State of emergency weekend: East Coast cities beset with a myriad of problems

It's been quite a weekend on the East Coast, where the people of several cities — New York, Boston, and Nashville — have been dealing with some rather serious emergencies. First, there was a bomb scare in the Big Apple:

The police discovered a car bomb in a smoking Nissan Pathfinder in the heart of Times Square, prompting the evacuation of thousands of tourists and theatergoers from the area on a warm and busy Saturday evening.

There was no explosion.

"It appears to be a car bomb left in a Pathfinder between Seventh and Eighth" Avenues on 45th Street, said Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne, the Police Department's chief spokesman.

Thankfully, no one was injured or hurt. The worst that happened was that thousands of people were inconvenienced.

Still, the incident is very serious, and hopefully law enforcement will soon have the perpetrators in custody. The incident is already being called an attempted act of terrorism, and while that's probably accurate, it is unfortunately likely to produce a lot of unwarranted right wing grandstanding… and fearmongering.

When they do, progressives ought to respond by pointing out that protection is part of the progressive moral system. That is why we believe in a strong common wealth: we want our first responders to be able to defuse crises like this quickly and efficiently, so that our people are kept safe.

Authorities in New York did an exemplary job of reacting and responding once they had been alerted to the presence of the suspiciously-smelling vehicle. The area was cleared, the bomb squad called in, the danger dealt with.

While New York was dealing with the car bomb in Times Square, Boston was dealing with a very different sort of problem:

A "catastrophic" break Saturday in a relatively new, 10-foot wide steel pipe rendered the water undrinkable in Boston and more than two dozen of its suburbs, forcing Gov. Deval Patrick to declare a state of emergency.

The state issued an order for resident to boil water before drinking it in the 30 affected communities, which include 2 million people in 700,000 households.

The Massachusetts Water Resources Authority was able to draw emergency water supplies from various reservoirs for bathing, flushing and fire protection. That water isn't treated for drinking, so the state issued the boil-water order.

It's not unusual for decades-old water pipes to break, but the failure of this newer pipe raises many questions. When we don't put critical infrastructure in place carefully and properly — when contractors cut corners or use substandard equipment to get the job done as cheaply as possible — then we all end up with dangerous threats that are just out of sight.

We know about that phenomenon firsthand from researching instances of shoddy home construction here in the Pacific Northwest.

Clearly, there will need to be an investigation into what happened.

Boston's water problems, however, don't compare with Nashville's, which has literally been flooded with H₂0:

As darkness set in across the soaked and battered Middle Tennessee region Sunday evening, Nashville began evacuating homes and businesses along the rising Cumberland River.

The storms that started Saturday have left 11 dead across the state, including five in Davidson County and one in Williamson County. Thousands of cars, homes and basements are filled with water. Entire neighborhoods are submerged, and hundreds of people are in shelters.

Authorities were just beginning to comprehend the damage. Late Sunday, Nashville announced that it was shutting down a water treatment plant and that a levee in MetroCenter along the Cumberland River had begun to leak.

The river is still rising, and damages from the flooding already appear to be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions. This is a major disaster; it's being called a thousand year flood. In fact, it's so bad that it's threatening Nashville's most well known landmark, the Grand Ole Opry.

And yet, to date, the national media have been largely ignoring it.

Perhaps that's because Nashville — like most of America — lies outside our country's insular, celebrity-and-scandal-obsessed media axis.

The Tennessean has some incredible photos of the flooding. The city is starting to resemble New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Federal disaster relief is going to be sorely needed in the days and weeks ahead.

All this comes as the Deepwater Horizon disaster continues to get worse. A column of oil is still gushing underwater and oil is moving towards the shores of Gulf Coast states. Exxon Valdez will soon seem like nothing compared to this tragedy if BP (Baleful Petroleum) can't figure out how to stop the oil from leaking.