It’s not just a gulf coast disaster, it’s a Gulf Of Mexico Disaster.

[trof]

“Louisiana, a center of the oil, gas and chemical industries, "was known for its very weak environmental enforcement regulations," Kaufman said, and there are a number of landfills and storage areas containing "thousands of tons" of hazardous material to be leaked and spread. "On top of that, you have dead bodies that are going to start to decompose, along with the material that was in industrial and household discharge, sewage, gasoline and waste oil from gas stations," he added. "You've got a witches' brew of contaminated water."

Given New Orleans's desperate straits, recovery teams will not be able to do anything with the toxic mess except pump it into the Gulf of Mexico, ensuring that the contamination will spread to a larger area, he said. "There's just no other place for it."

Authorities will be monitoring levels of water toxicity along the coastline for years: "There is no magic chemical that you can put in the Gulf to make heavy metals or benzene go away. You're stuck with it."
"http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/31/AR2005083102758_3.html"

That string of swamp, wetlands, and islands trailing southeast from New Orleans into the Gulf of Mexico is a “breakpoint” for gulf currents. To the west, the Yucatan current flows on past the Texas coast down into Mexico. To the east, the Florida current flows on to Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida.
http://oceancurrents.rsmas.miami.edu/caribbean/loop-current.html

I live near the Alabama coast, 10 miles inland. I wonder what this toxic stew will do to our fishing, shrimping, crabbing, oystering industries? And what will it do to our biggest money-maker of all, tourism?

And all because we invaded a country that was no threat to us $$$, cut taxes for people who needed no tax cuts $$$, and didn’t fund the levee projects in New Orleans $$$.

The rule of unintended consequences.
For want of a nail, a shoe was lost...

[1932]

1. And you'd think strengthening the homeland would have included

strengthening the levees. (A bomb could have done the same damage.)

So not only are tax cuts and destroying the infrastructure hurting us, but whatever we've been doing in the name of protecting America from terrorism has been an expensive joke too.

And we can't even run an evacuation properly either (which ALSO should have been part of a homeland security program) so we're losing some our most valuable resources -- PEOPLE -- unnecessarily. People are dying who either should have been evacuated before the storm or should have been evacuated on Tuesday.

[trof]

2. This area runs on seafood and tourism.

We. are. screwed.

[1932]

4. Don't forget: people are our greatest resource.

I know that people are working hard to make wealthier people wealth these days, but it's still the case that we lose a great deal when peoples lives are unnecessarily cut short or their potential is never realized.

[trof]

3. kick

[trof]

5. And kick again. This has HUGE consequences.

[slor]

6. They need to do something else with it...

and they need to take the tax cuts for the big oil companies to figure that out. We cannot let them dump that shit into the gulf!

[oneighty]

7. Clams and oysters

It will be interesting to see how they are affected (Infected). I do not believe it will be good.

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