hurricane katrina... oh my god! i don't watch the news on tv because american news coverage is too insular and censored. so every few days when i feel news deprived, i first check out cnn even though i really don't like them. then i look at other news sites around the globe, if i have time, my bad. (recently i have discovered other news sources on tv. one of them is a compilation of news from around the middle east, translated into english.) earlier today at work was when i first heard of this hurricane that struck the gulf coast. damn! how could i be so unawares? because i am a sheltered person who doesn't talk to that many people over the course of a day and none of those that i talk to mentioned it.

when i got home, i watched the news to see footage and it's much worse than what i had read about. hurricanes are horrible things to go through for that part of the country but this one seems to be just terrible. i can't help but try to relate to it on some level to try to understand what it must be like. my two immediate thoughts are that it's just like going through a war, or surviving after an 8.0+ earthquake. i'm amazed though at the claim that 80% had already evacuated new orleans before the storm hit. that number seems way too high. how do they even derive at that number? a lot of people usually don't heed evacuation warnings and stay behind for various reasons. there are also those without resources to evacuate. if 80% did evacuate, then the human life tragedy is much less than what it could have been. if even 50% evacuated, then many lives were saved. imagine if 50% were warned and able to evacuate the tsunami struck areas of boxing day 2004. if this had happened 100 years ago, everyone would have been dead. this hurricane and last year's tsunami are great examples in understanding histories of civilizations that were decimated or entirely wiped out by natural disasters.

okinawa goes through a similar thing with typhoon season every year. we went through some pretty bad ones when i lived there--bad enough that americans starting printing t-shirts that read, "i survived typhoon blah blah blah". however, we all lived. nothing was ripped from the earth that i can remember. whereas, all the american hurricanes that make the news are completely devastating. perhaps this is simply that the typhoons i've experienced were tame? i remember my mom once telling us that when she was a small child, there was a typhoon that was so strong and horrible that it flipped their house upside down. maybe every typhoon since then has been mild. or is it partly also to do with the construction of buildings? everything seemed to be concrete in okinawa and due to space scarcity, built to be high in the air, so to speak. but the homes i see in hurricane country seem to be pretty much of similar look/design and materials as the homes around me and other parts of america. we have earthquake code standards in california and i haven't lived in any other state, so i don't if there are codes to help reinforce buildings against other natural disasters. but it just doesn't make sense to me to have certain kinds of roofs in places where winds can become life-threatening. for example, a city in my area won't allow certain kinds of roofs due to their high flammability. floods though, that's tough. i could never live in a known flood area. but this is beyond that.

the one theory i have been able to come up with on the situation is this: i am hazardous to the health/safety of communities i visit but it takes a couple years for the curse to appear. i had never been to new york city. i visited in december 1999. i went to the top of the world trade center and tried to take night photos. all were blurry. i thought i have to come back and take photos in the daytime and night photos that are not blurry. look what happened 2 years later. around april 2003 i visited new orleans for the first time. we started driving from georgia along the gulf coast there until we reached new orleans. not my first time in georgia but my first time in those other states that we crossed. since then, my friends and i have been saying how we have to visit together and go to mardis gras. it's 2 years later. i don't think we'll be able to go to new orleans for mardis gras until we're in our 40s. where else have i been to that i should keep an eye on 2 years after the visit? is it only places where i went for the first time? if so, watch out navajo nation arizona in 2006 and new zealand in 2006/2007. or is my curse only effective in america? or maybe it's not me who is cursed. perhaps it is my mother. my mother is the other person who went with me on both trips to nyc and nola. either way, don't let us visit your town!

p.s.
happy birthday mom

[update 12/22/05: ok, so i just had to finally look it up. i actually went to new orleans in june 2002 so my 2 years later theory doesn't quite stick. still though, i thought it was humorous in some perverse way to say that i'm cursed with a 2 years later effect.]