Word: flooded
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...unclear what serious alternatives exist to the kind of painful mass evacuations Louisiana officials ordered last week. A politically tricky situation remains: If state and local officials fail to move residents out of flood-prone areas, they risk charges of incompetence, or worse. But their hesitance after Gustav to allow residents to quickly return to areas that lacked basic services like electricity, grocery stores and gas stations brought the same accusations. In addition, their heightened rhetoric as Gustav approached - New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin at one point said it could be "the storm of the century" - only hurts their credibility...
...Since the European Union's enlargement in 2004, when Britain opened its job market to Europe's new member states, Poles have provided the British economy with a flood of cheap and plentiful labor. (Sweden and Ireland also opened their doors to East Europeans seeking work, while other E.U. countries delayed their legal arrival.) The immigration wave took Britain by surprise. While the government expected at most 13,000 East Europeans annually, nearly 800,000 applied for work permits between 2004 and the end of 2007. The stereotypical arrival was the Polish plumber, but thousands of professionals arrived too. Today...
...start with the good news: Hurricane Gustav was a much ballyhooed bust. It arrived in Louisiana as a relatively mild Category 2 storm, not the Category 4 nightmare forecasters had feared, and it missed New Orleans. The fatal failures of Hurricane Katrina were not repeated: levees and flood walls didn't collapse, pumps didn't break down, and most residents fled the coast before Gustav's landfall. There was much better preparation and cooperation, much less finger-pointing and obfuscating. And for all the TV footage of downed power lines and uprooted trees and windblown reporters, there were just...
...first task will be defending New Orleans, which was betrayed during Katrina by badly designed and constructed Corps flood walls as well as by a misguided Corps navigation canal called the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, which intensified storm surges. The Corps has pledged that by 2011, the city will be safe from a 100-year storm--the level of protection that was required but never provided before Katrina. It has already repaired or improved 220 miles (350 km) of flood walls and levees and installed floodgates that during Gustav helped keep surges from Lake Pontchartrain out of the city...
Many folks in the rest of the country wonder why anyone would want to live in such a flood-prone place. Luke becomes visibly tense at the subject and responds, "It's a way of life," referring to living on the water. "The new buildings are being built on pilings. So you can take the flood. Wind, you just don't know. But everyone's going up," he says, referring to the homes along the bayous perched on stilts. "You just set yourself up for the lick, you know?" The "lick" is a euphemism for heavy flooding...