A Disaster Waiting to Happen... Again
by Joseph C. Krupnick

Americans have been unsurprisingly quick to blame much of the disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the federal government. There is, of course, a good case to be made for the allegation: the federal government didn't evacuate people quickly enough, the Department of Homeland Security delayed sending adequate numbers of National Guardsmen until three days after the flooding began, and President Bush has said things that seem remarkably blithe and off-the-point. Even more shockingly, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chernoff admitted that the federal government mishandled much of the relief effort.

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However, the longer-term issue is not whether this particular hurricane is being handled effectively, but what the government's policy with respect to expectable natural disaster should be. According to atmospheric scientists, we may be in the 15th year of a hurricane cycle, last seen in the 1920s (they typically last as long as 40 years). In July 2001, Stanley Goldberg, a research meteorologist at the oceanographic agency's Hurricane Research Division, put it starkly: "Every person should take every hurricane season seriously, but we're watching a catastrophe waiting to happen." In 1992 Hurricane Andrew killed 58, in '98 George killed 600, in 2003 Isabel killed 58, and last year a spate of smaller hurricanes cost the country billions. While America is deluged by hurricanes — which meteorologists expect to continue for another 20 years — Katrina may be just the beginning.

The characteristic liberal response to Katrina's foreseeability is that the disastrous aftermath was also preventable. In an opinion in the New York Times on Sept. 2, scientist Mark Fischetti argued that the federal government passed up the opportunity to prevent a Katrina-like disaster by reducing federal spending on Louisiana public works projects and then striking down the large-scale 1998 Louisiana public works proposal dubbed Coast 2050. Coordinated by hundreds of Louisianan engineers and public officials, Coast 2050 requested $14 billion from the federal government to strengthen Louisiana coast levees and improve the infrastructure tenfold. According to Fischetti, cost-benefit analysis proves Congress acted irresponsibly. They could have saved many billions by investing that sum seven years ago.

But the lessons of Katrina are not as simple as retrospective economic analysis would imply. As the official Coast 2050 document delineates, the program, which took a full 18 months to formulate, would have taken 30 years to complete and at least 14 years to fund. This means that Coast 2050 would have been nowhere near completion by now and that a powerful hurricane like Katrina would undoubtedly have broken through the partially-finished levees. Even if the engineers and public works officials had managed to complete the infrastructure required — which would mean working four times faster than planned — it is far from clear that ramped-up coastal restoration would withstand a Category 4 storm like Katrina. So the real trade-off was between $14 billion in tax money to an unlikely solution versus $14 billion to education or poverty-reduction in the inner-city.

Hurricane Katrina renders the kind of tragedy that Americans abhor, a tragedy that is basically unpreventable, beyond human control and outside the scope of the federal government. Unlike the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, we cannot pin the blame on nefarious human beings and retaliate. But Katrina does not render the federal government completely helpless. Once the residents have been nursed back to physical health, the government has three distinguishable long-term possibilities to consider:

· Rebuild the city and relocate its citizens back to a better-engineered New Orleans
· Give up on local recovery and relocate residents to other cities
· Take a middle-ground approach and renovate the city to the extent commercially viable while encouraging residents to relocate or else shoulder some of the inevitable cost of living in a disaster-prone city.

The desire to restore New Orleans to its former condition reflects the great courage of the American public to rally behind victims and make everything right again. But it also reflects a particular American hubris about our ability to overcome the power of nature. New Orleans is — and has always been — a sitting duck for natural disaster. It sits below sea level like a shallow bowl. New Orleans has already suffered at least eight major hurricanes in the past 100 years, which is unsurprising since a 1910 engineer exposed the city to increased flood risk by pumping groundwater out from underneath the city. In fact, New Orleans was founded on a risky bluff by entrepreneurs who sucessfully marketed the idea of erecting a town on a swampy island to unwitting colonists. Now Louisiana engineers are suggesting raising the ground with extra earth, erecting taller levees and larger seawalls at the straits that would decrease the amount of water that could enter Lake Pontchartrain. But the reality is that the city's geographical liabilities make it impossible to engineer an acceptable hurricane protection system.

At any rate, the experts should weigh in on this before we commit our national psyche — and finances — to the full restoration of New Orleans. Americans are too quick to endorse rebuilding, and our knee-jerk reaction is reminiscent of the failing reason we stayed in Vietnam: we do not want to go down in history as quitters. Like Joe Frazier, who nearly died after getting up each time he was knocked to the mat by Muhammad Ali, Americans are heavily investing in fighting to the grave, at the expense of good reason.

A "never say die" attitude and sentimental attachment to the city are not valid justifications for restoring New Orleans or any area that suffers such an apocalyptic blow. The more prudent response to Katrina is for the federal government to repair the city's cultural life only to the extent economically efficient (rebuild oil rigs, large commercial centers, etc.), resisting the pressure to rebuild every building on every block.

It is standard in America to defray the cost to taxpayers, but in the case of such apocalyptic disasters as Katrina asking Americans to shoulder the blow is unrealistic and undesirable. The city is in such disarray that the financial outlay may total in the tens, or even hundreds, of billions of dollars. Even with those kinds of expenditures, parts of New Orleans may not be salvageable. More importantly, though, the heightened sensitivity of New Orleans to natural disasters during the current hurricane cycle renders the city a tremendous risk for future devastation that could mean squandered funds and more financial obligations in the future. Assigning the burden of such relief largely to taxpayers and the federal government runs the risk of creating what economists call a moral hazard: we would essentially provide insurance at no cost to New Orleans residents. And that means many won't bother to protect themselves and their homes because they know the Federal Emergency Management Agency will come to their financial rescue.

Obviously, America has some stake in the cultural richness of New Orleans, and House Speaker Dennis Hastert was being more than a little hasty when he called for the government to give up on the city. But the risk for the residents themselves should not be completely deflected toward the federal government or to American taxpayers. We would be much better served by spending money on healthcare, improved education, poverty reduction, prison rehabilitation or any number of other areas that would benefit the nation as a whole. In the end, Katrina is a valuable lesson that even a superpower with tremendous technological and economic power is powerless in the face of catastrophic natural disaster. No matter how much we snipe at the federal government, it cannot alter the fact that human advances still pale beneath the power of Mother Nature.

E-mail Joseph C. Krupnick at joekrupnick at gmail dot com.

— image by and used with implicit permission of the University of Wisconsin Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies