Posted on 10/30/2012 4:42:33 AM PDT by Kartographer
Hundreds of people are being evacuated after a levee broke in a northern New Jersey town early Tuesday. Bergen County executive chief of staff Jeanne Baratta tells The Record newspaper the entire town of Moonachie is under water and as many as 1,000 people could need to be evacuated.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
well, we in Louisiana deal with this alot. We have never evacuated. It is harder than you can imagine to leave your home, your history, all you have. Somehow you want to be there to protect it as best you can. And given the large population affected, few die. Even Katrina, there were relatively few deaths considering the sheer number of people affected. The aftermath is horrible but I feel better about being in my place ready to protect it than veing in a shelter not knowing.
I guess you have to be there.
Bush broke another levy?? /jk
No, not really.
There’s pretty good sized cities in the midwest that have disasters that befall them, and the news is over and done in two days.
The NYC media complex engages in self-centered naval gazing as their favorite pastime. They’re widely known around the world of over-hyping their own sense of importance.
It’s also why they can’t imagine anyone voting for Romney (or any Republican). They’re all Democrats, they live among almost all Democrats, who is stupid enough to not see what they see?
A lot more of us than you realize. It’s that we are outnumbered
In Wyoming, because we so frequently get winds as high or higher than what NYC/NJ is coping with right now (and we don’t call them ‘hurricanes’ - we call it ‘winter’ and it comes for months every year) the utilities ruthlessly prune trees that are in the power line right-of-ways every year.
I mean *ruthlessly* prune. They’re not above taking down the top half of a tree and leaving you to ponder what to do with the bottom half.
As a result, the power reliabilities are pretty good, all things considered.
People still, allegedly, have freedom in this country.
The government is not on the hook for theft from your property if it survives one of these events.
It is not government's job to rescue you from your bad choices.
It is not government's job to reap the rewards of your good choices.
If one chooses to ride out an event like this they are on their own.
It is pretty simple...government (local, state, feral) makes an announcement that fire and police WILL NOT be responding to calls during an event other than actual fires or a crime in progress.
Simple. You are an adult and you make a choice. You reap the benefits or the consequences of your choice.
(and for those that cannot exist without the government tit, we get the added benefit of chlorinating the gene pool...they won't survive.)
Yes, and some turned back and headed home. My brother lives slightly north of Houston and he knew backroads to take and got out in record time.
Sandy looks devastating.
I haven't seen that. I have seen people making fun of the media for acting like NYC is the center of the universe. A year or two ago, big floods hit Kentucky and got almost no media coverage.
I checked a webcam last night and Times Square still had power, I would think you should all show up there. Mayor Nanny will no doubt provide everything the residents need beside salt and soda.
This is easily 20 Rexburgs in terms of scale. You lack perspective.
TV says there are also blizzard conditions in some areas!
Not just rain; not just snow. Devastating.
That show was already cancelled thank goodness
In a lot of cases you're better off staying where you are.
If you flee inland you don't know where the storm is headed, the storm can follow your path of flight so you have to stay ahead of the storm.
Small town don't have the infrastructure to handle the flood of people. Food, fuel, and shelter simply don't exist for all the people.
You may be inconvenienced but in most cases it's safer to let the storm pass over you than try to flee before it.
You are right about the traffic. With the massive number of people on the road you will not outrun the storm if you are in it's path.
People in an area that floods need to get out and go to an area that doesn't, but everyone trying to flee the storms path would result in more deaths.
The problem, as I see it, is not so much that the levees didn’t get upgraded.
The problem is the whole “benevolent dictator” thing. As has been well said, a government powerful enough to give you everything you need is certainly powerful enough to take it away.
And by me saying that, I’m not necessarily dinging even the government. People get the government they elect.
If the people want to end up being little more than sharecroppers living in a shack, they will depend on government. Any time they need something, their first reaction will be to ask government for it.
And the people then become lame. They can’t think for themselves. They can’t build for themselves. They can’t feed or heal themselves. They are out of ideas and motivation.
A people so inclined are not easily conquered, they are already conquered!
I have perspective just fine.
The national media is super-saturated with the perspective, opinions and toe-stubbings of this group of people.
They don’t seem to understand just how weary the rest of us are of them.
They don’t matter to us... because we don’t matter to them.
Hurricanes happen. In good presidencies and bad presidencies. To good people and bad people. Rain falls on the just and the guilty. Oh, and hurricane creation technology is out of the grasp of both pubbies and dummies.
Simple rule of thumb - in the face of a hurricane/tornado/wildfire etc, which unlike earthquakes can be mapped out in advance to some degree of accuracy, get out of town early. Even a 'hyped' hurricane can still mess up your year in a spectacular manner.
So which is worse, sticking your head in the sand and denying that a event even happen or lying about the handling of the event?
Well, there is this place called the Jersey Shore with a lot of valuable real estate that got flooded. Likewise with a place called Long Island. But we all know how cheap real estate is in NYC, so it can't cost that much when a large part of the city gets flooded. Dittoes when the subways flood and five million people now can't get to work for at least a week.
I live in League City, TX. We evacuated for both Rita and Ike. In both cases my house took ZERO damage. (Well, not really. I broke a window putting up unneeded boards to protect the windows.)
We came back as soon as possible afterward, and it is a good thing we did. Power was out in my house for a week after we returned following Ike, and if we had not returned when we did, there would have been damage due to the lack of power. (Mainly due to thawing food in the appliances, but there was some other stuff, too.)
We got out early in Ike, and that was a good thing, because friends that left two hours after we did spent a day on the road due to morons in Houston evacuating and jamming the evacuation routes. I call these folks morons because their homes were in no danger of flooding (the real danger in a hurricane) and all they risked by staying was a little discomfort. Meanwhile people in the city of Galveston or Texas City — who were in peril if they remained — could not get out and risked getting caught in their cars trying to evacuate.
As it was, due to boneheaded policies by the City of Galveston following Ike, everyone who evacuated suffered substantial damage to their properties because they were not allowed to return in a timely manner. Those that ignored the orders were able to repair their homes and minimized damage. (Mind, there were areas of Galveston that did not flood, especially behind the seawall.)
Given that, how many of those who did evacuate following Ike are likely to evacuate next time - especially if their homes withstood Ike? I don't think that would be particularly smart, but I understand those who choose to stay.
As for me, I plan to leave any time the predicted storm surge comes within two feet of the elevation of my house, and remain otherwise. You are safer in a well-built home (mine is) than in a car evacuating, so long as your house does not flood.
Having ridden out four hurricanes in Houston (and evacuated for four others), I realize what a lot of newcomers do not — hurricanes are not atomic bombs. The damage they do is limited to coastal flooding and tornadoes — and you can get tornadoes well inland. (A shelter in Austin, TX that my wife and I fled to during one evacuation had its roof ripped off by a hurricane-spawned tornado. We would have been safer staying in Houston.)
Is riding though a hurricane uncomfortable? Yup. But riding it out — if your house does not flood — is safer than evacuating, with its attendant risks of accident or getting trapped on the road.
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