August 31, 2005
A Slow Nightmare Scenario
A disaster of heroic proportions is unfolding before our very eyes. The damage caused by Katrina is huge, the deaths untold (and likely to be hearbreakingly high, as in thousands) and yet the misery and suffering are not over, and will continue a while longer. A major US city and the region near it has been destroyed and rendered uninhabitable. The "chaos and looting" are only a small part of the story, and will end as the entire area is completely evacuated of residents.
It will take a long time and a lot of money to restore the area. But the immediate task of just rescuing as many people as possible and getting the survivors out and in shelters is daunting enough. What will they do, how will they live while the rebuilding goes on? How many people will return, and what kind of changes in building codes and land use will we see as a result? Should New Orleans even be rebuilt, given it's location, geography, and weather?
Soon enough, the dramatic part of the disaster will be over, the rest of the country will go back to our own concerns, and the people in the area will be left with picking up the pieces -- although with plenty of outside help.
Dave Winer had an interesting observation
on what's happened in New Orleans, commenting on a remark by Aaron Brown of CNN:
http://archive.scripting.com/2005/08/31#When:1:33:52AM
On CNN, Aaron Brown asks what the city will look like when the water recedes. The correct answer, which he did not get, is that the water isn't going to recede. The only way to get the water out of the city is to pump it out, after the levees are fixed. In the meantime, the water isn't receding, it's going the other way, it's rising.
New Orleans may return to its "Crescent City" roots according to Holman Jenkins, commenting in the Wall Stree Journal's Opinion Journal:
Expect the recriminations now to get ugly, proportional to the size of the catastrophe. In reality, however, everyone knew New Orleans was a disaster in the making. Federal and state officials long ago decided to protect the city from a Category 3 hurricane, choosing to let nature takes its course in the event of Category 4 or 5 storm. The term for this is "moral hazard." Implicitly, they knew they couldn't justify spending billions of U.S. taxpayer money to subsidize Louisianans to build in ill-advised places. They also knew, in the wake of the inevitable disaster, unlimited federal money would likely be available to rebuild in all the same spots. This is the reason you can't buy commercial flood insurance. "Private insurers will not offer private flood coverage because typically these stories replay themselves over and over again," says Robert Hartwig, chief economist for the insurance industry's Washington trade group.
Congress does not heed such basic lessons about incentives and human behavior, however. Subsidies to build and rebuild are forthcoming partly because the rich and influential populate waterfront areas. If somebody tried to build New Orleans from scratch today, he might be jailed as a wetlands molester, but he wouldn't be denied subsidized federal flood insurance. In rebuilding, it would be nice if federal subsidies at least weren't made available for rebuilding in areas below sea level. New Orleans could then go back to being the "Crescent City," as it was known before its central marshlands were drained to allow hotels and high-rises at elevations five or ten feet lower than the river and bay (called a "lake") just a few hundred yards away.
Posted by: Sean Murphy at September 1, 2005 2:38 AM
