Re: Moore Oklahoma twister history
Posted by
Chris in Tampa on 5/21/2013, 10:08 pm
I agree in terms of individual homes, but in terms of some of the schools, more could have been done to make them safer. The school where everyone is believed to have survived was apparently newer and had safer areas. I'm not exactly sure what they were, but they said on the news tonight that the school where the kids died was older and did not have the safer areas. (However, the school where everyone seems to have survived may have been a little bit less harder hit based on the track, so that could have actually been the difference.) The news said it costs about $1.4 million per school to build the safer areas. I think after this Moore will certainly be at the top of the list for the money needed to make the schools safer. Given Moore's history, I am a little surprised they were not all upgraded, but then again who would have thought something like this would have happened in just about the same place 2 to 3 times in the past fourteen years.
As for the individual homes, I don't know what FEMA may or may not have done to delay grants, but I think it should have been more responsibility on the homeowner to decide what they want to do. When you are building a home or buying it, the cost to build a "safe room" should be something people budget for, not hope to win part of the money to build it.
But I think schools are different. You have to trust that your kids will be taken care of the best they can. While everyone did the best that they could under the circumstances, if they had safer areas to go to the result may have been different.
Certainly, you could do absolutely everything right and have everything you could ever hope to have to protect you and be unlucky enough for it to be not enough. With winds anywhere close to that, where trees are debarked and large objects are thrown large distances, there is no safe place, only safer places than others. But in this case, there was a little more that could have been done and I think they will now probably do whatever they have to do to upgrade the schools in the area that have yet to be upgraded. It's easy to look back now and say you had one EF5 tornado come through so you should have been prepared, but of course that is one of the reasons the schools probably were not all upgraded. You already had something like that, or even another time nearby near that intensity, so what are the odds of it happening another time?
I do agree that people will always ask if anything could have been done. That gets into what could have been reasonably done and then gets into what is reasonable. You could spend tens of millions and take away money from other programs that might have really needed the money more. I think it is hard to accept that sometimes there is nothing that could be done, though in case there is something that can be reasonably done in the future to help reduce the loss of life, I think the question does always need to be asked. Sometimes we just may not be able to accept the answer. |
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