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njlauren -> RE: Tragedy foretold but ignored (3/30/2014 9:20:50 AM)
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You have the freedom to live where you choose, but what the 'live free or die types' forget is how much influence the government has, and how government policy helps encourage people to live in bad areas. It is true every area has risks, but it is completely irrational to assume the risks are the same, which is what some posters are saying.
For example, Alabama points out that when the big floods hit the midwest, that people in California chided people for living in a flood plane, and it is the pot calling the kettle black. What he left out is that the federal government, thanks to pressure from both congressmen in that area and the river shipping industry, had the army corps of engineers reroute the mississippi, both to make it more navigable, and also ironically to reduce flooding in certain areas to make them more attractive to build houses..and what happened was they created an even bigger mess (by moving the river, they took away the natural means of the river to handle high water, and all the levees in the world won't stop it). Since then they have bought out people in the area they stupidly allowed to live there, and have let the river go back to more its natural banks.
In North Carolina, they passed legislation making it illegal to talk about climate change or rising oceans in official state documents, because they were afraid it would drive off development of coastal and barrier lands......yet these are subject to the effects of storms.
Then we have federal food insurance. I live in an area that has a very, very low flood risk, they claim it is a once in several hundred year flood plain. If I were to get flood insurance based on the risk in my area, I would probably be paying 50 bucks a year, yet I pay almost 600...why? Because I subsidize people living in major flood risk areas, so they can afford or get flood insurance. Recently they passed legislation to make flood insurance be realistic, and all these people living on barrier islands and coastal flood plains found out they would be paying a lot more, and yelled, and congressmen stepped in and put a moratorium on the rate increases (one of the ironies is they mentioned a house in coastal Carolina, big house, that was worth about twice what my house is, that had an incredibly high risk of floods, and their insurance was less than mine......in part because congressman and senators basically wrote into the law restrictions that made flood insurance cheaper there than where I live, despite the fact that the floor risk is probably 10x where I live.
In NJ where I live there are towns that were built on the Passaic river flood plain, towns like lincoln park, Wayne, Pequannock, where when heavy storms happen they get flooded. You drive on Route 80 you can see it, swampy, marshy, low lying land with branches of the river and houses built right on it.....these houses get flooded time and again (used to be every 10 years, now it seems like every other year), yet they are rebuilt, the state and fed government helps them rebuild.
The problem isn't government building housing, it is that it is encouraging building in dangerous areas and then picking up the tab when it happens. If allowed to work as the market would do it (the irony being that many of those who support the policies that encourage this kind of reckless building also claim to be free market types, the government is evil, etc) people wouldn't build there knowing the costs; if they knew they couldn't get flood insurance or FEMA help because the risk was considered too high (which is what insurance companies do all the time, with any kind of insurance, or financial companies), it would tend to reduce risky building.
Yet people insist that these subsidies are 'freedom', when the government is de facto encouraging risk taking because there is no risk. It is much like the arguments about the big financial firms, that played russian roulette with 5 bullets in the gun cause they knew with how big they were, Uncle Sam would take the 6th bullet, not them. In the example I gave in NJ, both the feds and the state of NJ have proposed buying out houses in those areas likely to flood and leave them as a flood plain, it would cost a lot less to do so than all the storms we keep seeing wiping out houses, but instead a lot of the representatives from those towns and the people, who generally are very Tea Party leaning, want the state and fed to spend 8 billion dollars on a project that would literally put the Passaic river in a giant water tunnel through the area, which a)would probably end up cost 15-20 billion and b) would probably cause problems somewhere else; flood control using ends up causing more problems then it solves.
Though in many parts of California it is impossible to get earthquake insurance, one of the reasons they keep building on fault lines and such is that people know the government will step in if a disaster does happen, and with earthquakes, because they are unpredictable, because the big ones tend to happen relatively infrequently (the last big one in CA was in 1989), people assume it won't happen. LA has the threat of droughts and wildfires, then floods and mudslides, but people know the government will step in if insurers won't. It is disingenuous to claim that the government has no right to tell people where they can live, but then expect the government to de facto make it possible for people to live in high risk areas.
As far as living on the boat in a hurricane area, it seems contradictory, but a well found boat often is safest out at sea, where you can ride it out; ocean going sailboats are designed to get rolled over and such. The boat in the story and movie of "a perfect storm", where the coast guard forced the guy to abandon ship (talking the sail boat, not the fishing boat), ended up washing ashore in Delaware, and it was in relatively unscathed shape, some damage to the gelcoat from running ashore, some bent stanchions, but it it survived.
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