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Ike: Why People on the Coast Stayed


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No sanitation + houses and streets soaked in raw sewage = high risk for water-borne illnesses such as dysentery. There are no functioning hospitals or medical facilities on the island. Why should people be allowed to put a strain on very limited resources?

Stay out of the water around Galveston

Advise people of the danger, what are the safe practices to prevent contraction of waterborne diseases, and let them take responsibility for themselves.

I've heard of fishermen that wade out into the warm shallows of Matagorda Bay getting cut up on an oyster reef, and then contracting vibrio vulnificus. Maybe we should ban wade fishing too? For the good of the sportsman? :rolleyes:

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Advise people of the danger, what are the safe practices to prevent contraction of waterborne diseases, and let them take responsibility for themselves.

Then they still get sick and they have to go to an emergency room, which is probably running on generator power and already full of patients suffering from heat stress. We should stretch all our resources further to babysit a few who are working on the assumption that they still have property in a disaster area. :rolleyes: How exactly would these people who are gravely ill or injured because they were poking through a hazardous area take responsibility for themselves? Would they sit around and wait to die?

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Then they still get sick and they have to go to an emergency room, which is probably running on generator power and already full of patients suffering from heat stress. We should stretch all our resources further to babysit a few who are working on the assumption that they still have property in a disaster area. :rolleyes: How exactly would these people who are gravely ill or injured because they were poking through a hazardous area take responsibility for themselves? Would they sit around and wait to die?

Whether they are property owners or emergency response personnel and contractors, people are going to have to occupy the island and clean stuff up. If emergency personnel and contractors can handle themselves, so can the general public.

From an operational standpoint, hospitals closest to the area with the greatest numbers of injured and sick people can triage the cases and send minor cases up the road to other hospitals in the region. It does have a social cost in terms of resources (but so does the renting of tens of thousands of hotel rooms on the mainland), and that is what out-of-pocket cash payments, health insurance, personal debt, or charity is for.

Some increased number of people will get sick and assuredly some increased number of people will die. But on the condition that they understood and accepted the risks, then so be it.

EDIT: Btw, I have several properties in a "disaster area". All of them have electricity, water/sewer, and telecommunications; none of them sustained damage. I'm living in one of them. They are fine, I am fine.

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What is "the law" that people think they are above? Whatever the city government of Galveston decrees?

Are not property rights (defined through the years as the right to control and exert your will on your property, which is hard to do if you're being kept away from it by force) also part of "the law?" In that sense, isn't what the city government of Galveston is doing "above the law?" Why not? You can't do anything with your property that puts other people at risk or infringes on someone else's property rights, but that's not the same thing as being restricted "for your own good."

I'm not saying that it's not dangerous for people to return or that the city government isn't sincere in its desire to keep its residents safe or that this truly isn't an extraordinary circumstance, but the residents should be given the opportunity to objectively evaluate those risks for themselves. Otherwise they don't truly "own" the property in a natural law sense, they just practically own the property at the city government's discretion.

Yes, it's a theoretical argument I am trying to make, but it's an important one I think.

I

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You can't always give residents the opportunity to objectively evaluate risks for themselves because frankly, a lot of people simply can't. Humans don't have talent for assessing risk. That's why rescue forces had to fetch out 900+ knuckleheads from the island who decided to exercise their "rights" before realizing it was actually a serious storm and changing their minds on the public dime. This isn't a little utopia of rational risk assessment. Get real - these are the kind of clowns we are dealing with.

A lot of people are too uneducated to make rational decisions in the voting booths. And the decisions made there have consequences on orders of magnitude that far exceed a few disaster situations. By your logic, it would seem a fair analogy that because a lot of the voting public are ignorant, incompetent, or insane, we should eliminate voting altogether. And it wouldn't be fair, after all, to only allow only some people (deemed competent by possibly incompetent people in government using rules placed into law by politicians voted into office by the incompetent) to vote.

