this post was submitted on 05 Oct 2024
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Only if you count what happened in New Orleans after the storm, which was an infrastructure issue, not a weather issue.
Why are you making this some type of competition?
I’m not. I’m explaining a difference.
What is the point of comparing Helene to Katrina? Harvey was also a 4.
Why discount the impact of Katrina just because there were systematic issues? It was a natural disaster and that was the impact.
Because it comes off to me like you're trying to "well ackshully" about Helene being really the most devastating hurricane.
How am I discounting it? Please quote me discounting it.
You're splitting hairs.
No I am not. Those deaths were not the result of a natural disaster. The levee break was both predicted for years and preventable if the funds were just spent on it. Those deaths were directly the result of government incompetence.
So are you not going to count deaths from Helene resulting from people not evacuating properly? For not taking it seriously because it was preventable?
Individual choices are different from government incompetence resulting in mass casualties. You understand that, right?
If lightning strikes a skyscraper that doesn't have sprinklers, causing it to burn down and kill 100 people- did the lightning kill those people or was it the lack of sprinklers?
There's a systemic criticism here; people not evacuating Helene properly demonstrates we don't have proper systems in place to facilitate evacuations in the case of a hurricane.
Someone who chooses not to evacuate because they didn't understand the severity or don't have a car or anywhere to go isn't an individual choice.
I notice you didn't answer my question. I will ask it again:
The lack of regulations requiring sprinklers of course.
Right. Which is why it would be a man-made disaster and not a natural disaster. The same with Katrina and the levees. Katrina was a natural disaster, but what killed the people in New Orleans was the levees not getting repaired when they needed to be.
And it's different from people refusing to evacuate since that's on them, it's not an issue of other people's incompetence being the cause of mass casualties.
It isn't though, you need to examine why those people were unwilling or unable to evacuate.
This is a systemic failure; our systems failed to adequately enable and incentivize people to evacuate. Do you judge a country's covid response by the number of people killed by covid, or just chalk that up to people's individual choices too?
The former. Which was my point. They were not deaths caused by the hurricane itself.
~~Guns~~ Hurricanes don't kill people.
“Not evacuating properly”? Plenty of the people who died had no idea the storm was going to be as bad as it was when they were hundreds of miles inland in an area that had never had significant flooding.
I'm not saying any or all were preventable, only that OP is cherry picking out one single part of a catastrophe to tweak stats without fairly considering the removal of similar causes from the other event.
Where will poor people go and how would they afford to go and how would they get there?
It's the same for either hurricane