Just Who Should Be Blamed

[Para]

Now I have friends out in Mississippi area so I watched the American New Broadcasts closely. During the storm and after the storm the News Reporters from the New Orleans area kept on saying that the Hurricane had moved a degree of course and spared New Orleans from disaster. During the following day they reported that a Levi had been breached and the Army Corps of Engineers were there and were hoping to fix it, it was not until the third day when these reporters get further out from their safe hotels and had look in the surrounding neighbourhoods did they start telling people just what had really happened. Now as all the mobile phone masts were down and the telephone links had been cut every one was taking the Television News Reporters word as true. By the time the news had got out on just what a state the New Orleans area was in then it was yo late for effective aid to arrive in time. Rather than blaming the Government as these News Broadcasters are now doing should they not be looking at their own role in this disaster

[Mark Sman]

Blaming the media is idiotic.

I don't know where you get your news. But it was pretty common knowledge, and much discussed by the media days before the hurricane hit, that if NO got hit the lake was going to jump the banks.

Also, any city or water management engineer that gets his survey from CNN should be fired.

The media thoroughly reported this danger years, months, days before this happened.

When it did happen they reported it immediately as well.

Actually this whole cult of "blame the media" is fairly assinine and smacks of an inability to either accept that the world is the way it is, or assume personnel responsibility.

The fault here lies entirely with the civil planning and absolutely no place else.

Of course, assigning blame at this point is actually pointless.

[Moledet]

if your government take all its information from the media, you are in a serious trouble. And if you need the media to pressure your government to act, you are in an even deeper hole.

[haslinger]

You want someone to blame. Blame Gaya. We built a city in a bowl. We [i live on the coast, in Mobile] know the dangers, but we still live here. Blame life.

[Romulus]

You want someone to blame. Blame Gaya. We built a city in a bowl. We [i live on the coast, in Mobile] know the dangers, but we still live here. Blame life.

Better yet, blame the god damn storm.

Pointing fingers at "who did what" or "why wasn't this done" is borderline childish. Yeah, things could have been handled differently at ALL LEVELS of government but to bitch and scream about what could have been doesn't help put food in a starving childs mouth or help get the proper medication to the sick and dying.

Here is a novel idea..... Stop with all the drama and get off your asses and do something to help. Money, food, water, medicine, etc.... are all still needed down there.

[Midav]

You want someone to blame. Blame Gaya. We built a city in a bowl. We [i live on the coast, in Mobile] know the dangers, but we still live here. Blame life.

Better yet, blame the god damn storm.

Pointing fingers at "who did what" or "why wasn't this done" is borderline childish. Yeah, things could have been handled differently at ALL LEVELS of government but to bitch and scream about what could have been doesn't help put food in a starving childs mouth or help get the proper medication to the sick and dying.

Here is a novel idea..... Stop with all the drama and get off your asses and do something to help. Money, food, water, medicine, etc.... are all still needed down there.

That is hands down THE best post on this topic anywhere on the board!!!

Stop the finger pointing, folks!

[Roaming East]

I blame God. He's the one responsible for everything in life.

[Bluezoo]

Blame it on the rain. :lol:

[Vorian]

Blame it on the rain. :lol:

Yeah, lets go and bombard the weather :D

[bugkill]

noone is blaming anyone for the storm hitting, but blame is to be laid down for the total mishandling of the NG in NO. the state government in LA knew five days in advance that NO might get hit hard by the storm and see massive flooding. they should have alerted the NG and prepositioned them with supplies and tent cities should have been built for evacuees where the storm would have less impact. it's a shame that texas can handle the situation and it shows how the rest of LA, that was not totally affected by the storm, was never used efficently

also, the wiz kid that came up with the idea to have everyone go into the superdome, instead of using the NG and other state resources to transport people without means of getting out, was not thinking things clearly. granted, they probaly would not have had gotten everyone out, but you limit the people left behind. you cannot have that many people packed in like sardines with no facilities to take care of themselves, it was a disaster the moment they closed the doors of the superdome.

like i said in previous posts, the NG should have been ready to secure parts of NO within 1-2 days after storm hit, but it did not happen because they were not properly prepared. the tax dollars that the people of LA pay was totally wasted because the state government was more concerned about mardi gras, not prepping for a natural disaster.

