Act before It Happens Introduction In the article Under Water by Kate Sheppard, the author addresses the issue of natural disaster more specifically super-storms that highly endanger people who live on coastal counties throughout the U.S. Sheppard primarily addresses this article to the 39% of American population who live on coastal counties that are likely to get flooded, and to the governmental authorities who rather spend billions of dollars fixing damages caused by super-storms instead of taking precautions to prepare for them. Sheppard relies on extrinsic proofs to claim that people pretend like there will not be another major super-storm that will happen in the near future while weather changes and data have shown otherwise, and as …show more content…
Sheppard states many secondary claims such as “The U.S spends of dollars on disasters after they happen, but pennies to prepare for them”, “the feds creates programs that allow people to build in high-risk area as if a storm will not happen again”, and “by 2050, extreme storms will cause 129.7 billion dollars’ worth of loss”. (Sheppard, 2013, Pge 240-243). These secondary claims all work together as evidences to prove that nobody is doing anything to prepare for super-storms. There will be many helpful consequences if Sheppard succeeds in persuading her audience; such as the government will start preparing for disasters before they happen instead of after and will stop insuring houses that are repeatedly destroyed by storms, people will stop building in risky area, and people …show more content…
First, the government has to determine if the rapid sea level rise is due to climate change or global warming because government officials say one thing, and climate experts say the other. Also, people have to be educated about the sea level rise; they have to know exactly how it is going to affect them with or without government assistance. And lastly, some people will have to be forced out of their homes because some residents have lived in flood risk area all their life; it is where they grew
In the article “Swimming for Her Life” by Kristin Lewis the main character Yusra Is a 18 year reefuge who is a olympic swimmer who faces many problems early in life. She and her sister had to flee their country because of terrorists and war. There where not many countries that would allow refugees into their country. So they had to hire a smuggler to get them to germany. While they rode on a boat to greece The motor stopped working so yusra and her sister had to jump in the water and push the boat for three hours. After they got to Greece they had to walk for 25 days to get to germany. Finally they got there and they were very luckie to find a refugee camp. Then when the olympics started they announced that there would be a refugee swim team.
Already scientists have observed that more than 75% of the recent economic losses are caused by natural hazards which can be attributed to wind storms, floods, droughts and other climate related hazards. In the year 2008, the U.S. state of Iowa was on the front pages of newspapers all around the world. Weeks of heavy rain in the Midwest caused rivers to swell and levees to break. Millions of acres of farmland are now underwater, their plantings most likely destroyed. By March, Iowa had tied its third-highest monthly snowfall in 121 years of record keeping, and then came the rain. April’s st...
In the first short story of Drown by Junot Diaz, the reader follows a nine year old and his twelve year old brother, Rafa, as they stay with their uncle in Ocoa for the summer. Throughout their brief journey to unmask Ysreal, who wears a mask to hide his disfigured face caused by a pig when he was a baby, there is a very evident portrayal of the brothers’ family dynamic. Through their relationship, the reader is able to get an understanding of how machismo, their environment, and how their absent father play a role in their life.
Of course I do not consider myself to be a racist, or a bigot, but I am aware of socially conditioned stereotypes and prejudices that reside within. That awareness, and the ability to think for myself, has allowed me to approach issues with clarity of mind and curiousness at the social interactions of various movements. Buried in the Bitter Waters, by Elliot Jaspin, has easily awakened my sensibilities and knowledge of modern era race relations in the United States. I read each chapter feeling as if I had just read it in the pages before. The theme of racial cleansing - of not only the colonizing of a people, but the destruction of their lives and livelihood – was awesome. The “awesome” of the 17th century, from the Oxford English Dictionary, as in “inspiring awe; appalling, dreadful.” Each story itself was a meditation on dread and horror, the likes of which my generation cannot even fathom. It is with that “awe” that I reflect in this response paper.
As George Santayana famously said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”. This appears to be prophetic seeing the events that played out during both the Johnstone flood and Hurricane Katrina. However with proper plans and infrastructure in place, appropriate inspection and maintenance, and an accurate and up to date emergency notification system, it is very feasible that we can in the future break this deadly trend.
In 2008 Hurricane Ike made land fall to the east coast line in Galveston Texas. The storm surge water that Ike produced flooded the east coast region of Houston and Galveston. It has been estimated over billions of dollars in damage to home owners, business owners, and cause numerus of deaths. The mass destruction that Ike caused had people coming up ways to prevent or lessen the effects if a storm like this would ever occur in the future. A storm surge project was drafted and submitted to politicians is being delayed due to funding issues. Money should not be the major delay when it comes to saving homeowners, business owners, and a life of a person.
