Great Disasters: Katrina and the Fire

In general, the 1918 Pandemic, the great depression, the Great San Francisco Fire as well as 9/11 and Katrina have all proved to be devastating events in anyones opinion but have also showed how seem to point out the flaws in Americans thinking as to how safe they might be or how great they or the products which we have come to build are. In all it does seem that each have similar outcomes with a slightly different twist as to the way that Americans are impacted.

Two very different style of incidents are the Great San Francisco fire and Hurricane Katina. Both detestations left tons of people homeless and lost. They both showed how disaster could strike and America would not be prepared to recover from that devastation. When San Francisco had its fire, many people were forced out of the area and complained that no help was provided. In New Orleans, residents were ask to evacuate before the danger struck but refused to leave because as they saw it, hurricane evacuation warnings have been issued before and there was nothing bad happened when they did not evacuate. Americans expected nothing bad to happen to them because there does not seem to be anything that can take us down as we think over and over again.

Apparently there is something that can take us down, and we still manage to miss what it is. One reason for this blinding may be due to the way as to how we were effected or as to the type of catastrophic event. The San Francisco fire and Katrina both effect people the same way, people are scared and say they will be prepared next time, everybody 'prepares' and then goes back to normal. To begin San Francisco had no official warning that there was going to be a huge earthquake (However they do hold a record for earthquakes). New Orleans had weeks of warnings of a huge storm. SF had no time to evacuate, The South did. SF was forced out of the area weather they wanted to go or not...people chose to leave to stay safe. During the hurricane, people chose to stay not because they had no where else to go, but rather because they were a bit on the ignorant side.

Personally I would say that this status of rise and fall of comfort will occur again, but what I do also notice is that every time things seem to get worse. The hardening of out thinking that we are inferior to anything that hits us is only going to get stronger by every event that comes our way and gives us the idea that we have survived _____ and _____ in the past so we will survive this one.

As terrible as it sounds, the solution to this seems that it would be not to survive or come back as strong as we have in the past, but rather to loose a couple of times so that as a country we can realize that we are not as strong as we think in certain areas. Maybe then we it be apparent that we need to look ahead and find our vulnerabilities before our enemies (not literal enemies) find us...


Birkland, Thomas. A.. Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change After Catastrophic Events. Georgetown University Press. 2006

Nolte, Carl. The San Francisco Century: A City Rises from the Ruins of the 1906. Sterling Publishing Company. 2005