“Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed levees and exploded the conventional wisdom about a shared American prosperity, exposing a group of people so poor they didn’t have $50 for a bus ticket out of town. If we want to learn something from this disaster, the lesson ought to be: America’s poor deserve better than this.” - Michael Eric Dyson
This past weekend, Hurricane Irma made landfall in the United States, battering the entire state of Florida with a colossal reach of more than 400 miles. Making landfall as a category 4 hurricane, with sustained winds in excess of 130 miles per hour (209 km/hr), causing massive flooding and storm surges, resulting in more than five million power outages, and even creating catastrophic tornadoes, the damage it caused may well rise into the hundreds of billions of dollars. This occurred on the heels of Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall in and around Houston, Texas, as a category 4 hurricane as well, marking the first time in recorded history that two hurricanes as powerful as category 4 made landfall in the same year in the United States.
Read the Medium story by Ethan Siegal - “Now is absolutely the time to politicize Hurricane Irma and other natural disasters.”
