Natural Disaster Preparedness Quotes

I've been through natural disasters. I lived down in Miami and was down there for Hurricane Andrew which was a Category 5. There were members of my family that thought they were going to die. Everyone was in the bathtub.

My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.

... universal adoption of the institutions of the free society would better enable adaptation to climate both now and in the future. It would also ensure that, if at some point in the future, a real catastrophe, whether human-induced or otherwise (including climate change), does loom on the horizon, humanity would be in a better position to address it.

In fact, if you are faced with the prospect of running across an open field in which lightning bolts are going to be a problem, you are much better off if their timing and location are determined by something, since then they may be predictable by you, and hence avoidable. Determinism is the friend, not the foe, of those who dislike inevitability.

Before Katrina, it was a longstanding tradition in our country for political officials to wait until the last minute to warn, to take action, to evacuate. No more. With Irene, you had mass evacuations - mandatory ones - issued days ahead of time. That was the right thing to do.

Eighty-five percent of us in this country, by the way, live in coastal areas, so again, Katrina and Rita were not just about New Orleans. There were a lot of lessons that the nation can learn from us if they just pay attention to the things that are going on down here.

We cannot prevent hurricanes or earthquakes, floods or volcanic eruptions. But we can ensure that both people and communities are better prepared and more resilient.

Second, there are two problems with respect to mobile homes in particular. One is we obviously don't want to put them in a flood plain, because if there's another flood, you're going to lose the mobile home.

We hope that as a species we're capable of dealing with environmental catastrophe before it actually does collectively kill most of us.

Public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated.

The problem is that every study I'm aware of, which is probably not that many, has indicated that a dollar spent in preparation and avoidance of natural disasters is worth $15 that is spent in relief. But there's no political payoff for preparation. So, who benefits? I mean, the governor or senator or the president? Bill Clinton at Oklahoma City, his performance there helped him enormously. And there really hasn't been any regulation that would, in fact, interfere with environmental disaster.

If the wind rises it can push us against the flood when it comes.

I hope weather coverage on a national level will help folks learn to respect the power of severe weather, and weather in general, so more lives are spared.