Afaik, the government response after Katrina was unusually incompetent for a first world country, and it doesn’t make sense to draw general conclusions from it.
that it happened in the US should be enough reason to question how other countries would fare.
for example, the 1st world countries being comprised mostly of Europe, North America and Japan, when was the last time Europe got hit with something like Katrina? I’m not so well informed but I’d hazard a guess that their response wouldn’t be that much better given a similar situation.
1st world is an all encompassing term though, Japan is obviously much better prepared than themost when it comes to earthquakes/tsunamis simply because they occur more often there.
as it were, I think we do have very good ‘instructions’ on how to deal with such events, but not the organizational skills
see http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1187/
Afaik, the government response after Katrina was unusually incompetent for a first world country, and it doesn’t make sense to draw general conclusions from it.
that it happened in the US should be enough reason to question how other countries would fare. for example, the 1st world countries being comprised mostly of Europe, North America and Japan, when was the last time Europe got hit with something like Katrina? I’m not so well informed but I’d hazard a guess that their response wouldn’t be that much better given a similar situation. 1st world is an all encompassing term though, Japan is obviously much better prepared than themost when it comes to earthquakes/tsunamis simply because they occur more often there. as it were, I think we do have very good ‘instructions’ on how to deal with such events, but not the organizational skills see http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1187/
and this for comparison http://www.jma.go.jp/jma/en/Activities/earthquake.html
do ignore my first reply though, I wrote that after 40 hours of no sleep :)