Nutty, your comment about the Indonesian tsunami reminds me of a comment in nn article I read on the MSNBC website (NBC news service). Here's the excerpt:

The biggest known cluster of      s was at the Quiet Water Beach apartments in Biloxi, a red-brick beachfront complex of about 100 units. Harrison County, Miss., emergency operations center spokesman Jim Pollard said about 30 people died there.

"This is our tsunami," Mayor A. J. Holloway told The Biloxi Sun Herald.

This really annoyed me when I read it. Yes, Katrina was an extremely destructive hurricane, but I don't think it can be compared with the scope of devastation wrought by The Tsunami -- and to do so trivializes the tragedy of The Tsunami and the plight of its victims.

One big difference is that The Tsunami almost literally came out of nowhere, whereas everybody in Katrina's path had plenty of warning that a category 5 hurricane was headed for their coastline and they had plenty of "lead time" to save themselves. When I see the video clips of Katrina's victims being rescued from their rooftops, or hear or read the kinds of reports quoted by Amos (29 Aug 05, 03:31 PM), I want to tear out hair in frustration. What part of "mandatory evacuation" did these people not understand?!???! By staying in their houses, they purposely endangered not only their own lives but the lives of their rescuers and in some cases the lives of their children -- auugghh! -- for what? For the sake of their possessions? (...and here I'm including the house itself as a possession) Heck, let the police and the insurance companies deal with the looters, if there's anything left to loot, and get out of town while the gettin's good. The cliche "Better safe than sorry" never applied better.

Likewise I fail to understand complaints of the evacuees that authorities aren't letting them go back to their homes (or the sites thereof) right after the storm. Hello, this is a disaster, and it ain't over yet -- flood levels rose the next day (and you'd think local residents would understand about breaches in their levees better than anybody!). I guess this is the "denial" phase of post-traumatic stress.

From this remove (southeastern Pennsylvania, where we very seldom get even a tornado), I just don't understand the mindset of people who make their homes in areas where they're likely to be destroyed by an act of nature, and then seem to be surprised when nature is about to act and upset when it actually does act. I mean, to me, the history of these areas IS a hurricane warning.