• Hurricane Katrina: Unthinkable Hurricane Katrina: Unthinkable St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 1, 2005 As the horrors wrought by Hurricane Katrina continue to mount – the devastation, the evacuation, the looting, the deaths and destruction – the sheer scale of it
• Hurricane Katrina: Unthinkable
Hurricane Katrina: Unthinkable
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sept. 1, 2005
As the horrors wrought by Hurricane Katrina continue to mount – the devastation, the evacuation, the looting, the deaths and destruction – the sheer scale of it begins to defy imagination.
America pays people to think thoughts that defy imagination, though it then often ignores their recommendations. In early 2001, experts with the Federal Emergency Management Agency set out to rank the likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing America. According to the Houston Chronicle, they were a terrorist attack in New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a major hurricane in New Orleans.
In this case, two out of three is bad.
“It is our job at FEMA to think the unthinkable in terms of disasters, and to prepare for those that will become catastrophic,” Joe Allbaugh, FEMA’s then-director, told a conference of the National Emergency Management Association four years ago. “I want our most vulnerable communities to plan for the worst … A major earthquake or Category 5 hurricane in an urban area would stretch our current response and recovery capabilities to the breaking point.”
The date of this conference: Sept. 10, 2001.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington the following day, the federal government created the Homeland Security Department to coordinate disaster work. A national emergency plan was devised to manage recovery from catastrophic disasters. On Wednesday, two days after Katrina devastated the central Gulf coast, President George W. Bush enacted the emergency plan for the first time.
It’s well and good that such a plan exists, and well and good that New York, New Orleans and San Francisco all have elaborate plans in effect. St. Louis, which faces a frightening, if more remote, threat from the New Madrid fault, should take heed and continue work on its own regional disaster plan.
What’s humbling, however, is that as good as the plans may be, they will always be inadequate. New York didn’t contemplate airliners flying into the World Trade Center, or else its disaster coordination center wouldn’t have been located next door. Nor did it realize that its emergency radio system would fail. New Orleans had a “reverse flow” traffic plan to evacuate the city, but no mandatory evacuation system was in place. As a result, as many as 100,000 citizens may have chosen to ride out the storm in their homes; the city’s mayor, Ray Nagin, said Wednesday that many thousands of them may have died.
Similarly, Mississippi state officials issued evacuation orders last weekend but didn’t have the manpower to enforce them. As a result, more than a hundred people died in Harrison County, which Gov. Haley Barber said looked like Hiroshima.
No disaster plan could mitigate what has happened in New Orleans – an entire city under water – its citizens with no homes or jobs to return to, facing months without electricity and years of rebuilding. No plan would have envisioned loading 10,000 refugees onto buses and driving them to Houston to live for months in the Astrodome.
But thinkers of the unthinkable have thought for years that New Orleans’ levee system was inadequate. In 2001, the Corps of Engineers New Orleans District spent $147 million on various construction and repair projects. This year, the Corps spent $82 million in the district, 44 percent less than four years ago.
Also underfunded at $40 million a year: The $14 billion Coast 2050 project that aims to restore the wetlands of the Mississippi Delta. The marshes and swamps buffer New Orleans from the Gulf of Mexico. With the levees forcing Mississippi River sediment into the Gulf instead of spreading it across the marshes, the Delta is disappearing at the rate of one football field every 15 minutes.
Without its buffer, the next time a hurricane hits, rebuilt New Orleans could become Atlantis. And there will be a next time. Plan on it.
