Haiti in a Katrina Perspective - @NPRnews gets it wrong

I usually listen to the Saturday edition of NPR's "All Things Considered" on Sunday mornings, and was struck by something The Atlantic's James Fallows said during his regular sit-down with show host Guy Raz. The segment jumps through many of the hot news topics of the week. They started with Haiti:

RAZ: First, Jim, of course, to Haiti and a country that was already facing deprivation on a colossal scale before the earthquake, now seems to be teetering on the edge of total collapse.

Mr. FALLOWS: I think the first way in which we all have to respond is this just is a human disaster of a scale, I think, few of us can remember. I was looking the most recent figures coming out of Haiti, and if they turn out to be tragically true, it would be on a proportional scale as if every single person in the state of Louisiana had drowned during Hurricane Katrina.

Well, no, Mr. Fallows, there are 4 million people in Louisiana, so that's a bit high, but I'll buy if all of New Orleans had drowned. That's the difference between hurricanes and earthquakes, though--we get warning.

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