Does the situation in Myanmar demonstrate what happens when you have no disaster preparedness at all?
YANGON, Myanmar - The cyclone death toll soared above 22,000 on Tuesday and more than 41,000 others were missing as the international community prepared to rush in aid after the country's deadliest storm on record, state radio reported. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080506/ap_on_re_as/myanmar_cyclone I guess that's the trade off when you don't pay taxes or live in a first world country. How does this governments response compare with ours during Katrina? Is a comparison even fair?
Politics - 7 Answers
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1 :
Sure, they could have gotten into their cars and headed for the mountains, right? Or not, as say the 63,000 and more would have walked nowhere with little food, and still been killed. If there is a massive earthquake in LA and somehow we knew of it twelve hours beforehand, and got the word out, do you think it would be different? Mother Nature is a b(i)tch. The people in Katrina survived the storm, they were killed by the floods of a broken levee, one the Army Corps of Engineers figured the didn't need to build stronger or taller because it wouldn't be cost effective. They ruled yesterday that the Corps could be sued over it. Katrina didn't even hit NO with its full force, it actually made landfall in another state. Recently they found that the new levee had been built with newspaper inside instead of the absorbent material specified. They blamed the men working on it. One can only wonder why they didn't blame the supervisiors for not noticing, or the CEO for not noticing that no one was using the material that I'm sure was in the warehouse. One can only wonder.
2 :
kind of remind you of this country usa don't it.
3 :
Considering we are 50 United states and the Constitution Does Not allow ( or did not allow) The federal government just running into LA. Till this very day if The Federal gov gave California 20 billion for Earth Quake warning Systems california could spend it on better road signs and hollywood theme parks and the Fed could do nothing about it.....
4 :
Yeah, we should have just sent them more duck tape and plastic sheeting. They could have taped up their "safe room" in thier huts and rode out the storm.
5 :
There is little protection against mother nature. While better infrastructure does minimize loss of life in most disasters, there are limits to what you can protect yourself from. What separates Myanmar from modern nations is, modern nations have the resources to provide rescue and minimize the death toll.
6 :
No, it shows how devastating a cyclone can be and how hard it is to get aid to distant and remote areas. With the early warning and accessability that was available to the areas hit by Katrina, there could have been and should have been a mass, forcible if necessary evacuation that would have saved lives, though not property. As we have seen in the midwest and south, it is quite a different thing to get out of the way of a storm that literally pops up and one that you know is on its' way for literally days.
7 :
It does. Clearly, neither the people nor the government were prepared for the disaster. You said: "I guess that's the trade off when you don't pay taxes or live in a first world country." I agree with the second part about living in a first world country. These people live in poverty. Many of them struggle to provide bare living essentials. There are few resources with which to prepare for disasters. As to the part about taxes, substantial taxes may be raised in first world countries because the wealth exists to be taxed. Raising taxes on the meagre incomes of these people would not be a solution. What is needed is to raise their general standard of living. Then the resources will exist to not only meet their daily needs but to provide for protection against natural disaster. We can then have a discussion about how to best address disaster prepardness needs.
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