Posted on 09/14/2005 8:36:20 AM PDT by NutCrackerBoy
My first recoverable memory is of sitting on the back porch under candlelight in the spring of 1936, the evening after the flood of that year, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. This was not the first Johnstown flood (there were six or so before 1889), nor the last (1977), nor the biggest (1889), but my father had been downtown at work when it hit, and he was missing. I remember the feeling of worry among the adults on the porch. I was not yet three years old.
In 1889, when downtown Johnstown was a city of 12,000 people, a wall of water 30-feet high hurtled down the Conemaugh valley with a horrible roar and smashed the entire flatlands on which the city stood, between two rivers, hemmed in closely by steep, towering hills. At a narrow neck between two huge hills where the two rivers converged, a strong stone bridge held, and formed a dam against which huge mounds of broken houses piled up, and after a few hours burst into flame. Many-ton railroad cars, trees, and other unbelievable flotsam were borne along on the raging waters and kept slamming into the burning heap. Between water and fire there followed a night of terror. The tower of St. John Gualbert Parish Church burst aflame against the night sky.
When at last the waters subsided a week or so later, some 2,280 dead bodies had been counted, 777 of them never to be identified. These Unknown Victims now lie under diagonal rows of markers, up on the dominating hilltop on which Memorial Cemetery silently thrusts its tombstones to the sky. The departed of many of Johnstown's families lie buried there, and so these graves are visited often.
For this reason, never far from my consciousness has been the power of nature's fury to take away an entire city's life in an instant. (The flood of 1889 may have had some human causes, in neglect of the huge earthen dam at South Fork; but earlier and later floods did not.) You learn about the fragility of life just from growing up in Johnstown.
That may be why I have been thinking, during the hysterical media tirades since the hurricane struck New Orleans at the end of August, that the media may be exaggerating almost everything. They certainly did in Johnstown in 1889. Many rumors then reported as fact that "Hungarians" (read immigrants) were cutting fingers bearing wedding bands from the dead; which, like other things, turned out to have been fevered imaginings (perhaps partly malicious).
In particular, I took last week's projections of "10,000 dead" with quadruple grains of salt, and felt disgust at a supposed order for "25,000 body bags." Maybe there will be that many dead -- I have not been on the scene -- but I have very strongly doubted it. My disgust arose because the media should be reporting facts -- not speculation before the facts are known, and especially not speculation designed to inflame.
I doubted that the death toll would reach even tiny Johnstown's level of some 2,280 dead. (Most in Johnstown were counted, but some of the missing were believed burned beyond discovery in the flaming conflagration at the bridge, or never discovered under the silt deposited for many miles down river.) I was certain that the toll would be nothing like the proportion of Johnstown's dead: 2,280 out of 12,000.
My main reason for suspicion is that most of our television reporters may possibly be too highly educated, hothouse protected, delicate, and inexperienced in the horrors of our world, to maintain a hardened eye on dreadful events. They are too easily shocked, too easily blown away. Maybe it is only a matter of appearances, but they seem to me not to have been permanently toughened by such horrors as World War II and so many other hellholes of our lifetime. One feels they actually believe that this world is a benign and kindly place, arranged with lawns behind neatly clipped hedges, and seem surprised that a Hobbesian world waits explosively, just below its skin -- here in America, just as in any other place human beings live.
New Orleans seemed to threaten the illusions of some. To ward that off, they sought out somebody they didn't like, to blame -- making the horror manageable, projecting it away.
I was also deeply suspicious that some of the horror stories reported breathlessly in the first few days, especially from within the Superdome, never happened. Five-year-old girls raped, the throat of a little boy slit, dead babies stacked in refrigerator units, a hundred dead bodies stuffed under stadium seats. The reporting from the first five days or so will soon deserve a thorough going-over. No evidence of the worst stories has afterwards emerged, so far as I can see.
Oh, and let me address one more utterly suspect report. It takes more than four days for people to "starve," even in the Superdome. Does no one remember Terri Schiavo's horrible ordeal?
