Thursday, September 01, 2005

Hurricane Katrina: The Ripple Effect

This is a non film/tv post, but I just wanted to extend my best wishes for the safety and security of all the people in Louisiana and Mississippi who have been displaced by the terrible tragedy of Hurricane Katrina. We hope your nightmare will soon end, and you can return home. I know that people around the country are donating time, labor, blood and funds to help, but that the months ahead are going to be heartbreaking and difficult.

I live in Monroe, North Carolina, just south of Charlotte, and we are actually feeling the ripple effects of Katrina here. Since the storm, when gas supplies were disrupted because of two downed pipelines on the Gulf Coast, there have been over ninety "incidents" at area gas stations. And that was before rush hour this morning.

Police have been deployed to metropolitan stations to maintain order, there have been 67 car accidents, 23 incidents (such as fighting) and 9 arrests in the city. People are advising Charlotteans to conserve gas, but the opposite seems to be happening, and the city is engulfed in what appears to be a full-fledged panic.

The pipelines are supposed to be repaired today, but if they aren't, the gas shortages will increase until this city is virtually frozen early next week. Charlotte-Douglas Airport has enough jet fuel to keep planes flying for a week, and already, 30+ area gas stations have closed because they've run out of gas. I fear a ripple effect here. If trucks can't get gas, they can't deliver food....let's just hope things don't get any worse and that the two pipelines (Colonial and Plantation, I think...) are repaired in a timely fashion.

It is past time for our federal government to seriously begin investigating alternate fuel supplies. Should have happened 30 years ago with the OPEC crisis, but we've all been lulled into a false sense of security and encouraged to buy SUVs. This kind of thinking just has to stop, and we have to become less dependent on oil. A city hundreds of miles from the hurricane is coming to a stand-still because of the oil problem. If this continues, we can say goodbye to the automobile utopia we've enjoyed for almost 100 years.

The "suffering" in Charlotte is like .0000000001% of what is occurring in New Orleans or Gulf Port, Mississippi, but our city's borderline-hysterical reaction to this shortage sure isn't pretty. Imagine if a real apocalypse had come instead?

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