Tag Archive for 'Katrina'

The Everhouse, a market solution for coastal housing

Published on 5/31/2008 in Economics . 15 Comments Tags: .

Not just Katrina recovery — but any coastal, high-risk, high insurance zone. John Sawyer’s Everhouse is exciting — manufactured housing designed for the coastal risk profile and a delivery pipeline that make sense. The hundreds of millions of your money [aka "Government Assistance"] has failed to produce affordable housing that can be insured at affordable rates. But a New England entrepreneur seems to have innovated a solution – at $68/square foot — about one-half the going rate in New Orleans.

The upshot of the house’s durability and cost is that it’s easy to insure. Just ask Shorty Sneed, a local insurance broker who lined up a deal with Travelers that will cover all Everhouses.

“I have been in this business for 35 years, and we see a lot of big hat but no cattle,” says Mr. Sneed. “But these guys impressed me because they had done their homework.” He says the Everhouse, built “with steel and concrete like a New York skyscraper,” is “far superior” to anything else on the market. According to Mr. Sneed, the annual cost of insuring a $150,000 Everhouse would be $1,355. The going rate for insuring a conventional house of equivalent value would be $3,425.

To put together the Everhouses, Messrs. Sawyer and McKenna are recruiting local residents currently living in FEMA trailers and training them in construction. (Mr. Sawyer struck a deal with the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, which will be sending 20 trainers down to Mississippi.) The hope is that the new construction workers will buy the houses they help build. Mr. Sawyer will pay them union wages for as long as they work for him. Afterwards, the newly trained workers will have a skill that is in demand.

“The plan is very unusual,” says Kay Kell, Pascagoula’s city manager. “John Sawyer is the first developer who . . . looked at this as a complete process. He wasn’t trying to come down here and sell houses quickly – he was here to solve a problem.”

Caveat — this is a startup — it’s not clear from the article how well-proven are the economics and the delivery system. Also, when looking for background on Environmental Building Systems and Everhouse’s, I discovered that both are rather invisible in Google’s index.

Oil Canals May Have Worsened Katrina

Published on 1/22/2008 in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: .

R. Eugene Turner, an LSU oceanographer, has calculated that every square mile of the delta is bounded on three sides by oil-canal ridges. Turner has spent more than 30 years studying the oil industry’s footprint on the delta.

“If the water is blocked from going in, the wetlands on other side is drier for a little longer and also stays flooded longer than it otherwise would be,” Turner said. “By drying it, the land oxidizes and dries out; and if it’s wetter, it’s like leaving a lawn sprinkler on and the plants are going to die.”

<more>

Risk study of New Orleans

Published on 5/30/2007 in Science and Technology . Closed Tags: .

But the ultimate message is likely to be that despite the billions of dollars being spent to improve hurricane protection for New Orleans, it remains a city in the cross hairs for dangerous storms. Dr. Daniel, the University of Texas at Dallas president, said, “It doesn’t take a sophisticated risk analysis tool to say it’s a risky place.”



The NY Times surveys the New Orleans Corps of Engineers risk studies:

The answer is complex, and a wary city has been waiting to hear it. After the New Orleans hurricane protection system failed under the onslaught of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Army Corps of Engineers rethought the way it assesses hurricane risk. It devised new, flexible computer models and ran countless simulations on Defense Department supercomputers to help it understand what kind of storms the region can expect, how the current protection system might perform against them, and what defenses will be needed in the future.

…The new methods employed by the corps have already been adopted by the other government agencies most interested in hurricanes and flooding: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which runs the National Flood Insurance Program and will use the data in its flood maps.

It is the first time all three agencies have agreed on a common method of assessing such risks for the Gulf Coast. Eventually, Dr. Link suggested, it may be used by all of them nationwide.

The corps has all but completed the initial work of patching the damage done to the network of levees, floodwalls, gates and pumps. But as some work continues, there has been a lull in moving on to the next major step: raising the level of protection to meet the challenge of a 100-year storm, the kind of hurricane that might have a 1-in-100 chance of occurring in any given year.

The new report will provide the estimates of the kind of storms that could be expected at intervals of up to 500 years, and the damage and flooding they can be expected to produce. And it will help to develop proposals for protection systems against the strongest storms. The report is an important prelude to the design process.

