Sheri Fink Quotes
Soon after a disaster passes, we tend to turn our eyes away and focus our resources on the day-to-day, rather than on preparing for the rare, but foreseeable and potentially catastrophic disaster. It's another form of triage, how much we invest in preparing for that, a very important question for public policy. We are a short-sighted species.
Fink, Sheri. Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital. Crown Publishers, 2013.
This quotation shows the naivety of the Islamic terrorists about America. They assumed that because the Federal Government did not send help to New Orleans and other communities hit by the hurricane, it was because there was a shortage of military personnel to send and they took credit for tying down all the troops. They just could not accept the possibility that some American administrations were totally incompetent and were not be prepared or that an American President could appoint someone with no real qualification. Ironically, they would believe that of the Arab countries in the Middle East, but not the vaunted USA. The terrible response to Katrina had nothing to do with the shortage of troops and civilian first line responders. There were more than enough. They just were never prepared and never deployed on time.
The reference was to the New Orleans Katrina Crisis of 2005.
Technically, the probability has never changed. However, most probabilities are in relation to a specific event or time. A levee may have only a 1% probably of failing in a hurricane but if there are 10 hurricanes a year, the probability that the levee will fail at least once in 30 years is about 50%.
Sheri Fink is an American journalist who writes about health, medicine and science.
