• Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      8 hours ago

      No I am not. Those deaths were not the result of a natural disaster. The levee break was both predicted for years and preventable if the funds were just spent on it. Those deaths were directly the result of government incompetence.

      • XeroxCool@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        So are you not going to count deaths from Helene resulting from people not evacuating properly? For not taking it seriously because it was preventable?

        • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          7 hours ago

          “Not evacuating properly”? Plenty of the people who died had no idea the storm was going to be as bad as it was when they were hundreds of miles inland in an area that had never had significant flooding.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          7 hours ago

          Individual choices are different from government incompetence resulting in mass casualties. You understand that, right?

          If lightning strikes a skyscraper that doesn’t have sprinklers, causing it to burn down and kill 100 people- did the lightning kill those people or was it the lack of sprinklers?

          • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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            7 hours ago

            Individual choices are different from government incompetence resulting in mass casualties.

            There’s a systemic criticism here; people not evacuating Helene properly demonstrates we don’t have proper systems in place to facilitate evacuations in the case of a hurricane.

            Someone who chooses not to evacuate because they didn’t understand the severity or don’t have a car or anywhere to go isn’t an individual choice.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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              7 hours ago

              I notice you didn’t answer my question. I will ask it again:

              If lightning strikes a skyscraper that doesn’t have sprinklers, causing it to burn down and kill 100 people- did the lightning kill those people or was it the lack of sprinklers?

                • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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                  7 hours ago

                  Right. Which is why it would be a man-made disaster and not a natural disaster. The same with Katrina and the levees. Katrina was a natural disaster, but what killed the people in New Orleans was the levees not getting repaired when they needed to be.

                  And it’s different from people refusing to evacuate since that’s on them, it’s not an issue of other people’s incompetence being the cause of mass casualties.

                  • alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml
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                    7 hours ago

                    it’s different from people refusing to evacuate since that’s on them

                    It isn’t though, you need to examine why those people were unwilling or unable to evacuate.

                    This is a systemic failure; our systems failed to adequately enable and incentivize people to evacuate. Do you judge a country’s covid response by the number of people killed by covid, or just chalk that up to people’s individual choices too?