Berg's Second Law

After a disaster, whenever government and the media declare "there can not be any more survivors, and this is now a recovery operation"< they will be wrong:

John and Leola Lyons stayed together, locked in their neat little blue house, riding out the killer storm and the flood that followed.

A pair of agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms found the elderly couple inside their house Tuesday, more than three weeks after Hurricane Katrina roared through New Orleans.

That stuff, to me, is always the scariest part of big disasters; the notion that the government, operating from rules of thumb about survival that might apply to bureaucrats but seem continually to miss the mark with real people, leave a scary number of people alive in the rubble.

Posted by Mitch at September 21, 2005 07:03 AM | TrackBack