Such reporting as I have seen from Europe also seems distorted, although for a different reason. Candidate Gerhard Schroeder in Germany favorably compared his own presence at the rainfall-caused floods in southern Germany a few years back with the "inadequate" response of President Bush in face of Katrina. This comparison showed that Herr Schroeder had not the faintest sense of the magnitude of Katrina. If a storm with the frontal breadth and wind velocity of Katrina had hit the German coastline along the North Sea, it would have leveled many buildings along that entire coast like matchsticks, and driven its devastation inland to cover 90,000 square miles of Germany. It would have torn down bridges, pushed aside some highway overpasses, covered other autobahns beneath impassable mounds of rubble, thrown down radio and television and cell-phone towers, and uprooted entire forests.
If Katrina had hit in the south of France, it would have smashed the entire southern coastline and devastated at least a third of the country from there on northwards. If Katrina had hit the west coast of France, its front -- which measured 541 miles across -- would have unleashed 140-mph winds upon the entire western coastline and roared inwards to cover 90,000 square miles of France from west to east.
Winds devastating an entire 90,000 square miles of the United Kingdom would have devastated nearly every mile of it.
Almost the same goes for a storm hitting the entire Italian coastline from the French border to a point 541 miles southward, well to the south of Naples. To grab for 90,000 square miles of Italy to smash, the storm would have had to hurtle across that country and tear it up from its east coast to the Adriatic, along a front from France nearly to Calabria.
Before opining, it would be wise for Europeans to look at the aerial photographs of the southern third of the state of Mississippi, and especially the piled-up broken matchsticks that appear to be all that is left of huge swathes of Biloxi, Gulfport, Pascagoula, and other cities of that state, as well as neighboring Mobile, Alabama. Katrina hit there with more fury than it hit New Orleans. (Despite that, the governor and the state's citizens kept far better order than in Louisiana.) Though the death tolls are rising -- and will especially in Louisiana -- they are currently well below 1,000. They may stay that way. We pray they do. We will wait and see.
The physical toll on buildings, trees, bridges, railroad lines, etc., is stupefying, for hundreds of miles east-west and north-south. But so far, that relatively low death toll seems to me almost miraculous. Jack Kelly has reported that the federal response to Katrina was at least as fast as that during the last six major hurricanes -- and that far more goods and materials were delivered into the area hit by Katrina during the first 72-96 hours.
In the perspective of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the human lives lost to Katrina seem, blessedly, fewer than we honor in our own local cemeteries from the flood of 1889. Let's hope the numbers slain by Katrina stay that low. And give thanks for the more than $700 million already donated to help their fellows by private citizens across this land. This outpouring of neighborliness has been greater in its proportions than Katrina itself, and it has not yet abated. Children all across the land are being taught by their parents that even they should send something precious to them to the victims. Many favorite toys are on their way.
-- Michael Novak is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for progress in religion and the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. Novak's own website is www.michaelnovak.net.
They even included Whorealdo, as a shining example of how appropriate was the hysterical response of the CNN reporters.
Lots of posts here on FR were circulating the same sort of hysteria.
The time for that is RIGHT NOW, because the death toll only stands at around 290 with the recovery operation winding up. The media keeps telling us they're a government watchdog.....but who's watching the watchdog?
Imagine if this storm had hit the Netherlands...
TG somebody finally said that. I've been thinking that right from the start but no way was I going to post that on this forum!
Go ahead and imagine it, this is why we're asking the Dutch for technical help.
The blogosphere, for one.
I think ways are evolving, but I am not sure what they will look like, to take the unaccountable to account. The problems of bad reporting are getting out of hand. I think something analogous is developing with Congress and Congressional committees. Like Able Danger - the 9/11 Commission may have gone way too far to politicize and twist their findings.
We are.
Thank you for reminding me that I forgot to add the usual (rhetorical question) alert to my post
That's what I thought when I heard some woman complaining that she'd been stuck on a bridge for 3 days with no shade and DEMANDED to know where her rescuers were. I don't mean to make light of those 3 days, but I wanted to say, "Honey, the rescuers are pulling people out of attics who are about to drown. They are pulling people out of trees that are about to topple in the flood waters. They are searching for people who are trapped and can't get to the comfort of a dry bridge in the sun.
Priorities are a fact of life. Had I been on that bridge I hope I would have been thanking G-d I was alive instead of complaining.
Shalom.