[dangerclose]

I blame Bush .. if only he had signed the kyoto treaty this hurricane would've never happened and neither would the 2004 tsunami.

The U.S. never suffered devasting hurricanes until after Bush was selected president in 2000.

[Jobu]

Blame it on the rain. :lol:

I blame Milli Vanilli.

[Bryson C]

Blame it on the rain. :lol:

I blame Milli Vanilli.

rofl Yep, it's all his fault alright, find him!!!!

[bugkill]

dangerclose,

you need to read up on your history. you must have forgotten andrew, fran, etc. hurricanes have been happening for years and all of sudden the president can now cause hurricanes? i know you don't like bush, but no treaty will stop mother nature. it is a NATURAL disaster, not man made.

[Rifleman]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9178815/site/newsweek/

[walford]

I blame Bush .. if only he had signed the kyoto treaty this hurricane would've never happened and neither would the 2004 tsunami.

The U.S. never suffered devasting hurricanes until after Bush was selected president in 2000.X2. Nothing bad happened anywhere in the world pre-Bush.

[California Joe]

That jackass Mayor is on 60 Minutes whining still. The guy is NOT a leader. Period. Goddamnit I can't believe he was ever elected.

[walford]

That jackass Mayor is on 60 Minutes whining still. The guy is NOT a leader. Period. Goddamnit I can't believe he was ever elected.Judging by the behavior toward those trying to help, it would seem they have a truly representative mayor.

[Macs.]

Why is the mayor already on the media ?

Shouldn't he be more worried about what to do now then already speaking on TV ?

There are still people stuck there, and I don't think a Mayor should do a TV Show at this very situation, after all its his job to care about the city/people.

[Happy]

I blame some of it on the IQ. If I lived in a house that was below sea level, and then it was announced for a week on TV that a category 5 hurricane was headed in my direction, you couldn't pay me a $million dollars to stay there. Just how damn stupid do you have to be to stay in a place like that? I am in horrible shape, but with the warning they had, I could have walked to high ground, much less rode a bus.


now, I also have nothing but sorrow for the old, feeble, weak, families with little kids, and young who had no choice. It is a horrible tragedy for many, but many of the able bodied adults are plain out stupid.

[Aerosoul]

Why is the mayor already on the media ?

Shouldn't he be more worried about what to do now then already speaking on TV ?

There are still people stuck there, and I don't think a Mayor should do a TV Show at this very situation, after all its his job to care about the city/people.

yeah but the Army and feds have pretty much taken the situation over. so he can go on and whine all he wants now and it won't matter what he does.

[Happy]

This is one of the better analysis of the situation in NO that I've seen yet.
[quote]
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
[quote]
http://tiadaily.com/php-bin/news/showArticle.php?id=1026

[CG51]

That jackass Mayor is on 60 Minutes whining still. The guy is NOT a leader. Period. Goddamnit I can't believe he was ever elected.Judging by the behavior toward those trying to help, it would seem they have a truly representative mayor.

:lol:

[Russ.Dill]

dangerclose,

you need to read up on your history. you must have forgotten andrew, fran, etc. hurricanes have been happening for years and all of sudden the president can now cause hurricanes? i know you don't like bush, but no treaty will stop mother nature. it is a NATURAL disaster, not man made.

I blame the disastor on people with no sense of humor whatsoever

[mi35d]

Bugkill...remember that these boards are chock full of the natural goodness of sarcasm. I do believe "Dangerclose" was serving up a hearty helping with a parsley garnish.

There's been mention of the whole global warming thing but from a statisical point, we've actually had LESS "killer" storms in the last years than at any time in US history. High point was back in the 1930's. Less population of course so there was less deaths and housing damage.

