Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Astonishingly, Hawaii does not have enough hurricane shelters for all its inhabitants. Reminds me of New Orleans. And Puerto Rico. And pretty much every other burg run by Democrats who have plenty of money for illegal immigrants, street mimes, diversity coordinators and homeless bums but not enough money to patch the streets or shelter citizens from disaster. I wonder if their Resilience Officer spent all his time organizing garbage collection, as St. Paul’s has? I’m sure that will be a big help when a tornado rips through the heart of town, or a blizzard knocks down the power lines.
Joe Doakes
Given our last brush with “Protect” Minnesota, it seems they consider genuine resilience to be a bug, not a feature.
Hawaii ain’t Florida — no hurricane has made landfall here in, well, forever. They degrade to tropical storms before landfall — usually they never make landfall, as with Hurricane Lane last week. At my casa, I got 30″ of rain in 48 hours, but no wind.
Guam, I’ve heard, is the opposite of Hawaii in respect to hurricanes (“typhoons”, since they are on the other side of the international date line). They are supposed to have a building code that requires steel “typhoon shutters” on the windows of residential buildings. In the mid pacific, the happy place to be is above 20 degrees latitude, and 150-160 west longitude.
“but not enough money to patch the streets ”
When last I was in HI, against stern admonitions, I decided to take the road to Hana. There was some sign that said the road, the Hana Highway, was laid in 1910 which from all appearances was the last time they performed any maintenance – that was the eastern road to Hana. The map showed another road, the Piilani Highway, out of Hana up the west side of the island so I decided to take it. I was actually surprised at how much worse it was. In fact it disappeared for a while on the Kaupo Ranch. The rental agency was distinctly unhappy when I returned the car to them.
The way government is organized in Hawaii is not the same as it is on the mainland. In some cases this makes sense, and in others it does not. Responsibility between the county & state for road maintenance is not clear. The Big Island (Hawaii County) has no connecting roads with any other county (obviously) but the Big Island has both state and county roads.
Oahu is an island about 20×30 miles with a population of about one million. About another half a million people live scattered across 6 other islands. The mayor of Honolulu represents the county of Honolulu. The county of Honolulu consists of the island of Oahu & the Northwestern Hawaiian islands with the exception of Niihau & Midway. Niihau & Midway are the only Northwestern Hawaiian islands with people living on them, and Midway is controlled by the feds. The feds have large jurisdictions on most of the islands.
It gets complicated fast. Local political arrangements evolve from local circumstances. The Midwestern norm is land was held by the Indians, transferred to the feds in the 19th century, transferred from the feds to the railroads, and from the railroads to farmers, townships, and private investors shortly afterwards. Hawaii’s history is nothing like that at all. The state had a feudel monarchy until the 1850s. After that the monarch adopted a European-monarch style of constitution, where land could be bought and sold. Most land ownership, if you go back far enough, originates to the transfer of a royal patent before the 1892 coup. The land my house is on was sold by the monarch (actually a royal trust, I believe) to a rancher in the 19th century, and the rancher sold it to a subdivision developer in the early 1980s.
In Hawaii, anyhow, “ranchers” in those days were political players who owned vast land holdings, more like aristocrats than like cowboys.
You know, I’m pretty sure that while my town does have tornado shelters–part of city hall and the schools–I’m also pretty sure that they wouldn’t have nearly enough for the whole town to shelter in. That’s why sensible residents have basements. In places worth living, people take care of their own needs for predictable storms.
Big exception being trailer parks, of course. Thanks to government for making it impossible to build a home of less than 1000 square feet in most areas, of course.
The only disaster we worry over is a flood of Northern leftists.
“The only disaster we worry over is a flood of Northern leftists.”
Well the War of Yankee Aggression has left a bad taste…