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One thing that bothers me more and more now that the relief efforts seems to be kicking in, is the future disaster that will surface in the coming weeks and months and which this country is not equipped to handle. Let me try to explain what I mean.
1. Monetary situation With this I mean the financial status of the refugees. If you are a "homeowner" with a mortgage and did not have flood insurance or natural disaster insurance, you will loose the house but still have to pay the mortgage.
How on earth are they supposed to do that?
2. Work Since it will take years and years to bring the area back to a pre-hurricane state, many people if not most will be without jobs and have a direct effect in 1.
3. Education There is a need for long term education alternatives that will maybe have to last years to come. Since it will most likely not be possible to reopen schools in the area for a long time, long term alternatives will have to replace the current ones. Since a lot of higher education costs an arm and a leg and a newborn in this country, schools are not opening their doors to people from the area for free and since most terms have already started, the students have already paid for the term or year and will not get their money back (due to force majeur). Who will ensure that these people can continue their education without having to pay double?
Talking about lower grade education, the problem lies in coordinating housing, work and education locally where people will be housed temporarily. You can not separate these 3 things as that would totally split a family and add extra financial burden.
5. Long term housing Several hundred thousand people will need long term housing due to the state of the area. What are the plans for this?
6. Future storms/hurricanes This season is still in it's most active periode and if another storm/hurricane were to head the way of NO, even just atropical storm, it would render the area inhabitable for years to come. Looking at the experience we had here in Florida last year, were I was hit by 3 hurricanes in a little more than a month, I fear the worst.
There is a lot more, but these are some of the main areas that will cause this tragedy to become an even bigger tradgedy than it already is.
USA as a country is not able to handle a disaster of this kind due to it's lack of a modern infrastructure and a modern social system. The way the system works today, it's actually having the effect of working against a disaster of this type. Add to this the antiquated and totally inefficient state/federal division, top it off with a multitude of agencies that can not work together or are in direct fights with each other and it doesn't take more than a couple of minutes of thinking to understand that we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.
PS. I also heard that they expected 2000 inmates to have died because they don't evacuate inmates, i.e they got a death sentence. What a fucking disaster country this has become. I hate to say this, but USA seems more and more like a 3rd world country in many aspects.
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