* The Mosul Dam with its 1m potential death toll is not even in the top league. Without a doubt the most stupidly placed dam on the planet is the Aswan High Dam in Egypt. Built as a “national greatness” folly by Nasser (using Soviet engineers), it gave Israel a knife to put at Egypt’s throat–in fact it may be *the* reason Egypt signed a peace treaty in 1978.
One nuke, or even one fuel-air explosive, that takes out that dam will send an extremely high-speed wall of water all the way to the Mediterranean. Estimates are that it would be over 50 feet high and going 100 mph when it hits Cairo, and still 20 feet high when it reaches the sea. Since 90+% of the Egyptian population lives within a few miles of the Nile, the death toll could top 75 million people in the first day.
* When the dimensions of the crisis in New Orleans became apparent, Ray Nagin — the utterly corrupt mayor of that utterly corrupt city — literally had a nervous breakdown and fled his responsibilities. The Governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, utterly failed in her responsibilities to keep abreast of the situation and respond appropriately. Until she belatedly requested federal help FEMA could not – by law – provide assistance. When she finally did request that assistance it was provided immediately and on a scale proportionate to the disaster. Yet progs then, and still today, lay the blame for this mess on George Bush II.
Utterly left out of the equation is the abysmal behavior of New Orleans locals who did nothing to help themselves and when they were not apathetically waiting for someone to parent them indulged in orgies of violence and destruction. Not much later, just as bad a disaster hit at the other end of the Mississippi in the upper mid-west. Local officials responded immediately. The population handled much of the problem itself. Thew magnitude of the natural disaster was just as great. But because of the character of local politics and the local population the human disaster was much less and received correspondingly little MSM coverage.
It’s left as an exercise to the student to determine the cause of the difference between this natural disaster and the impact of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