[bugkill]

mi35d: it's cool, but the situation has me pretty pissed and i hate to see what is going on down there.



posted by happy,

[quote]This is one of the better analysis of the situation in NO that I've seen yet.
[quote]
An Unnatural Disaster: A Hurricane Exposes the Man-Made Disaster of the Welfare State
by Robert Tracinski
Sep 02, 2005
by Robert Tracinski
It has taken four long days for state and federal officials to figure out how to deal with the disaster in New Orleans. I can't blame them, because it has also taken me four long days to figure out what is going on there. The reason is that the events there make no sense if you think that we are confronting a natural disaster.

If this is just a natural disaster, the response for public officials is obvious: you bring in food, water, and doctors; you send transportation to evacuate refugees to temporary shelters; you send engineers to stop the flooding and rebuild the city's infrastructure. For journalists, natural disasters also have a familiar pattern: the heroism of ordinary people pulling together to survive; the hard work and dedication of doctors, nurses, and rescue workers; the steps being taken to clean up and rebuild.

Public officials did not expect that the first thing they would have to do is to send thousands of armed troops in armored vehicle, as if they are suppressing an enemy insurgency. And journalists--myself included--did not expect that the story would not be about rain, wind, and flooding, but about rape, murder, and looting.

But this is not a natural disaster. It is a man-made disaster.

The man-made disaster is not an inadequate or incompetent response by federal relief agencies, and it was not directly caused by Hurricane Katrina. This is where just about every newspaper and television channel has gotten the story wrong.

The man-made disaster we are now witnessing in New Orleans did not happen over the past four days. It happened over the past four decades. Hurricane Katrina merely exposed it to public view.

The man-made disaster is the welfare state.

For the past few days, I have found the news from New Orleans to be confusing. People were not behaving as you would expect them to behave in an emergency--indeed, they were not behaving as they have behaved in other emergencies. That is what has shocked so many people: they have been saying that this is not what we expect from America. In fact, it is not even what we expect from a Third World country.

When confronted with a disaster, people usually rise to the occasion. They work together to rescue people in danger, and they spontaneously organize to keep order and solve problems. This is especially true in America. We are an enterprising people, used to relying on our own initiative rather than waiting around for the government to take care of us. I have seen this a hundred times, in small examples (a small town whose main traffic light had gone out, causing ordinary citizens to get out of their cars and serve as impromptu traffic cops, directing cars through the intersection) and large ones (the spontaneous response of New Yorkers to September 11).

So what explains the chaos in New Orleans?

To give you an idea of the magnitude of what is going on, here is a description from a Washington Times story:

"Storm victims are raped and beaten; fights erupt with flying fists, knives and guns; fires are breaking out; corpses litter the streets; and police and rescue helicopters are repeatedly fired on.

"The plea from Mayor C. Ray Nagin came even as National Guardsmen poured in to restore order and stop the looting, carjackings and gunfire....

"Last night, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said 300 Iraq-hardened Arkansas National Guard members were inside New Orleans with shoot-to-kill orders.

" 'These troops are...under my orders to restore order in the streets,' she said. 'They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary and I expect they will.' "

The reference to Iraq is eerie. The photo that accompanies this article shows National Guard troops, with rifles and armored vests, riding on an armored vehicle through trash-strewn streets lined by a rabble of squalid, listless people, one of whom appears to be yelling at them. It looks exactly like a scene from Sadr City in Baghdad.

What explains bands of thugs using a natural disaster as an excuse for an orgy of looting, armed robbery, and rape? What causes unruly mobs to storm the very buses that have arrived to evacuate them, causing the drivers to drive away, frightened for their lives? What causes people to attack the doctors trying to treat patients at the Super Dome?

Why are people responding to natural destruction by causing further destruction? Why are they attacking the people who are trying to help them?

