I didn’t have too much of a problem with the overall speech, but as a recipient of the Catastrophism Ping List here at FR, I was a little distressed at his putting down the money for volcano monitoring. He is very aware of the New Orleans environmental risk, but obviously has no idea what the volcano risks are in this country.
The former residents of the Tootle Valley could tell him a thing or two about volcanic flooding when Mt. St. Helens erupted, only killing between 50 and 100 people. It would have been more, but fortunately it blew before the public got tired of listening to the warnings of the volcano experts. The Armaro lahar in South America killed 23,000 people in a few minutes. We have valleys in our own country that could be equally devastated if a volcano erupted suddently. Signs of old lahars are more than 50 miles long in valleys of the Cascade volcanos. Yellowstone has been acting up a bit in recent months.
When Mt. Pinitubo blew and destroyed our major air base in the Philippines, the volcanologists had a major problem getting enough equipment to adequately monitor the volcano as it was ramping up. They had to borrow from our American monitoring areas leaving them underwatched. One seventh of the world’s population is at risk from volcanos, about the same as those at risk from wind storms, like New Orleans population.
I was taken aback by that as well.. being as the entire SW is potential volcano country and if Yellowstone blows, for instance, we are all toast out here.
“the money for volcano monitoring”.....
And how, exactly, does this fit into a stimulus package?
No need to answer, almost everything in the “stimulus package” had no business being there.
I agree with you completely. However, this should have been part of the normal budget, not a rider to the stimulus package.
Federal funding does not prevent natural disasters. Being the governor of Louisiana, Jindal knows this.