate by private automobile.

---

Anyway, not only did he say it, he said it several times in close succession... and then topped it all off with "now is not the time for blame."

quote:

---

The director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Thursday those New Orleans residents who chose not to heed warnings to evacuate before Hurricane Katrina bear some responsibility for their fates.

Michael Brown also agreed with other public officials that the death toll in the city could reach into the thousands.

"Unfortunately, that's going to be attributable a lot to people who did not heed the advance warnings," Brown told CNN.

"I don't make judgments about why people chose not to leave but, you know, there was a mandatory evacuation of New Orleans," he said.

"And to find people still there is just heart-wrenching to me because, you know, the mayor did everything he could to get them out of there.

"So, we've got to figure out some way to convince people that whenever warnings go out it's for their own good," Brown said. "Now, I don't want to second guess why they did that. My job now is to get relief to them."

(...)

Asked later on CNN how he could blame the victims, many of whom could not flee the storm because they had no transportation or were too frail to evacuate on their own, Brown said he was not blaming anyone.

"Now is not the time to be blaming," Brown said. "Now is the time to recognize that whether they chose to evacuate or chose not to evacuate, we have to help them."

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Sourapple:
As for the 35% who don't own a vehicle how many of them have spouses who do own, or fathers, brothers, sisters yada yada ...I look at my own family with me and my girl friend we own one, My parents own one, as well as my sister and her hub, and my brother and his wife.....50% of the people in my family who do drive do not have a car for themselves however this hasn't limited our ability to get out of where we live if we need to.

---

quote:

---

Two families displaced by the same disaster, both facing uncertain futures as they moved forward on Saturday, but in completely divergent circumstances.

Just as it ripped through levees to send water pouring through New Orleans, the storm cleaved a harsh chasm among the region's refugees, providing a stark portrait of the vast divide between America's haves and have-nots.

The more than 100 members of Mrs. Porretto's extended family have cars that carried them out last Sunday morning, well before the hurricane hit.

Ms. Jackson, who does not know how to drive, escaped on foot only after the floodwaters started filling her apartment on Tuesday, walking first to a bridge, then to the squalid Superdome.

Mrs. Porretto, 51, has an American Express card that covered her $564.26 bill at the Hilton in Lafayette, La., where a cousin who works for AT&T secured a low corporate rate when she booked a block of rooms days before of the storm.

Ms. Jackson, 24, does not have a bank account, and her husband, Jerel Brown, spent their last $25 to buy fish and shrimp from men grilling on the street in the chaos, so now there is nothing in the pockets of his baggy jeans but a crushed pack of Benson & Hedges someone gave him to calm him down.

The Porrettos have cellphones and connections in city government and churches that not only helped them find one of the last available rental properties anywhere around here, but also let them sneak back into their neighborhood early this weekend to grab televisions and furnishings for their new house.

Mr. Brown, in tears, has no recourse but to ask a reporter to look for his missing brother, Wallace, and if he turned up, find out how they could get back in touch.

---

http://tinyurl.com/7u8jq

Anyway, to get back to the topic at handm if China can evacuate 5,00,000 citizens, then a country with the resources of the US should be able to evacuate 50,000. Unless of course that country is dominated by officials who don't believe in the value of government at all and trusts private enterprise to get everything done.

[ 05 September 2005: Message edited by: Granola Girl ]

Will I ?

,"" one sister-in-law and her husband have one tiny little car between them, and... well, there you go. that's all the cars we have in the entire family, counting all parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, sons and daughters. the point, sourapple,""

I find that terribly hard to believe out of all your family only your sister in law has a car. Are you telling me the fear of riding in a small car would make you reconsider a potential disaster zone?

