When Everything Goes Wrong

Likely nothing could have saved Biloxi. Residential buildings are not made to withstand 140 mph winds and heavy flodding and even if new housing could there is no way to retrofit existing buildings . New Orleans is a different story. It was spared the worst of the hurricane. As of yesterday morning things looks fairly good. Then came the floods.

Last night on Nightline former New Orleans Mayor, Mark Morial admitted that they made a lot of bad assumptions in disaster planning. They thought that the levees would hold, that the pumping stations would continue to function, and that the Superdome would be usable indefinately. Most emergency planning was based on the assumption that order would be restored within a few days.

Instead, things are a mess. The city is flooded with water still pouring in. No one can say when the levees will be fixed. Power, water, and gas service will be out for weeks, maybe months.

The Superdome lost power Sunday night. The bathrooms stopped working some time ago. The roof leaks. The floor has water on it. The emergency generators are threatened by rising water. The arena is currently sheltering between 20,000 and 30,000 people. There are plans to move them to the Astrodome, possibly for the rest of the year. No one is quite sure how the evacuation will happen since the 450 busses cannot get near the arena. Possibly boats will have to be used.

No one knows how bad the death toll will be. With water reaching the rooftops, an unknown number of people could have drowned in their homes with more trapped in their attic. Current Mayor Ray Nagin estimates that thousands are dead.

Unfortunately, this was a disaster waiting to happen. It has long been recognized that New Orleans was a problem. They almost bragged about being below sea level. It took enormous effort just to keep the city dry in normal times. Disaster planning was mainly limited to picking up after a Category 3 or less storm. A half billion dollar, ten year project to shore up the levees was finished a few years ago. Immediately more money was requested to raise the levees. It seems that they subside so the work never ends.

Just a year ago it was officially admitted that the city could not survive a Category 4 or 5 hurricane. The Army Corp of Engineers wanted to do a $4 million, four year study to find ways for the city to survive.

Of course, the bloggers at the Huffington Post and the DailyKos blame Bush for everything. The budget for levee work was cut over the last two years and the study on surviving a major hurricane was never started, both due to budget cuts.

In assigning blame, we can discount the study completely. Even if it had begun a year ago nothing could have come of it until it finished in 2009. Add in a decade or so for implementing the recomondations. That gives you the minimum date that New Orleans could have been ready for Katrina.

As for the levees, they were pronounced solid but subsiding. The levee that broke was worked on this Summer.

Would a few hundred million dollars of work have raised the right levee in time for this storm? I don't know and neither does anyone at Huffington or Kos. They just want something else that they can blame Bush for.

Granted, Bush wasn't giving New Orleans much long-term help but we are talking about long-term projects. Katrina hit decades before New Orleans could possibly be prepared.

The real problem is New Orleans itself. Having a major city in a bowl between two large waterways is insane. The flooding was inevitable. No one wants to tell an entire city that they are living in a disaster waiting to happen.