Disasters vs terrorism - nobody wins
Randolph recently wrote about the lack of transit service - or even information or reporting about it - in New Orleans during the hurricane evacuation. Planetizen has an op-ed by a University of Louisiana professor who managed to rent a car and evacuate, but valiantly restrains himself from angrily criticizing the local agencies for having basically crap transit service to begin with, so the people (mainly poor) dependent on non-car evacuation modes were basically screwed from the beginning. Mass transit can and often does play an important part in disaster evacuation and recovery, and this country seems to be very slow in learning that lesson.
I have been looking for information, mostly academic research on transit disaster planning, and an unfortunate side effect of 9/11 is that most disaster planning of the past few years has been focused on terrorist attacks and security issues. Not that this kind of planning was not needed, but we have hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes in this country every year, and their much higher likelihood - and their unfortunately often greater effect on lower income people - has been overshadowed by the fear of terrorism. I am guessing here, but terrorism targets - the ones identified like the stock exchange, the Golden Gate Bridge, airports - probably have "clients" of a higher economic and social class then the ones that are affected by a many natural disasters. As always, follow the money.
I guess we did not need the Federal Emergency Management Agency anyway. I am sure something called the Department of Homeland Security cares just as much about natural disasters as it does about terrorism.
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csa | 02:29 PM |
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This Jeff Danzinger comic seems quite apt:
http://news.yahoo.com/comics/uclickcomics/20050907/cx_jd_uc/jd20050907