"is that the evacuation plan was entirely based on driving out of the city, and there was ZERO assistance

Stop with the generalizations there was assistance...it could be argued that were not as much as should be. But to say 0....

for those who couldn't drive. as for hitch-hiking, i have to wonder how many families in their bigger SUVs filled up their cars with items of luxury because they couldn't bear to part with it."

footage from evacuations before the storm hit still showed empty rear windows for the most part meaning that yes the trunk may be full but the back seats for the most part appeared to be empty.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Sourapple:
... "is that the evacuation plan was entirely based on driving out of the city, and there was ZERO assistance

Stop with the generalizations there was assistance...it could be argued that were not as much as should be. But to say 0....

---

[ 05 September 2005: Message edited by: Contrarian ]

When the body count is completed and it runs past 10,000, if the official party line is they were "going to die anyway," he will be spouting it.

quote:

---

Mrs. Porretto's four-car caravan crammed with a lifetime of photo albums, a few changes of clothes and coolers of drinks pulled up to a yellow house with a wide front porch that she had just rented for $600 in the humble hamlet of Arnaudville, La.

---

Plus, considering the history of race relations in the states (gun sales in mostly white, middle class Baton Rouge have boomed since its residents have learned that hundreds of thousands of black refugees will be arriving in their town) its fair to say that most NO residents with cars, who were disproportionately white, were not going to stop for any unfortunate blacks they encoubtered.

Sourapple, not everyone in the world, or even Greater Vancouver, owns a car, nor do they all have family who owns cars. It's a common middle class presumption that everyone does. This is not the case. Fully half the residents in my apt. building are carless. When will the privileged learn that not everyone is just like them?

Edited to add, I wrote this post before realizing that responding was probably futile. Is it too late to start exchanging recipes?

[ 05 September 2005: Message edited by: Granola Girl ]

The transportation is there, floating in their street or hovering overhead. Yet, they still refuse to leave their homes or the Superdome.

You're comparing your Burnaby, BC family's access to automobiles, wherein you list your occupation as 'Automotive', with the access to automobiles of a housebound senior citizen or a single mother in downtown New Orleans? Go give your head another shake.[/QB][/QUOTE]

Most people in new orleans who were there after the hurricane were not seniors. Un registered car use is high in the u.s. particularly in poor areas. Those cars are not counted in car ownership stats...there is no way to unless they get caught by the polics

quote:

---

Originally posted by Contrarian:

There was no assistance for poor people who had no car and no money nor for those who were old or sick; No assistance. So stop lying about it; or provide evidence that transportation was offered to 100,000 poor people.

[ 05 September 2005: Message edited by: Contrarian ]

---

As for Sourapple's comparison between NO refugees and refugees from Kosovo, I think its fair to say that citizens of the world's richest and most powerful country had, until Monday, every reason to believe that their government would not sit idly by while they drowned. I hardly think that the gov't of Kosovo had similar resources at its command.

And as for these unregistered cars that you keep harping on, it's one thing to have an unregistered car and another entirely to be able to put gas in it. Why are you so intent on believing that all those suffering people down south only have themselves to blame?

The floods caused by Talim have destroyed 66,000 houses, with 173,000 damaged.

quote:

---

Originally posted by No Yards:
Much worst than the Katrina floods

---

And yet the mayor of New Orleans said as many as 10,000 may have died.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Contrarian:
Incidently, a typhoon is the same as a hurricane, isn't it. The BBC website has the same explanation for how they form and are measured; so is the choice of word just a regional preference?

---

Yup. Hurriances are Atlantic tropical storms while Typhoons are Pacific.

BTW, why the silly comparisons with two wholly different storms ? I surived Talim when it hit Taiwan, all in all a pretty mild Typhoon by this island nation's standards. Two dead and 37 some injured...

[ 06 September 2005: Message edited by: Panama Jack ]

quote:

---

As for Sourapple's comparison between NO refugees and refugees from Kosovo, I think its fair to say that citizens of the world's richest and most powerful country had, until Monday, every reason to believe that their government would not sit idly by while they drowned. I hardly think that the gov't of Kosovo had similar resources at its command.

---

You are arguing with an idiot, GG.

