As the scale of the enormous disaster in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama becomes clear, two things come to my mind:
- Despite the mandatory evacuation orders, 20% of the population stayed behind to ride out the storm. Let’s just take the New Orleans metropolitan area, which has more than 1.3 million people. That means about 260,000 people did not evacuate. If 1% of them died, that’s 2600 people. And that’s just New Orleans.
- Do I have enough food, clothing, and supplies to last a week without any assistance from the government, after a major earthquake? Do I have enough gas to drive long distances, just in case? Right now, I don’t. (I should have bought gasoline on Sunday…) Time to get an earthquake preparedness kit.