The media here in Britain seem to be a bit geographically challenged when it comes to assessing the relief efforts on the Gulf of Mexico. They seem to have, consciously or not, transposed the damage from a map of the USA to a map of Britain without taking note of those funny “scale” markings in the corner, and they imagine that what has happened is something like Bristol being destroyed by bad weather, and Britain having to respond, when the actual destruction is more like Scotland or Denmark being taken out by bad weather, in terms of area and population. The nearest big cities to New Orleans are Dallas and Atlanta, each about 500 miles away – that’s further than London to Glasgow. How would you go about evacuating Scotland with 12 or 24 hours notice? How whould you supply it, with sea and air links taken out first of all, and roads impaired for the last hundred miles or so?
And the second implication of this scale, of course, is the perspective on the terrorism issue…