His argument is that some people didn't want to leave. Okay, so lets focus on an undefined and unidentified potential minority as opposed to a very real, and very identifiable majority.

The truth, should he dare to ever acknowledge it, was that the people left in New Orleans were the "poor, the sick and the old". They were told to evacuate to the convention center and the sports center and they did. On foot. Through fetid water polluted with human and animal remains.

But unlike the refugees of Kosovo, they were not met by UN peace keepers providing shelter and food but by the nothingness that only government agencies staffed through cronyism could possibly provide.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Sourapple:
this is an incredibly stupid post. let's take a look at my family... umm, neither myself nor my partner have a car (though i suppose you'll come back and tell us that we should buy one even though we don't have the money to)"

Will I ?

,"" one sister-in-law and her husband have one tiny little car between them, and... well, there you go. that's all the cars we have in the entire family, counting all parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, nieces, sons and daughters. the point, sourapple,""

I find that terribly hard to believe out of all your family only your sister in law has a car. Are you telling me the fear of riding in a small car would make you reconsider a potential disaster zone?

"is that the evacuation plan was entirely based on driving out of the city, and there was ZERO assistance

Stop with the generalizations there was assistance...it could be argued that were not as much as should be. But to say 0....

for those who couldn't drive. as for hitch-hiking, i have to wonder how many families in their bigger SUVs filled up their cars with items of luxury because they couldn't bear to part with it."

footage from evacuations before the storm hit still showed empty rear windows for the most part meaning that yes the trunk may be full but the back seats for the most part appeared to be empty.

---

ETA: i'm only allowed to have 8 emoticons.

also, ETA, i'm not bothering to provide a more wordy arguement to sourapple because, clearly, the NO evacuation plan is far too complex and beyond the scope of what he/she can grasp.

[ 06 September 2005: Message edited by: ephemeral ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by Panama Jack:
why the silly comparisons with two wholly different storms?

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Sourapple:
It is amazing how those kosovonians in 99 mamanged to travel hundreds of miles through war and conflict to escape to macedonia with such a poor population... I'm willing to bet car ownership is not that high in kosovo. There is other examples of this in areas where there is little cars and public transport and people managed to evacuate.

---

quote:

---

First By the Floods, Then By Martial Law
Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, CounterPunch.

[From a description of a group of tourists and locals trying to walk out of the city, across the Greater New Orleans Bridge.]

As we approached the bridge, armed sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions.

[...]

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the six-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans, and there would be no Superdomes in their city. These were code words for: if you are poor and Black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River, and you are not getting out of New Orleans.

[...]

All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away--some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the city on foot.

[...]

The only way across the bridge was by vehicle.

[...]

Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.

---

quote:

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Most people in new orleans who were there after the hurricane were not seniors. Un registered car use is high in the u.s. particularly in poor areas. Those cars are not counted in car ownership stats...there is no way to unless they get caught by the polics

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Carter:
The whole article is worth a read. As is the rest of CounterPunch. It should be part of everyone's daily routine.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Sourapple:
Un registered car use is high in the u.s. particularly in poor areas. Those cars are not counted in car ownership stats...there is no way to unless they get caught by the polics

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Lard tunderin' jeesus:
Sourapple, your nonsense about 'unregistered vehicles' was fact-checked and dismissed by all. Your denials without substantiation are a waste of cyberspace. To date, you've contributed nothing of valu quote here. Please stop posting if you're not ready to make more of an effort.

---

Who checked the facts ???? I have yet to see a single source that quotes any source contradicting my post about unregistered vehicles... are you seeing things?

As for "Please stop posting if you're not ready to make more of an effort"

quote:

---

Originally posted by anne cameron:
un-registered cars... how did they get license plates?

Far be it from me to suggest anybody would make up something just to stir the pot and get people worked up but the image of thousands of unregistered plate-less auto's driven by unemployed black people refusing to leave a city is just a tad difficult for me to swallow...

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by anne cameron:
un-registered cars... how did they get license plates?

