Harry Reid insults Katrina victims

Fox News:

Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter ripped Majority Leader Harry Reid for suggesting the damage from Hurricane Katrina was "nothing" compared with the damage from Superstorm Sandy.

Reid, D-Nev., made the comments last week when Congress was taking up a $9 billion disaster-relief bill for the East Coast, which is still reeling from Sandy.

“The people of New Orleans and that area, they were hurt, but nothing in comparison to what happened to the people in New York and New Jersey,” Reid said.

Vitter acknowledged that Katrina and Sandy, in late October, were “horribly destructive storms that caused real human misery,” but argued that Katrina “by any measure” was the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

The hurricane hit the Gulf Coast region in 2005 and resulted in 1,833 deaths and more than $108 billion in damage.

“Sadly, Harry Reid has again revealed himself to be an idiot, this time gravely insulting Gulf Coast residents,” Vitter, the ranking Republican of the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, said Monday.

Sandy, whose full force hit New Jersey and New York, caused at least 125 deaths and $62 billion in damage along the entire East Coast.

Reid apologized Monday, after Vitter's criticism.

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The most deadly hurricane to ever hit the US was the 1900 Galveston Hurricane where the death toll was between 6,000 and 12,000 as a surge tide swept across the entire Galveston Island.  It is a storm that was so ferocious that it was killing people from Texas to New York and actually hit New York City at 65 miles per hour causing surge tides and drowning there too.

But, yeah, Harry Reid is an ignorant man when it comes to even recent history.

Storms were not named in 1900.  After people were able to get to the island and see the devastation it took some time to clear the bodies that had by then bloated in the oppressive heat that followed the storm.  Texas decided that it would move its major port inland to Houston.  The dirt from dredging the Houston Ship Channel was used to raise the level of Galveston 8.7 in height at its highest point to over 17 foot in height as well as building a seawall on the Gulf side of the island.