Perspective
September 16th, 2008
Half of the Austin Conference Center houses AGDC this week.
The other half houses refugees from Hurricane Ike.
Extra Special Bonus Commentary On The Human Condition:
Watching people meander on 6th Street (Austin’s pub crawl) wearing official Red Cross issued survival supplies backpacks.
Sounds festive!
Considering it’s a presidential election year and all that, would it have been in good taste to bring out Granddad’s old “I like Ike” lapel button?
There’s actually a second convention going on at the center, one for radio broadcasters. The evacuees are sandwiched on the concourse in between. Don’t even have a room for the people, they’re just on the concourse, sitting in chairs they got out of storage. I don’t know what they slept on last night.
Austin PD and convention staff are careful to steer non evacs away from the scene of human misery and desperation.
I expect a lot more panhandling than usual in downtown.
“I expect a lot more panhandling than usual in downtown.”
From the evacuees or the game developers?
“From the evacuees or the game developers?”
Oh, SNAP!
Yeah, I ran into the hurricane thing and had to move out of where I was staying due to those guys having family coming into town, and then having to find a motel I could rent for a week or so.
Fun times, let me tell you. And having people basically lie to me during roommate searches didn’t make it any better either.
However, I hope that everyone who got out of Ike is able to return home and have things return to relative normalcy.
True story, last year: Spacetime Studios was handing out free t-shirts as swag. On the last day of AGDC, I saw a scraggly-looking guy standing on the corner wearing one of the shirts. Frozen-wide eyes, long shaky arms, unkempt hair, worn shoes.
And it wasn’t until I got close that he put his hand out and asked for 50 cents, that I realized he wasn’t a game developer.
The Spacetime people thought that was funny last year.
They have little boxes out on some of the expo booths so attendees can donate to the Red Cross. I put in a $20.
I hope they quickly rebuild Galveston like they did NO. It would be a shame if we got a hurricane next year and it wasnt able to run directly into a low lying city
“I need a drink.”
I think that’s one time time I’d hear that and not be the least bit skeptical.
Dartwick,
Every part of the country has its own brand of natural disasters. Being snarky about coastal towns getting hit by hurricanes is just as clueless as mocking towns in the midwest for being tornado magnets, towns in the north and northeast for being vulnerable to blizzards, or communities in the west coast for risking forest fires, earthquakes, and mudslides.
In each of those locations there are good reasons to have people living there. In Galveston, the shipyards and port facilities, as well as the fishing fleets, are the reason (tourism doesn’t hurt, either). Similarly, other nearby locations, such as Texas City, provide refineries that process petroleum products for much of the nation (the same goes for the refineries near New Orleans, by the way). Going without that industrial capability because a huge hurricane sweeps through the area every 100 years or so just doesn’t make sense.
PS: New Orleans remains a huge mess. Much of the town is not rebuilt.