My wife, Sherri, figured it out first, and she figured it out on a sense-of-life level. While watching the coverage last night on Fox News Channel, she told me that she was getting a familiar feeling. She studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Chicago, which is located in the South Side of Chicago just blocks away from the Robert Taylor Homes, one of the largest high-rise public housing projects in America. "The projects," as they were known, were infamous for uncontrollable crime and irremediable squalor. (They have since, mercifully, been demolished.)

What Sherri was getting from last night's television coverage was a whiff of the sense of life of "the projects." Then the "crawl"--the informational phrases flashed at the bottom of the screen on most news channels--gave some vital statistics to confirm this sense: 75% of the residents of New Orleans had already evacuated before the hurricane, and of the 300,000 or so who remained, a large number were from the city's public housing projects. Jack Wakeland then gave me an additional, crucial fact: early reports from CNN and Fox indicated that the city had no plan for evacuating all of the prisoners in the city's jails--so they just let many of them loose. There is no doubt a significant overlap between these two populations--that is, a large number of people in the jails used to live in the housing projects, and vice versa.

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit--but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals--and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep--on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the apparent incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. But in a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters--not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. They don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

The welfare state--and the brutish, uncivilized mentality it sustains and encourages--is the man-made disaster that explains the moral ugliness that has swamped New Orleans. And that is the story that no one is reporting.

Source: TIA Daily -- September 2, 2005
[quote]


i find this theory wrong on a couple of levels and i will list them:

1) welfare is not the reason we have crime in the projects.
2) welfare is not the reason people stayed in their homes.
3) some middle class folks stayed behind also to "ride it out".
4) welfare is a state government check, not a way of life.
5) thugs are not on welfare and some of them wear three piece suits.

look, i know it would be easy to assume that most poor people in NO are on welfare and that they are at fault for being poor, but you DO NOT leave your fellow citizens out to dry during a disaster. how about we leave the "more fortunate" to fend for themselves? they got money and are not on welfare, so why help them out when they lose everything. this is a form of class warfare and it is total BS. do you realize that all classes were affected by this storm? white, black, yellow, rich, and poor have lost something and are crying for help.

i did'nt hear anything about "welfare state" during the other disasters from the past and i assume because of all the white faces on TV (they were victims, not refugees). white americans make up the majority of welfare recepients in this country and that is a fact. so why has'nt the stigma of a welfare state been applied to them when they committ serial murders or engage in drug abuse/dealing?

criminals are criminals, does not matter that they are welfare or not. also, the typical welfare recepient is a single mother with 1-2 children, not a grown ass man with a gun. you see black faces in despair and you are quick to say "it's their fault! they should of did something with their life", but what the hell does that have to do with a storm destroying your house or some asshole putting a gun in your face?

they have every right to complain when their government is not helping them when they lose everything and all they have is the clothes on their backs. now, the people in MS are complaining because they need help and they fear that everyone is only worried about NO (yeah, we have to assume that the people of MS are not on welfare because the violence has not been as bad as in NO and they show mostly white faces there).

you mean to tell me after all the riots and past natural disasters, you don't have the national guard posed and ready to go within a moments notice after you expect to see one of the most powerful storms in history bearing down on a big city? this is emergency response 101 and those clowns in LA did not prepare for this. they had the troops and manpower to put a force down there within a day to secure some of those areas and provide some guidance to the people on the ground, but it did not happen. that is where the problem lies, not with a welfare state or people being poor.

the criminals were going to be there because some of them were let loose and in large cities there will be more of them. you won't see this problem in small cities or rural areas because what do small cities/rural areas have? not much. they don't have the amount of people there as do big cities, that is why crime is lower in those areas. also, when you have that many people boxed in together (with no security or accomendations) after such a devastating event in their lives, tempers will flare and it don't matter what class you are from.

[Durandal]

I blame...

Oh wait...its the blame game.

You build on a coastline where hurricanes hit and things that are bad will happen.

Likewise in a city below sea level also located near the coast.

I am all about declining insurance on ANY home located within 50 miles of the coast or on a flood plain.

Idiocy.

I have to admit though, I could have done a better job than FEMA with an F350, dump trailer, bobcat, a couple chain saws, 100 gallons of water, some misc tools, a generator, 50 gallons of diesel and gas, and some MREs.

Called some local FEMA peeps and told to stay home.

[California Joe]

Durandal has an emergency list for EVERYTHING. He's the coolest.

[Durandal]

Durandal has an emergency list for EVERYTHING. He's the coolest.

Hell yeah....I need to write a book or something.

What people need to do is watch the very FIRST episode of Connections. that show puts this kind of stuff into terms everyone will understand or at least ask the questions that need to be asked.

If ou have seen it...well, it rocked.

"If you have gas and the person you meet doesn't, what if they ant your gas?"

"What if you do not have gas and they do?"

"How do you get it?"

"How do your prevent them from taking it?"

"Where do you go?"

On Connections of all places. A great episode. Basic rule...get away from the population centers.

[dangerclose]

I blame...

Oh wait...its the blame game.

You build on a coastline where hurricanes hit and things that are bad will happen.

Likewise in a city below sea level also located near the coast.

I am all about declining insurance on ANY home located within 50 miles of the coast or on a flood plain.

Idiocy.



Then you can decline insurance for homes in San Francisco or basically the entire west coast since we've all been warned that the "big one" is going to hit .. it's just a matter of when. You can also deny insurance to the entire midwest as they live in tornado ****e areas.

When New Orleans was built it wasn't below sea level.

It's a shame more aren't as smart as you.

[Durandal]

Then you can decline insurance for homes in San Francisco or basically the entire west coast since we've all been warned that the "big one" is going to hit .. it's just a matter of when. You can also deny insurance to the entire midwest as they live in tornado ****e areas.

When New Orleans was built it wasn't below sea level.

It's a shame more aren't as smart as you.

Maybe you should familiarize yourself with building codes and requirements and what banks require to grant loans when either purchasing or building a home or commercial property.

I LIVE in the Midwest and HAVE to have insurance for my home. In fact, my insurance is more costly because I live in a historic home and rent out my third floor. All I want to was to replace the purchase cost, of 170K not the actual rebuild cost of 1.5m.

My family owns a home in Florida and is REQUIRED to have insurance. My friend just purchased a home in Mobile and the bank would not loan him the money unless it was insured.

What we are going to see here will be a repeat of what we saw last year in Florida. Increased rates across the nation because WE have to pay for people living in places the should not be. Insurance agencies bankrupting leaving people high and dry. No FEMA aid should be given to rebuild either. Just as they have stopped giving aid to rebuild homes on flood plains on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.

Harsh, but necessary.

It matters little when New Orleans was or was not above the flood plain. It is now and has been for over a century. A majority of the residential buildings that have been destroyed have where built post-1940. The last times I checked, New Orleans has been below sea-level for the past century. :roll:

[2Sheds_Jackson]

You're bringing up a very interesting area. Insurance is a risk based enterprise. Some places face more risk than others. Some places - like homes built on the shore of the Carolinas, or FL, or the Gulf Coast, will almost certainly be hit - why should others who choose to live where it is safer, defray the cost to the wealthy who build where it is risky?

And since those homes are very expensive - and most likely require a bank to finance them - and a bank requires insurance - if those properties become uninsurable - what happens? I suppose nothing is truly uninsurable - it would just boil down to how much one was willing to pay for insurance - sort of like the sales process at a Ferrari dealership; if you have to ask how much it is, you can't afford it.

So then what happens? Will these areas be populated only by the super-rich who can pay with cash and not need insurance? Or if there aren't sufficient numbers of them to sustain the market, will the market values in these areas plummet to the point where the homes become cheap enough that insurance companies will again consider covering them?

But as to FEMA and Federal funds being devoted to such things - I have a hard time subsidizing the "good life" for people living on the coast - or anywhere that it's just plain stupid to build.