"The trauma these people have undergone is unlike anything that has occurred in the history of our country." - stated Daniel Becnel, Jr., a lawyer who said his clients have filed more than 60,000 claims, said measuring Katrina's devastation in dollars and cents is a nearly impossible task. (from
Yahoo news)
Umm, is it unlike what the victims of the
1906 San Francisco earthquake went through? They had issues of police misusing dynamite to create firebreaks and subsequently blowing up more of the city. There were riots then too, along with temporary housing for the displaced.
Or the
1900 Galveston hurricane perhaps? Between 6,000 and 12,000 died then and, as stated in the wiki article, "The bodies were so numerous that burial was not a viable option. Initially, the dead were taken out to sea and dumped; however, the currents of the gulf washed the bodies back onto the beach, so a new solution was needed. Funeral pyres were set up wherever the dead were found. In the aftermath of the storm, pyres burned for weeks. Authorities had to pass out free whiskey to the work crews that were having to throw the bodies of their wives and children on the burn piles."
1918 Spanish Flu where "in the U.S., about 28% of the population suffered, and 500,000 to 675,000 died?"
or, heeeeeyy, what about the
American Civil War? Yeahhh, no trauma there....
As for
Hurricane Katrina, just over 1800 people died in very frightening example of a natural disaster separating the haves from the have nots. My guess as to why the news plays up this as the OMGBFD disaster in U.S. history is the $$ involved. The value of many of the buildings is beyond price due to their historic or sentimental value. What the economists point out is the value in
revenue that was/is lost due to the destruction of businesses and other economic venues. To me, that's all
fake worth, numbers that are just that, only numbers, not a price tag.
What the yahoo article tells me is that this lawyer needs to actually
think before he makes a statement of such overt stupidity and that Yahoo news is (like many other news agencies) fine with using statements like these to gain popularity and is too lazy to call it out as the idiotic claim that it is.