...uent hurricanes that may come. Elevated homes, Flood resistant materials, Strong wind shields. Five years later, Gene and his family are still recovering, many others still getting to be where they were before the harsh September thirteenth. But what is important now is how they and the future generations will survive future disasters and not merely what they lost. The history of the Ike is still in progress as they think of ways to combat the challenges they face and avoid future ones.
The events that form you are probably the best events of your entire life. In the memoir, The Color of Water by James McBride, the audience is told about a young mixed boy who grew up in a very segregated time period. The setting was Suffolk, Virginia; New York City; Louisville, Kentucky; Oberlin, Ohio; and Wilmington, Delaware. James McBride describes how he changed from a confused child into an intellectual individual. Although the story talks about many small events that all built up James McBride as a person, there were three major events that truly gave him definition as to whom he was, or who he could be. These events are when his step father, Hunter Jordan, died; when he moved to Delaware; and when he was able to finally uncover his
After hurricane Ike, which hit Texas in 2008, Texas didn’t ask for a coastal protection program, and instead did what they believed to be most economically necessary. Scranton includes this information to emphasize how we don’t seem to learn from our lack of preparation for disastrous storms in the past, and why that’s such an issue. However, today researchers are working towards solutions to the damage of future hurricanes. Although acting out these plans has proven to be a struggle, according to all the information Scranton has provided us throughout the article it should be one of the most serious issues on our minds. The lack of immediate call to action on the issue of climate change means that “today it might be too late,” states Scranton. He then wraps up his ideas by claiming to understand why the population has difficulty fully grasping the urgency to prevent climate change, if still possible. Readers are emotionally provoked when Scranton lists concepts that relate to climate change, such as leukemia, shampoo, specific places, paper, etc. because people can often relate to some of these things in their everyday life. Scranton seems to understand that many people are just afraid of
A quote that sums up depression quite well was written by Martha Manning in her book “Undercurrents: A Life Beneath the Surface.”
August 23rd, 2005; Hurricane Katrina, formed over the Bahamas, hitting landfall in Florida. By the 29th, on its third landfall it hit and devastated the city of New Orleans, becoming the deadliest hurricane of the 2005 season and, one of the five worst hurricanes to hit land in the history of the United States. Taking a look at the years leading to Katrina, preventative actions, racial and class inequalities and government, all of this could have been prevented. As presented in the newspaper article, An Autopsy of Katrina: Four Storms, Not Just One , we must ask ourselves, are “natural” disasters really natural or, are they a product of the people, who failed to take the necessary actions that needed to be taken?
Scientists appear to have become aware of the issue of rising sea levels in the mid to late 1980s. An article published in Science News in 1987 predicted that “global warming… will cause… the world's oceans to expand, raising the average sea level by 4 to 8 centimeters in the next 40 years” (Monastersky). Though 4 to 8 centimeters sounds like a miniscule amount in relation to the vastness of the world’s oceans, this early article disturbed many readers. Many for this reason: early stud...
The global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century (NASA). The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century. With climate change on the rise, higher temperatures, more droughts, and wilder weather will prevail. These changes will affect animals, ecosystems, and people.
This lack of preparation takes place in different places and involves different hazards. In the case of hurricane, only half of all respondents living in Central Florida have hurricane evacuation plan in place (Kapucu, 2008). Another finding revealed that only 8 percent of all respondent have prepared a disaster supplies kit in home. Kenny (2009) found that most residents in South Florida, hurricane-prone area, failed to take preparatory measures such as securing bottled water and food when storms strike. In another place and a different hazard, the result of study demonstrated the same finding. Paton and Prior (2008) studied bushfire preparation in Tasmania show that most respondents had undertaken some form of protective behavior only minimal and limited. They started to prepare after they were warned by disaster emergency services.
Of the four phases of emergency management, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery, perhaps the place that individuals can make the biggest difference in their own state of resiliency and survival of a disaster is in the preparedness phase. Being prepared before a disaster strikes makes sense yet many people fail to take even simple, precautionary steps to reduce the consequences of destruction and mayhem produced by natural events such as earthquakes, volcanos and tornados (see Paton et al, 2001, Mileti and Peek, 2002; Tierney, 1993, Tierney et al, 2001).