…

This looks like good work — appreciating that the scientific and technical challenges are staggering. Hopefully the consumers of the study product will understand just how fuzzy are the model conclusions.

Glenn has comments and links to Lou Dolinar’s excellent survey of the tragically incompetent press coverage of Katrina. Glenn wrote:

CAN SCIENCE OUTWIT STORMS LIKE KATRINA? Sure. But it can’t do much about human corruption and stupidity, which alas were the real problems…

The corruption and stupidity accounted for 98% of errors in the early days of the post-Katrina response. But the problem would have been relatively small if the levee system had not failed.

Nicolas Sarkozy may rescue France

Published on 5/14/2007 in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: , .

Tigerhawk invested a good bit of effort to type out key paragraphs from the campaign book “Testimony” of French president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy. Thanks, mate!

France’s friendship with the United States is an important and lasting part of its history. I stand by this friendship, I’m proud of it, and I have no intention of apologizing for feeling an affinity with the greatest democracy in the world. It goes without saying that this friendship does not prevent either side from making its own assessments and taking independent action. And since this goes without saying, I don’t feel it necessary to run around chanting it every chance I get. It often seems to me that the more you assert your independence with words, the less independent you are in reality.

France and America are bound together by unbreakable historical links. People often forget that the Revolutionary War, which led to the creation of the United States, was long and difficult, and that its outcome was uncertain for some time. But France was right there at America’s side for the decisive battle of Yorktown in 1781, and it was a young Frenchman, Lafayette, who led the final attack on the English camp. [The French navy's victory over the British off the Virginia coast represented the only victory of the French over the British during the entire 18th century. - ed.] Without French support, history might well have followed a different path, one that would have been less favorable for the development of human freedom. ["Sarko" conveniently omits Napoleon III's invasion of Mexico in 1863, which was calculated to gain leverage on the United States while it was divided by civil war. The victory of the Mexicans on Cinco de Mayo may have saved us from intervening French perfidy. But let's cut Mr. Sarkozy some slack -- all politicians take liberties with history to make their point, and his point is ultimately gratifying. - ed.]

In the twentieth century, it was America’s turn to protect France’s freedom on several occasions. In 1917 and again in 1944 hundreds of thousands of young Americans crossed the Atlantic to pull Europe back from the verge of collective suicide. The French cannot forget that it was the Americans who liberated them from Nazi barbarity and who put an end to the bloodletting that this regime inflicted on the whole of Europe. For the forty years that followed the war, during which another kind of totalitarianism — communism — engulfed Eastern Europe, it was the military alliance with the United States that enable France and Western Europe to preserve their freedom. After centuries of hatred, after the Holocaust, European nations embarked upon one of the most ambitious projects of their common history: to create a zone of peace, unity, and solidarity. The United States was always at the forefront of this project, supporting it politically and financing it with the Marshall Plan, which protected Europe from Communist imperialism.

I am particularly sensitive to this gift of liberty in several ways: as a Frenchman, as a political leader who has always worked to promote freedom, and finally as a son who wants to honor his father, who settled in France in 1948 after fleeing Communist Hungary.

France and America, then, stood side by side to defeat the two deadliest forms of totalitarianism in world history. And now at the start of the twenty-first century, the United States and France again stand together in the same camp against a serious threat to global freedom. It was the United States that was attacked by Islamist terrorists on September 11, 2001, but it could just as easily have been France. Indeed, many French citizens died that day in the Twin Towers. Terrorists do not distinguish among free societies. They want to destroy or subjugate them all, without distinction.

Every time that terrorism strikes — whether in New York, Madrid, Beslan, Tel Aviv, Casablanca, Amman, or London — it is freedom that is the target. Facing such a threat, free countries have no choice but to pool their forces and work together….

This book presents my analysis of the difficulties France faces. It outlines my proposals for putting France back on the path toward economic growth, social justice, and modernity. [What, exactly, is "modernity" code for, in this context? - ed.] And it addresses many of the common domestic, international, economic, and social challenges that advances democracies like France and the United States must confront.

…

Read the whole thing at Tigerhawk. You’ll find that Sarkozy may just rescue France from it’s death spiral.

The Steps Not Yet Taken, Controversies in Science and Technology

Published on 1/16/2007 in Climate Change , Energy Policy and Global Warming . Closed Tags: .

