Posted on 09/12/2005 11:27:48 AM PDT by texianyankee
Sept. 11 was an epochal event in American culture, so it's no surprise that it's everyone's favorite comparison to the destruction of New Orleans. But the more instructive analogy is another great urban catastrophe in recent American history: The 1995 Chicago heat wave, when a blend of extreme weather, political mismanagement, and abandonment of vulnerable city residents resulted in the loss of water, widespread power outages, thousands of hospitalizations, and 739 deaths in a devastating week.
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Affluent and middle-class Chicagoans had little trouble getting out of harm's way. They either turned on their air conditioners or fled for cooler destinations. Thousands of poor, old, isolated, and sick people, especially those concentrated in the city's segregated African-American ghettos, on the other hand, were effectively trapped in lethal conditions. Neither federal nor local agencies did much to assist them. Instead, city patrols cracked down on young people who opened fire hydrants.
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Images of the "water war" between the teens and the city workers featured prominently in the local media, as did long sound bites from political officials who insisted that no one had foreseen the danger of heat waves and that they had done everything they could to respond. The commissioner of human services said that people died because they neglected to take care of themselves. The mayor blamed families for refusing to protect their kin. Outraged representatives of Chicago's African-American neighborhoods argued the obvious: Everyone knew which people and places were going to be most affected by the heat. The victims' vulnerability was predictable, and so was the city's neglect. Yet their complaints got little attention, and the story of what happened to their communities remains largely unknown.
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(Excerpt) Read more at slate.msn.com ...
i thought you was talking about mrs. o'leary's cow!
More died in Chicago under another democrat government that ignored its plan.
Yeah, it generally sucks to be poor. That's why most of us work so hard not to be.
Well, it's still Bush's fault, he should hop in the Halliburton! time machine and go back to 1995 and fix it. /sarc
Environmentalist and an Activist Federal Judge derailed just such a infrastructure improvement for New Orleans & Lake Pontchartrain in 1974 that would have saved New Orleans in 2005.
".......Mayor Richard M. Daley and many of his Cabinet members set off on summer vacations, returning to Chicago only after dead bodies began piling up at the morgue. In the absence of its leaders, the city failed to pull its forgotten heat-emergency plan from the shelf. Local emergency managers refused to call in additional resources to help with the unfolding health crisis, even though paramedics and ambulances were readily available......"
The lesson to be learned is that incompetency under a Democrat can be ignored. You can rape, lie, get blow jobs, lie to the juries, get your oppents harassed, etc etc, and no one will care if you are a Democrat. But don't try it if you are a Republican because you won't get away with it.
Hmm, I think I might re register as a democrat. Sounds like I can then get away with more and become rich and then party with TED Kennedy!
Great find and thanks for posting this.
I don't remember Americans condemning the French when 14,800 people died a few years ago of the HEAT.
I bet the sheople of New Orleans would have preferred their Police Dept. being on the job, protecting them from the gangsta wolves.
Must have been Gingrich's fault. Couldn't have been Clinton's!
Harry Carey raised that cow to inner sanctum. You blasphemer.
Try to remember next time.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/08/29/france.heatdeaths/
This number, 600 deaths or what ever it was, was hyperbole. You need to understand the news market here in Chicago. This place lives for a big rain, or snow fall, or cold weather. Local reporters are always standing outside O'Hare airport reporting on the snow fall, or by the Eisenhower Expressway videotaping the salt trucks as they ply the area roads.
During the heat wave of 1995, news reports showed dead bodies being lifted in coroner vans. Ten years later, even with all the killings and murders that take place in Chicago, (648 in 2002, fewer now) those scenes don't make it on the ten o' clock news.
Here on FR we sure did lol!
That was 2003, not that long ago.
But of course the MSM gave them a free ride, and blamed "global warming" and the fact that most buildings & homes in France do not have air conditioning. No one seemed to be wondering why there isn't any A/C anywhere (the fact that is doesn't usually get real hot is no reason, old folks are more sensitive to heat). Even the freeking hospital didn't have A/C and alot of folks died there after family brought them in. They didn't have any ICE either. In a dang hospital. What the heck do they do with burn patients??
So true. My parents and I lived I genteel poverty most of the time I was growing up. The standard answer to most requests was "We can't afford it." That was a terrific incetive to make me get a good education and become a professional. A lot more of the people in NO should have thought the same way, gone out and made it on their own, and not waited to suck on the taxpayers' welfare tit.
Yeah, I was living there too. I've lived thru much hotter summers in Iowa. The news media was on a feeding frenzy to make money and hyped everyone into a state of fear. Most of those people died because they shut their windows and had no AC.
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