John,
Those who have traveled to NYC see those water tanks on almost EVERY building. It isn't the first time that cities have had power outages (go back to the late '60s for a great example).
But those cities will be the focus of national relief efforts (as well as probable deployment of national guard troops to keep order in such an event). But you are predicting that water will be off for months and that just doesn't seem altogether plausible for NYC if you are familiar with their antiquated water supply system (ask the "sand hogs" about that one).
You are the folks saying there won't be any water, like people don't have the common sense to seek natural sources of it, or you seem to believe that gov't officials will just sit on their @sses and do nothing about bringing water in to take care of the people.
Look what happened in New Zealand for 6 weeks when power went out there because of faulty power lines.... People survived. It wasn't comfortable.. it wasn't pretty, but no one just sat on their duff and did nothing about it. They fixed the problem and drove on with their lives.
That what I would like to see being mentioned here. All I seem to hear is how this or that is practically guaranteed to fail, but no one cares to discuss the fact that most infrastructure failures are resolved fairly rapidly, usually within 30 days at the OUTSET. The political pressure would be just too great for these priorities to be ignored by city leaders.
So excuse me if I choose to look at prior precedents of disasters, man-made or otherwise, for examples of the potential for systems recovery by inovative and motivated human beings.
For god's sake, we built them and given enough time we can fix 'em.
I'd just like a bit of fairness from all sides. There are people reading this thread who are not participating, and they deserve the necessary data with which to make their decisions.
I'm by no means a polly-anna. People SHOULD, AND HAD BETTER, BE PREPARED for infrastructure disruptions, whether from acts of god, or acts of man. But Y2K need not be an event that people turn into some friggin' apocalypse scenario.
And given the INUMERABLE THREATS that we face each and everyday of our lives from terrorism and infowar attacks, there are more serious things should be worried about than some event that everyone has heard about for 2-3 years already.
They should prepare for the situations that catch our society with its pants around its ankles.
And like DOD Sect. Richard Cohen cautioned, it is ONLY a matter of time until some wacko out there like Bin Laden seeks to take on the US in a major way. They WANT to make us afraid.
How are you all going to react when the US or some other nation is ultimately attacked with biological or chemical weapons???
Y2K pales in comparison to that eventual probability.
Regards,
Ron |
