Katrina

Being in America now I am seeing day in and day out the news about the calamity which the hurricane Katrina has caused. Katrina which hit the gulf of mexico, which has affected very severey the beautiful city of New Orleans, in Lousiana and also some towns in the neighbouring State of Missisippi.
Thanks to the media, world wide, every body is able to see what is happening. I am really surprised to see that they are not able to cope up with the situation even after a week. Intially no body understood that the levees had broken.( I think levee is a kind of man made barricade to stop the missisippi flood water entering the low lying city of New Orleans. The city became a low lying city (below sea level) over the past 50 years due to the very levee system introduced to stop the annual flooding. The floods would have brought the soil along with it and the land level would not have gone down) The city was affected more because of the broken levees rather than the strom itself which had not hit this city directly but had gone and hit a place in the neighbouring missisippi state. This kind of lack of communication , delayed action in the high tech telcom days, is really apalling. The lootings, the water logged city, the helplessness, and the seemingly racist clippings they show on tv (showing again and again the lootings by blacks) and the blaming games by politicians and no body to take responsibility, the administrative mechanism crumbling down are all so damaging to the Image of America.
This shows how poor these people are in crisis management.
I always have a theory that We back home are not good at normal situation but we are all very good at 'crisis management' . May be we are so used to something going wrong, we all the time without our conscious knowledge, keep waiting for something to go wrong and are mentally more prepared at crisis management. This I could see in the airports here when I arrived that the security checks were taking so long with big queue at the airport, and we almost missed our connecting flight. Back home with more crowds our people work faster.

Coming back to Katrina, intially, on the first day of reporting in the national tv news I almost laughed when the reporting was like , there is no power for the past few hours in such and such a place, and one of the transformer broke and things like that. I imagined that if we were to report about the power failures and the broken transformers all the news papers in the world will not have space to write about any thing else. It was too silly compared to the enormity of the situation.
One more report showed some people worried about the cemetry where the tombs were affected and some body saying poor people loosing some loved one's tombs. It was so unrealsitic , when there were thousands of people who had left home and moved to other places, and several thousands huddled in a foot ball ground , to report about some water logged cemetry.
But all these changed within two days when the actual scale of calamity seeped in and people started comparing this hurricane to tsunami.
Amidst all this when people started saying in the media they felt as if they are in some 'third world country' it sounded really outrageous to me. They who have not moved from their places even to other parts of their own country using the jargon 'third world country' as if it is a dirty word made me so angry.
It is more comical to see the president issuing some stupid statements and doing helicopter survey very much like our own politicians. Poor people they deserve a better president!

Looks like it will take lot more time for the normalcy to return and it is a way of Nature showing us how mighty it is and how nature is laughing at us for trying to meddle with her.