You apparently hold human life quite cheap if you are saying that it was OK to stay on the island because fewer people died than might have been the case. Otherwise the argument is almost breathtakingly fatuous.

You are misrepresenting my argument.

And I do not presume to value any life other than my own. I am not a qualified appraiser of another man's life.

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No one has mentioned the possibility of damaged pipelines full of natural gas or other chemicals compromised by Ike. The closer you get to the coast, the more pipelines you find. The coast is just not a safe place to be when a hurricane and all it fury roars ashore. Not to mention the flood waters & all their nastiness.

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Is that really a possibility, or is this just speculation on your part? Any examples?

It's a real possibility, I worked for many years in the pipeline services industry, most recently as a pipeline data analyst, saw lines damaged by Katrina in New Orleans. One line had an anchor from a displaced ship drug over a pipeline, sat in a swamp. Was a "top priority quick turnaround" job. The tool I worked with found dents & restrictions.

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Bolivar did not have a hospital before and will not after. They got their first full time ambulance just this spring. There is no public sewage system, no natural gas, etc. All I wanted to do is look and leave after hearing it announced on Ch 11 that we could. If you think I had intentions of wading around in the muck, that would be wrong, especially after seeing the bloated dead cows and smelling the stank on the way down. I just wanted to take a few pictures and see if, maybe, perhaps, there might be something of a memory to retrieve before being pillaged by outsiders. Instead, we were denied access to our property.

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It's a real possibility, I worked for many years in the pipeline services industry, most recently as a pipeline data analyst, saw lines damaged by Katrina in New Orleans. One line had an anchor from a displaced ship drug over a pipeline, sat in a swamp. Was a "top priority quick turnaround" job. The tool I worked with found dents & restrictions.

I don't doubt that pipelines get damaged by hurricanes. But are they in use during hurricanes? Would they have volatile or toxic chemicals in them?

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I don't doubt that pipelines get damaged by hurricanes. But are they in use during hurricanes? Would they have volatile or toxic chemicals in them?

Yes, there are natural gas and crude oil lines under pressure and sitting still during these conditions, not flowing, sealed off at both ends of the line. There is a term used within the industry called "third party damage", always the biggest risk. Many times it's a backhoe that hits one, on the top of the pipe, but can originate from many other sources. The govt. has heavy inspection requirements for these lines.

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IRRC, during Rita, or some other storm that hit recently (last few years) there were several piplines that were compromised by barges that broke loose from their moorings during the storm. They drug across or snagged the pipelines in the Old River area were several fires started....somone may have a better recolection of when that happened...it is a very real possiblility...not sure if anything like that has occured to date from Ike...

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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/morenews/6027458.html

"Two weeks after Ike, more than 400 are still missing"

And a quote from the beginning:

"Gail Ettenger made her last phone call at 10:10 p.m. She was trapped in her Bolivar Peninsula bungalow with her Great Dane, Reba. A drowning cat cried outside. Her Jeep bobbed in the seawater surging around her home.

Ettenger, 58, told her friend she was reading old love letters by flashlight. "I think I really screwed up this time," she said, according to Monroe Burks, Ettenger's neighbor who had evacuated to Houston.

That was Friday, Sept 12. On Wednesday — 12 days later — her nearly nude body was found face down by a huge debris pile in a remote mosquito-ridden marsh in Chambers County, about 10 miles inland from where her gray beach house once stood."

and...

"About 60 of the missing lived on the Bolivar Peninsula, stripped bare by the storm surge that felled beach houses like a bomb. More than 200 were listed as missing on Galveston Island itself, according to a city-by-city analysis of the data conducted for the Houston Chronicle by Bob Walcutt, executive director of the recovery center in Friendswood."