…the early absence of the private sector from negotiation processes leading to Kyoto demonstrates an unwillingness to engage the one constituency without whom the necessary technological innovation cannot occur.

Roger Pielke, Jr. and Dan Sarewitz have contributed a chapter to the to-be-published “Controversies in Science and Technology, vol 2″. This chapter is well-researched and well-written anti-dogma by two of the leading science-policy researchers. A pre-publication chapter PDF is available here.

Roger Pielke runs The Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado — this is one of the few sources I know of where you can find non-political, objective thinking on controversial policy issues — e.g., Kyoto, energy policy, etc. The subject contribution distills their research into a clarifying dichotomy:

• you want to reduce atmospheric carbon loading

• you want to protect people from the impacts of climate change – think Katrina and Bangladesh

These are not the same thing — entangling them has, so far, resulted in little progress on either objective. The introduction to the Pielke/Sarewitz chapter hammers on this point:

The climate system of the planet earth, and the energy system built by those who inhabit the earth, are today seen as the integrated elements of a single problem: global warming. In turn, scientific inquiry, public concern, and policy prescription have given rise to an international regime for controlling the behavior of the climate through management of the global energy system. In this chapter we explain why this regime, and in particular its codification through the Kyoto Protocol, is a failure. Our central point is simple: protecting people and the environment from the impacts of climate is a different problem from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming. The policies that have resulted from combining these two problems are, as a consequence, failing to meaningfully address either problem. Policies to reduce global warming must be pursued independently of policies to reduce climate impacts.

First we explain why the Kyoto Protocol is not achieving its environmentally modest goals, a failure that has no connection to the refusal of the United States to sign onto the treaty, but rather reflects the complexity of energy systems and their management. We then consider the impacts of climate on society through the lens of Hurricane Katrina. Such impacts are unrelated to global warming, and cannot be addressed by emissions reductions. Instead, they require policies specifically focused on reduction of socioeconomic vulnerability to climate.

But emissions reductions are a key societal goal, and next we discuss the role of technological innovation in pursuing that goal. Current policies, embodied in Kyoto, are inappropriate and insufficient for making the necessary progress. A cornerstone of our argument is that much of the failure to date of climate change policy originates in a misunderstanding of the appropriate roles of science and technology in social and political change. Proponents of action on global warming have treated scientific evidence as the central catalyst for motivating necessary change, while technological advance has been viewed as a second-order consequence of such change. We argue that this reasoning is backwards, and that technological innovation is a much more effective scaffolding upon which to address energy policies than scientific knowledge.

The Kyoto Protocol is not effectively addressing the climate impacts problem or the energy technology problem. Although Kyoto is often portrayed as only a first step toward establishing an effective international climate change regime, we conclude that it is a step in the wrong direction.

Here’s an especially relevant paragraph from the PDF preview:

When advocates for the present climate policy regime connect natural disasters to global warming, presumably they hope to motivate policy makers to take action on emissions reductions as a way to help prevent future disasters. But if policy makers are not sufficiently motivated to apply relatively modest, well proven interventions to help reduce vulnerability to the disasters happening today, why would they undertake extraordinarily complex, expensive, and long-term efforts to implement emissions reductions whose impacts on climate behavior won’t be felt for fifty years or more, and whose benefits for disaster reduction are at this point completely unknown and are likely to be marginal compared to the common sense, near-term actions that policy makers refuse even now to take?

The idea that the UNFCCC climate regime, or the Kyoto Protocol in specific, amounts to a strategy to combat rising disaster vulnerability is both practically absurd and morally suspect. The problem isn’t simply that Kyoto’s marginal decreases in greenhouse gas emissions will have no effect on long-term climate behavior, although this is the case, but that emissions reduction programs don’t reduce the entrenched social inequities, irresponsible development trends, and inadequate hazard reduction policies that led to the worst of Katrina’s depredations and that are the cause of rising disaster vulnerability worldwide. In other words, the fact that science warns us that global warming may increase the severity of future weather events does not mean that reducing emissions is a reasonable or potentially effective way to prevent disasters. Reducing emissions is about as relevant to controlling the impacts of natural disasters as a nuclear non-proliferation treaty is to protecting public health.

