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Originally Posted by TexasWSP
Now, I watch the news just as much as the next guy...FoxNews, CNN, MSNBC...I watch it all. I'm not sure if anyone will agree, but I thought I'd make a thread about it. Does anyone else think the coverage of the disaster that is Iowa and the Midwest is rather minuscule considering how bad it truly is? I've heard three different times from new outlets over the past two days that right now, at this point, it's three times worse than Katrina....yet it seems like it is far less publicized. Maybe it's because people up there aren't shooting at cops and helicopters...I dunno, haha.
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I think quite a bit of this depends on how you view "worse" - it's "worse" in the sense that property damage will amount to billions, entire towns are demolished, and there is water over a comparably immeasurable amount of territory.
However, I believe the death toll measures something like five, total - and I feel like that is the real deciding factor for news agencies.
I live in downtown Des Moines, right off the river - not many problems in that part of town, but levees broke upstream and downstream. Pretty minor compared to what could have happened - then again, the National Guard and local volunteers put up something like 2.5 million sandbags. The real problems happened in Cedar Rapids, Iowa City and smaller areas between the Iowa/Cedar basins and the Mississippi. Property damage in small towns isn't nearly as "sexy" as dozens of deaths.
If you can, though, dig out coverage locally - it is truly insane. Cedar Rapids last week, Iowa City now, and basically Burlington to St. Louis from today to next weekend should get crazy. Here's my favorite shot:
Quote:
Originally Posted by TexasWSP
When Katrina happened you would have thought the world was ending....chaos, mass hysteria.
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Another major (MAJOR) difference: local officials, working closely with the Army Corps of Engineers, have generally had solid plans and a good idea of what was going to happen. Evacuations, sandbagging efforts and reinforcement of levees (including creation of entirely new dikes on the fly) has been borderline seamless all over the state, even in places where it ultimately didn't matter (see: Iowa City).
Of course, this makes sense, because the intense amount of rain over the last 3 months gave plenty of warning, and projections change much more slowly. Additionally, flooding 15 years ago forced a complete evaluation of all levees and rivers, leading to much better build-up (and crazy good ability to predict where breaks would occur).
All this leads to a much more calm scenario, even when 30,000 people are evacuated and an entire city of nearly 200,000 sits under 8 feet of water. It sucks, but it's been handled incredibly efficiently - again, making the story much less sexy.
Honestly, my major take-away from all this has been that I really think much more Katrina blame has to go on local officials than I would have imagined in the past - local government has been, for the most part, outstanding here in the Midwest, and I've changed my mind quite a bit with the way I view actions pre- and post-Katrina in that light.
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