HOME | POLITICS | SPORTS | LIFE | SCI/TECH | OPEDS | HELPFUL TIPS
|
Feb. 22, 2005 Who said it never rains in California? Mudslides continue to rip apart homes and lives in sunny California. This is a common event during the winter months so why do people still build homes in areas prone to this kind of natural disaster? I don’t know. Some of those folks we’ll never be able to ask because their lives were lost in the slides. Just Sunday night a repair worker fell into a thirty-foot sinkhole caused by the rains and was killed. A sixteen-year-old girl was killed in her home crushed by falling boulders. Why would anyone live there? I have to admit that when I first saw pictures of the disaster, I was appalled, but then I started to think about it. Why do people live in certain parts of the South and the Midwest? Tornadoes occur every spring. I live in Indiana and can’t remember a summer without a severe electric storm or a tornado. Last year my wife and I were visiting our kids in Indianapolis on Memorial Day and we were followed home by a tornado. We were about thirty minutes ahead of it and didn’t even know it. What about the Southeast? Every Fall there is hurricane warnings and watches no less than two or three times a year. Talk about damage, those babies can rip a city apart without trying. Northeast? I lived in that neck of the woods for about ten years and saw snowstorms that would render a community helpless for days. I’ve seen ice storms that would destroy power lines for weeks, snapping utility poles like toothpicks. We all saw the destructive powers of tsunamis in Southeast Asia, hundreds of thousands killed. I lived two years in Japan and saw trees bend over in typhoons and earthquakes that would shake even the strongest of buildings.
Conclusion, humans are not safe
anywhere. Humans are not more powerful than
Mother Nature. Why is there no manmade road
traveling parallel to the Nile River? Because,
the moment you are about halfway done, Mother
Nature has destroyed or over grown where you’ve
already built. After all, the Nile is over
4,000 miles long. Nature cannot be conquered.
It can be controlled to a certain extent with
damns, weather maps, radar, and seismographs.
But, it cannot be conquered. Perhaps, we can
destroy beauty, but we cannot destroy its will
to exist.
|
||||||
|
|
|||||||
|
