Reply to How does a Cat 4 Hurricane only kill three people?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We are really blessed to live in a country where most people live in pretty well built homes and we have places like Lowe’s and Home Depot that sell plywood to cover windows and cities give out sand bags.

If it hit like this in someplace like Haiti, death toll would be much higher.

[/quote]

True, but not because of Home Depot or even building codes. If you are at home and there's 8 feet of storm surge in your house, you are in trouble regardless of what you nail to your windows. But because of the US government you have weather predictions, opportunity to evacuate, shelters to evacuate to, emergency services to fly you off a roof if possible, and public health to provide clean water so you don't die of disease while utilities are messed up. You may also have government backed flood insurance. These are services provided by tax dollars and the government workers everybody likes to dump on. And no, it still doesn't save everybody, but those services are the difference between here, and places with huge disaster death tolls. [/quote]

Nobody complains about the Weather Service, and they are just a tiny drop in the budget. See who gets up in arms if you start talking about giving just 1% of HHS's budget to the NWS or even NPS. [/quote]

There are some pretty well publicized complaints about the NWS, from people who don't want to hear about climate change. But my point was not to get political, it was to explain that the difference between a storm hitting here and a storm hitting a poor island nation is not the availability of plywood or solid houses. The storm issues that kill huge numbers, like cholera from bad water, we don't even think about here because of the public safety and hygeine infrastructure. We do certain things so well here that most people don't realize it's being done - until it isn't funded and really bad things happen.[/quote]

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