http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/05/because-we-are-nashville-ctd.html
Andrew Sullivan and his readers are being a little snippy about it…

A large part of the reason that we are being ignored is because of who we are. Think about that for just a second. Did you hear about looting? Did you hear about crime sprees? No…you didn’t. You heard about people pulling their neighbors off of rooftops. You saw a group of people trying to move two horses to higher ground. No…we didn’t loot. Our biggest warning was, “Don’t play in the floodwater.” When you think about it…that speaks a lot for our city. A large portion of why we were being ignored was that we weren’t doing anything to draw attention to ourselves. We were handling it on our own.
This is a bunch of bunkum.
Dead in New Orleans – 1500 +
Dead in Nashville – less than 50 to date
Time it took for flooding to peak – Nashville 7 to 10 days
Time it took for flooding to peak – New Orleans – 24 to 36 hours
To compare this disaster to Katrina is ridiculous. This was bad, but nowhere near as bad a Katrina. I would also like to point out that the reports of looting & rioting coming out of New Orleans were largely manufactured.
And everybody can get all kittenish about it but what this guy is saying is a tarted up version of racist claims about brown people. It is ignoble.

Re: This was bad, but nowhere near as bad a Katrina. I would also like to point out that the reports of looting & rioting coming out of New Orleans were largely manufactured.
A lot of the looting was looting-by-necessity, since there were no stores open and no other way to obtain food, water or medicine. Even nice middle class people ducked into untenanted stores to get something to drink, and I suspect most of us would do so in similar situation (though I hope many of us would go back eventually to pay for what we took when this became possible.)

http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2010/05/flood-ravaged-iowans-idiotically-move-on.html
Funny stuff…

Mont D Law,
I agree that there is not a good comparison to Katrina. Your comparison about the time for the flood to peak is complete nonsense (or backwards, at any rate), however.
With Katrina, they had days to prepare. A major hurricane was forecast. I was watching from thousands of miles away for days as people discussed possible levy breach scenarios. People were asked to get out of town in advance. Large swaths of people did get out of town. In the Nashville event, the forecast called for . . . thunderstorms.
Nashville’s torrential rains came without particularly accurate warning, and the peak of the dangerous part of the floods was on Sunday, May 2, during the rain event (not 7 days later), and days before you or anyone outside Nashville or many many people in Nashville even heard that there was a problem. The river then crested within a day later, which caused a lot of damage, but was not the really dangerous part for people’s safety.
7 to 10 days to peak in Nashville?? You wrote this post 9 days after the rain, and the peak was looooong gone.
Maybe you just mixed up your facts. In fact, I think that the duration of the event in New Orleans made it much more prone to looting and panic. For one thing, I imagine that the exodous from New Orleans in advance of the storm and then during the floods added to the looting there. And the length of time the flood waters were present hampered rescue and recovery. Nashville was never deserted, so not as likely to loot.
But just to clear the record, there was essentially no warning in Nashville. This was not like the floods you sometimes see on rivers where people watch it slowly coming and start sandbagging days in advance, and have the opportunity to get out of the way.