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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAfter Irma, a once-lush gem in the U.S. Virgin Islands reduced to battered wasteland
By Anthony Faiola September 12 at 7:49 PM
CRUZ BAY, U.S. Virgin Islands The Asolare restaurant is gone, practically blown off its cliff, along with its world-famous carrot ginger soup. The facade of Margarita Phils is a junkyard of yellow and vermilion planks. Multimillion-dollar homes and aluminum huts alike lie in ruins.
On the island of St. John, that was only Irmas beginning. Once a lush gem in the U.S. Virgin Islands, a chain steeped in the lore of pirates and killer storms, this 20-square-mile island is now perhaps the site of Irmas worst devastation on American soil.
Six days after the storm some say several days too late the island finally has an active-theater disaster zone. Military helicopters buzz overhead and a Navy aircraft carrier is anchored off the coast, as the National Guard patrols the streets.
The Coast Guard is ferrying the last of St. Johns dazed tourists to large cruise ships destined for Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico. More than a few locals, cut off from the world with no power, no landlines and no cellular service other than the single bar you might get above Ronnies Pizza are leaving, too, some of them in tears.
The streets of Cruz Bay, the largest town of this island of roughly 5,000, were a bizarre tableau of broken businesses and boats on sidewalks. Beyond belief, the Dog House bar had not only a generator but satellite TV, and folks streamed in and out, some stepping over debris holding beers.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/after-irma-a-once-lush-gem-in-the-us-virgin-islands-reduced-to-battered-wasteland/2017/09/12/b49532e0-9736-11e7-af6a-6555caaeb8dc_story.html
world wide wally
(21,739 posts)Raster
(20,998 posts)...human-induced climate change virtually guarantees it.
Question: The Princes of Petroleum (Exxon, Shell, Aramco, etc.) KNEW ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE YEARS AGO. They knew it. They had the data thirty years ago that said humans have been changing the Earth's climate since we started burning fossil fuels in earnest. It started with coal and has continued with petroleum. Our military has also known this for years.
Al Gore tried to sound the alarm in a fashion that Joe and Jane America would and could understand. Unfortunately, the Princes of Petroleum and their cousins, the Lords of Money, made sure that Al Gore --who really was the legally and lawfully elected 43 President of the United States-- would never be allowed to sit in the Oval Office, and his warnings of climatic disasters to come would not get the attention they so richly deserved.
And my question: what are the Princes of Petroleum doing to help the needy from this latest climatic disaster? Where is even their acquiescence that there is a problem?