I would not have been in the least bit surprised if 10,000 people had died as a result of Katrina but I grew up on stories of the 1900 storm in Galveston. In Galveston 6,000 to 10,000 people did die and the number of people in the affected area was much smaller than in this storm.
Who's watching the [media] watchdog?The blogosphere, for one.
I think ways are evolving, but I am not sure what they will look like, to take the unaccountable to account. The problems of bad reporting are getting out of hand. I think something analogous is developing with Congress and Congressional committees. Like Able Danger - the 9/11 Commission may have gone way too far to politicize and twist their findings.
The Democratic majority Congresses of old used to conduct tendentious hearings in lockstep with journalism. Now that they are minorities in the House and Senate, the reportercrats demand "independent" investigative commissions to come to the predetermined conclusion of journalism (i.e., that everything is "Bush's fault").Middle America is under constant assault from the reportercrats - journalists, the rich, and much of the poor. The Republican congressional majorities have the duty to act as lawyers for, who are Middle America - for their constituents. That does not mean holding tendentious congressional hearings - but it does mean holding hearings which the reportercrats will call tendentious. It means having the courage to make the case for truth, when letting liars win the propaganda battle would be easier. It means telling the truth when The New York Times and The Washington Post - and ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS - all swear that the truth is a lie.
BTTT!!!!!!
Good points cIc. I would also add to Novak's article what he labels "hysterical reporting", may more accrately be described as "histrionics".
The people of the Netherlands are always aware that most of them are living below sea level. They continually repair and improve their levee system. Of course, they pay very high taxes. An interesting fact is that the state of Louisiana is 5 times as big as the country of the Netherlands.
VERY well written piece.
Though it isn't EXACTLY the same topic, the European's view of the US Federal Government's response shows a complete lack of understanding of US Federalism and such laws as the Posse Comitatus Act, as well as others.
They seem to NOT know that the STATE is LEGALLY in charge within their borders -- over the feds -- until they turn over control to the Federal Government or the Federal government declares martial law IF the State government is out of commission.
It's seems the US press doesn't want to acknowledge/include these particulars of US law either!
A storm the size of Katrina would have encompassed all of northwestern Europe from Denmark to Brittainy. The Mississippi Coastline is longer than the joint coastlines of the Netherlands, Belgium and Northern France to Dieppe. It is also flatter. The wall of water would have pushed up the Scheldt to Antwerp and flood The great storms of the north sea are not to be despised, but not even the storm of 1953 was anything like Katrina.
The Delta Project was one of the greatest post-war feats of hydraulic engineering in the Netherlands. Immediately after the devastating storm surge of 1953, a Delta Commission was appointed to advise the government on the necessary works to protect the south-western part of the country. The first step was to construct a moveable storm surge barrier in the Hollandse IJssel, east of Rotterdam. This went into operation in 1958. The next move was the closure of the Veerse Gat and the Zandkreek in 1961. This necessitated the building of great sluices to regulate the discharge of water from the major rivers. Huge dams with sluice gates were likewise completed in 1971 to close off the Haringvliet and in 1972 to protect the Brouwershavensche Gat. The Philips and Oester Dams followed in 1974 and 1987 respectively. Plans for the closure of the last open estuary, the Eastern Scheldt, were also on the table, but evoked a clamour of protest from mussel and oyster farmers and environmentalists. They were fiercely opposed to closure on the grounds that it would destroy a unique tidal area and that the Eastern Scheldt was the nursery for many species of North Sea fish. Eventually a compromise was reached. A partially open storm surge barrier would be built, with huge gates that could be closed in the event of high water levels. This would preserve the ecological value of the Eastern Scheldt as a tidal area while at the same time guaranteeing the safety of Zeeland. The resulting storm surge barrier in the Eastern Scheldt is one of the biggest in the world. The components for the moveable gates, each the size of a twelve-storey block of flats, were built in special docks and floated into place before being sunk. The dam was officially opened by Queen Beatrix on 4 October 1986 and the final piece of the Delta Works jigsaw was slotted into place in 1997, when a moveable storm surge barrier was completed in the New Waterway. This consists of two vast gates which are normally kept open but can be closed when a storm is imminent.
This is exactly the point of using Dutch technology.
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