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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/morenews/6027458.html

"Two weeks after Ike, more than 400 are still missing"

And a quote from the beginning:

"Gail Ettenger made her last phone call at 10:10 p.m. She was trapped in her Bolivar Peninsula bungalow with her Great Dane, Reba. A drowning cat cried outside. Her Jeep bobbed in the seawater surging around her home.

Ettenger, 58, told her friend she was reading old love letters by flashlight. "I think I really screwed up this time," she said, according to Monroe Burks, Ettenger's neighbor who had evacuated to Houston.

That was Friday, Sept 12. On Wednesday

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Not sure if this is the right place for this, but I have a co-worker who owns a home, with her husband, somewhere on Galveston. She was complaining about the damage and this and that.

I guess if you're rich enough to have 2nd and 3rd home, you ought to have really good insurance. Also, if you're foolish enough to own something in a prone disaster area, why should you be crying when it gets washed away.

Am I wrong for feeling not the least bit of sorrow over that? I mean, it wasn't her primary residence (which would have been terrible, and no one was killed or hurt).

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"About 60 of the missing lived on the Bolivar Peninsula, stripped bare by the storm surge that felled beach houses like a bomb. More than 200 were listed as missing on Galveston Island itself, according to a city-by-city analysis of the data conducted for the Houston Chronicle by Bob Walcutt, executive director of the recovery center in Friendswood."

No. Bombs and rising water are not similar.

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I have a basic understanding of Newtonian physics. That is enough.

(Disclaimer: I claim no knowledge about anything Newtonian.)

Buuuuut, does not a storm surge flow outward from the center of the hurricane much like the air or shockwave from the center of a bomb blast. I'm just sayin'. ;)

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(Disclaimer: I claim no knowledge about anything Newtonian.)

Buuuuut, does not a storm surge flow outward from the center of the hurricane much like the air or shockwave from the center of a bomb blast. I'm just sayin'. ;)

No, that comparison really doesn't make any sense.

The fact that they call it a surge should tell you that the water doesn't just simply rise.

Really? What does the word tell you? That the hurricane has swept up a derelict barge full of energy drinks left over from the late 90's?

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Just rising water?

They don't call it a windstorm for nothing. A structure must withstand sustained high winds and repeated extreme wind gusts for hours on end. That has the potential to be more punishing, in some ways, than a single extraordinarily high burst of pressure such as would accompany a bomb...although such a statement is of course subject to variables such as the bomb's explosive's velocity, density of air, its distance from the subject building, whether it is an air burst or a ground-level burst, the shape of the shock wave, and whether it is designed to carry shrapnel.

Couple that with wave action, a direct result of the wind, which pushes around the surface water in swells, and you have a situation where buildings that are up on stilts actually can be as severely damaged from the crests of waves striking the underside of the structure as from the wind. If the storm surge is sufficiently high, then the effect of wave action upon the side of a building is that the waves crash into it with as much force as you saw from the seawall on the afternoon before Ike came ashore. Again, rather than a single extraordinarily high burst of pressure, as from a bomb, a structure is subject to repeated impacts and over the course of many hours. The portion of a structure that is submerged is actually pretty well anchored during the height of the storm surge because the water beneath the surface does not have a very strong current associated with it. Houses ended up in marshes when they were knocked from their pilings and floated on the surface, their high profiles pushed around by wind, their mass surfing along the downward-sloping parts of waves. In contrast, cattle mostly just bobbed up and down in one place, eventually coming to rest back on land because they rode low in the water and were aerodynamic. This brings up another point: had it been a bomb, the cattle, the lion, and the tiger all would've been injured by concussive force and possibly shrapnel.

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The confirmed death toll is at 32; two unidentified bodies were discovered along a shore in Galveston County and a Port Neches man was found dead in Orange County.

40 people reported missing have been found alive. The hotline collecting information about Ike statistics got 16 new cases of missing people; as of writing 365 people are still missing. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/hotstories/6029478.html - "Ike death toll increases as three bodies found" - September 29, 2008 - Diane Schiller

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