Baghdad and New Orleons

The two main stories of the day are Baghdad and New Orleans. Baghdad, where the sudden fear of being blown up started a panic. What do you do, start to run even though there is no where to run to except in to the people in front of you. Then the people behind you who are running have no where to go but into you. In a crowd suddenly out of control is a dangerous place to be.

My unease of large crowds goes back to Coronation Day in 1953 when we walked down the Strand in London in the evening to watch the fireworks on the Embankment. Hundreds of thousands of other people were also walking down the Strand and we were in that crowd for what seems like a long time. Now a days the only time I like being in Fleet Walk, which can get very crowded in summer, is in the bus.

In New Orleans where a similar number of people could be dead they did have warning. For 6 days they knew that Katrina was coming. Most left but those that did not, seemed so ill prepared for what was about to happen. A two hundred mile wide monster was about to hit and destroy the most vulnerable stretch of the USA coast line and those that stayed must have believed that every thing would be OK regardless. Did they have adequate clothing, spare food, bottled water, battery radios and all the other items that any experience hurricane watcher will tell you you need. Not those seen on TV.

Incidents like this that hit the head lines make you sit in your chair and stare at the TV screen and be glad that disasters like this don’t happen every day. Then later in the evening I watched a program on BBC Four called Holidays in the Danger Zone. Ben Anderson the presenter went down the Amazon, the Ganges and the Congo. On all three rivers he came across problems faced by the local populations day by day, year in year out, unrelenting struggles for food, water, shealter, safety and some sort of order in there lives. And you realize that for a large percentage of the world’s population, disasters like these two in Baghdad and New Orleons do happen every day.

And there is nothing you can do about it.