Far be it from me to suggest anybody would make up something just to stir the pot and get people worked up but the image of thousands of unregistered plate-less auto's driven by unemployed black people refusing to leave a city is just a tad difficult for me to swallow...

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by ephemeral:

so, how do you know its high?

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quote:

---

Originally posted by Sourapple:

Who checked the facts ???? I have yet to see a single source that quotes any source contradicting my post about unregistered vehicles... are you seeing things?

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quote:

---

If your going to call me a liar then the burden of proof is on you

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by Lard tunderin' jeesus:
You pull your opinions out of your ass, and I, among others, already proved it. I for one provided a link showing that Louisiana has some of the stiffest penalties for driving unregistered vehicles among the various states.

...and your dubious 'fact' came from where?

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Sourapple:
if you ur going to call me a liar the burden of proof is on you.

---

[ 06 September 2005: Message edited by: obscurantist ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by obscurantist:
I never called you a liar. But I guess I must have missed your reference to where you got those statistics from. I'll go back through the discussion again and look for it. I'm sorry to waste your time responding to my stupid questions.

[ 06 September 2005: Message edited by: obscurantist ]

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Sourapple:

This conversation is geting a little heated ...Sorry for any sarcasm

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quote:

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I will say it again if you ur going to call me a liar the burden of proof is on you.

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quote:

---

Originally posted by Sourapple:
If that is true about the american gov. Then what does that say about Ottawa and what they think about BC. Considering we really have almost no resources to deal with a disaster, except for of course that 15 member disaster response team for a city of 2 million.

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quote:

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Vancouver's Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) Team
Volunteer, interdisciplinary team of 77 individuals who are trained to locate, rescue and give emergency medical attention to people in confined spaces or collapsed structures. The first team of its kind in Canada.

---

quote:

---

Originally posted by No Yards:
So, any news yet if anybody offically died from this Katrina disaster?

---

Sorry for quoting myself, but I may have stumbled upon why they are so slow to come out with any offical body counts as yet. Remember the estimated 10,000 dead? Loks like some people are starting to believe that this estimate is a very conservative one.

quote:

---

A co-owner of Shelbyville-based Gowen-Smith Chapel has been deployed to Gulfport, Miss., to help with recovery since Hurricane Katrina, and his business partner here has described the grim task there.

"DMort is telling us to expect up to 40,000 bodies," Dan Buckner said, quoting officials with the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, a volunteer arm of Homeland Security.

---

quote:

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...The official death count from Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana was 71 as of Monday evening, but that included only those bodies that had been brought to a make-shift morgue in St. Gabriel.

Nearly a full week after Hurricane Katrina, a rescue force the size of an invading army had not yet begun the task of retrieving the bodies Sunday. What's more, officials appeared to have no plan...

---

[ 06 September 2005: Message edited by: Contrarian ]

quote:

---

Originally posted by No Yards:

You're a liar ... LA has near the lowest level of uninsured motorists, and estimated unregistered vehicles. Your claims are based on nothing ... and BTW, you are the one who made the original claim, so actually the "burden of proof" is actually on you to back up your claims, and not on anyone else to believe you just because you say so.

---

quote:

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Originally posted by Canadian Socialist:

Vancouver Urban Search & Rescue Team

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quote:

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Originally posted by Contrarian:
Sourapple you came up with a claim. You have refused to state where your information came from so that people here can evaluate your source. Therefore nobody believes what you say. You probably just made up the numbers. If you did get them from somewhere STATE YOUR SOURCE.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Wilf Day:

As the thread title suggests, the comparison is not between two different storms but between two different cases of capability or willingness to evacuate.

---

Cuba leads world in managing disasters

How can fascists focus on national contingencies and not feeding at the trough when they know their time is short - 2008 ?. It's all grab the money and run with those parasites and fuck the real American's who can't afford to live in Bahamas and Riviera for 181 days a year to avoid paying American taxes.

[ 07 September 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]