The Big Ignore Of the Big Easy: A Billion In Prevention Worth a Trillion Of Rebuilding

Apologies for not posting over the past few days.  We’re in Florida, visiting Amanda’s grandmother, who has terminal cancer and recently decided to stop her chemotherapy.  She asked to meet Gabriel before it was too late, so we made hasty arrangements to get down to the Tampa area where she lives.  It’s wonderful to see her face light up when Gabriel flashes her one of his patented grins, but the situation makes the visit bittersweet.  Anyway, I’ll make better preparation to post while traveling in the future.

Had I been posting during the past few days, I’ve little doubt the subject would have been the tragedy in New Orleans.  Amanda and I have been saying for years that we’d better get down to the Big Easy before a big hurricane put it all underwater, and we’re wishing we’d listened to ourselves.  Amanda’s mom always wanted to visit the city, and Amanda planned a trip there just before her mom got sick with lung cancer.  

So we knew that this was coming for years, and so did a lot of people, but still nothing was done to upgrade the levees protecting New Orleans, or to replenish the wetlands that had provided a natural storm surge barrier before they were allowed to erode away.  Once the refugees have been evacuated and the levees have been temporarily patched, I hope people will cry out for answers and accountability.  

There was no dearth of experts reporting on the inadequacy of the levee and pump systems.  A few days ago, The World aired an interview with Bart Schultz, a senior adviser at the Dutch Ministry of Transportation, Public Works and Water Management.  As you might imagine, the Dutch know a great deal about living below sea level, and several years ago Mr. Schultz’s own assessment of New Orleans’ protection showed that it was about a thousand times less robust those in the Netherlands.  To paraphrase Mr. Schultz, the cost to upgrade New Orleans’ levees would have been a fraction of the cost to rebuild the city.  

Which makes me wonder, what explains the deaf ears?  Typical bureaucratic bungling, especially when large sums of money are involved?  But government spends huge sums on useless pork all the time, leaving me to wonder if it wasn’t the message but the messenger.  Many on the Right, especially in the Right-leaning sector of the media, have systematically ridiculed scientists who study weather for years, deriding the complex computerized climate models that predict global warming.  Those same models have predicted that as more energy is retained within the atmosphere we’d see a greater number of more intense hurricanes.  Maybe it’s because I’m writing this from a hotel room in Florida, but that sounds familiar.

Let’s ask the tough questions now and take action before we find ourselves facing more preventable tragedies.  To amend the old saw, “A billion in prevention is worth a trillion in rebuilding.”