The Hurricane that Wasn't Here
Water stripped from shelves. Jocularly, consumers, like cows in a closing feedlot, crowd the flashlight, battery and duct tape areas of local stores. Across the country gas is being eyed with a bit of panic. Pepsi and Coke are hoarded like bottled water. People are muttering about traffic, passing on numbers, locations, horror stories of local traffic.
San Antonio struggles with it's already complex traffic. The Austin City Limits show continues as planned. Houston's biggest evacuation headaches, aside from the preventable tragedy of an exploding bus with over twenty casualties, is the realization that capitalist evacuation methods depending on private vehicles don't work: only a well-orchestrated public transportation system can move millions of citizens from any two points.
In the meantime, tens of thousands of refugees, thinking they were only a step ahead of the storm, are instead wallowing in another hot, Texas fall day all over Central and West Texas.
The story not being told, the story covered up by the fearless fire fighters fighting blazes in downtown Galveston, is of the toxic time bombs direcly in Rita's path. It will be days, if not weeks, for the real truth to bubble up as to the real damage to the environment from this hurricane strike directly at our chemical underbelly.
One ill-timed hurricane gust, one tornado just a shade too powerful, and pipes will clang like xylophones around our main refinery complexes, shredding fuel and pastic manufcaturing facilities that spread like artificial cities across miles and miles of Texas flatland.
I can't deny we need the products produced by these plants, if not at the quantity we consume them. With the abject failures of FEMA and of Louisiana's entire government, with clear failure of our Texan evacuation system (what if we didn't have two days to evacuate Houston from, say a WMD), I don't have faith that the ever self-'regulating' petrochemical industry isn't setting us up for another Bhopal.
May I be proved wrong -- live upwind.
San Antonio struggles with it's already complex traffic. The Austin City Limits show continues as planned. Houston's biggest evacuation headaches, aside from the preventable tragedy of an exploding bus with over twenty casualties, is the realization that capitalist evacuation methods depending on private vehicles don't work: only a well-orchestrated public transportation system can move millions of citizens from any two points.
In the meantime, tens of thousands of refugees, thinking they were only a step ahead of the storm, are instead wallowing in another hot, Texas fall day all over Central and West Texas.
The story not being told, the story covered up by the fearless fire fighters fighting blazes in downtown Galveston, is of the toxic time bombs direcly in Rita's path. It will be days, if not weeks, for the real truth to bubble up as to the real damage to the environment from this hurricane strike directly at our chemical underbelly.
One ill-timed hurricane gust, one tornado just a shade too powerful, and pipes will clang like xylophones around our main refinery complexes, shredding fuel and pastic manufcaturing facilities that spread like artificial cities across miles and miles of Texas flatland.I can't deny we need the products produced by these plants, if not at the quantity we consume them. With the abject failures of FEMA and of Louisiana's entire government, with clear failure of our Texan evacuation system (what if we didn't have two days to evacuate Houston from, say a WMD), I don't have faith that the ever self-'regulating' petrochemical industry isn't setting us up for another Bhopal.May I be proved wrong -- live upwind.
posted by Da Shlom at Saturday, September 24, 2005
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