Flood stories

Mom Jones notes the extent of the flood in Baton Rouge.

But for some reason most of the article is whining that it wasn't as bad as Sandy or Katrina, maybe trying to justify that no one (i.e President Obama or the MSM) seemed to be concerned about it.

Of course, I am not sure about comparing it to Sandy: For one thing, the Baton Rouge flooding was due to a failure in flood control plans.

Two, since in the mid West, many folks find shelter with family and friends or pay for their own motel room, comparing the Red Cross numbers of people in shelters to those using shelters in Sandy might underestimate the true number of those made homeless.


Speaking of floods: India has a big one in Bihar. that displaced 200 thousand people, although so far the death tol, 23 is low.
There also have been monsoon related floods in China and Typhoon related flooding in Japan in recent days.

and in the news: The legendary Chinese flood 3900 years ago may have actually happened.

A Chinese myth that speaks of a flood so high "it threatens the very heavens" may be rooted in fact after all. Some 4,000 years ago, legend says, the flood tore through a large area of central China washing away cities and inundating farmland.

Enter a hero named Yu the Great, who earned his sobriquet by spending decades organizing a campaign to dig canals to channel the floodwater, supposedly passing his home three times as he traveled the region, but never setting foot inside until the job was done. Yu was so revered for these public works that he passed into legend as emperor of China's supposed first dynasty, the mythical Xia Dynasty.

hmm...maybe someone should hire someone like Yu the Great in Louisiana.

from the UPI article I cited above:

based on my experience studying risk and resilience in this region, I see parallels between the damage of current flooding and the damage caused by Katrina. In both cases, human decisions magnified the consequences of extreme natural events. Planning and permitting enabled development in areas that had experienced repeat floods, and agencies had failed to complete projects designed to mitigate flood damage before the storms hit.