Few would disagree that global greenhouse gas emissions will only be substantially reduced over the long-term through a global transition to energy technologies that no longer depend on hydrocarbon fuels—to a decarbonized global energy system. Technological advances might also allow the direct capture of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The Kyoto approach to creating the necessary technological transition depends on the idea that the science of climate change will create a global political convergence on the need for emissions reductions—and then, that this political convergence will cause the public and politicians to pursue policies that increase the costs of emissions, which in turn will stimulate the complex behavioral changes that lead to the necessary levels of conservation and innovation.

This is backwards. Whereas the demand for emissions reductions is a politically divisive and rarefied basis for global technological transformation, technological transformation itself is a politically unifying and inclusive principle for pursuing many beneficial objectives, including emissions reductions. There are many good reasons, in addition to global warming, to move the planet rapidly toward an energy system that is more efficient, more dependable, more technologically diverse, more equitable, less polluting, and less geopolitically destabilizing than the current, hydrocarbon-based system, and— consequently and crucially—there are many diverse, and sometimes even competing, values and interests that can be served by the pursuit of such a transition.

Highly recommended — the reader-of-the-whole-thing will be rewarded.

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Katrina: What the Media Missed

Published on 9/2/2006 in Media . Closed Tags: .

The truth about the National Guard’s role in Hurricane Katrina is gradually emerging…In the end, the media timeline was exactly backwards. The bulk of all rescues took place on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and began tapering off on Thursday, officials say…In all this time, Dressler said, “We didn’t see a single camera crew or reporter on the scene. Maybe someone was there with a cell phone or a digital camera but I didn’t see anyone.”

A must-read survey of Katrina coverage by Lou Dolinar. This is a truly remarkable story. It is very unlikely that you are aware of any of this.

Remember the dozens, maybe hundreds, of rapes, murders, stabbings and deaths resulting from official neglect at the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina? The ones that never happened, as even the national media later admitted?

Sure, we all remember the original reporting, if not the back-pedaling.

Here’s another one: Do you remember the dramatic TV footage of National Guard helicopters landing at the Superdome as soon as Katrina passed, dropping off tens of thousands saved from certain death? The corpsmen running with stretchers, in an echo of M*A*S*H, carrying the survivors to ambulances and the medical center? About how the operation, which also included the Coast Guard, regular military units, and local first responders, continued for more than a week?

Me neither. Except that it did happen, and got at best an occasional, parenthetical mention in the national media. The National Guard had its headquarters for Katrina, not just a few peacekeeping troops, in what the media portrayed as the pit of Hell. Hell was one of the safest places to be in New Orleans, smelly as it was. The situation was always under control, not surprisingly because the people in control were always there.

From the Dome, the Louisiana Guard’s main command ran at least 2,500 troops who rode out the storm inside the city, a dozen emergency shelters, 200-plus boats, dozens of high-water vehicles, 150 helicopters, and a triage and medical center that handled up to 5,000 patients (and delivered 7 babies). The Guard command headquarters also coordinated efforts of the police, firefighters and scores of volunteers after the storm knocked out local radio, as well as other regular military and other state Guard units.

Jack Harrison, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Virginia, cited “10,244 sorties flown, 88,181 passengers moved, 18,834 cargo tons hauled, 17,411 saves” by air. Unlike the politicians, they had a working chain of command that commandeered more relief aid from other Guard units outside the state. From day one.

There were problems, true: FEMA melted down. Political leaders, from the Mayor to Governor to the White House, showed “A Failure of Initiative”, as a recent House report put it. That report, along with sharply critical studies by the White House and the Senate, delve into the myriad of breakdowns, shortages and miscommunications that hampered relief efforts.

Still, by focusing on the part of the glass that was half-empty, the national media imposed a near total blackout on the nerve center of what may have been the largest, most successful aerial search and rescue operation in history.

“The Coast Guard, the National Guard, the military in general performed heroically,” said Sen. Robert Barham, R-Oak Ridge, who monitored the Superdome operation from Baton Rouge as head of the Louisiana State Senate’s Homeland Security Committee. His opposite number in the Louisiana House, Rep. Francis Thompson, D-Delhi, said, “They (the Guard) did a yeoman’s job.” Both said they were getting very different pictures from TV than they got from the Guardsmen at the Dome, and the state fish and wildlife department, another key player in the rescue operation.

[...]

Let’s try that again: The cavalry wasn’t late. It didn’t arrive on Thursday smoking a cigar and cussing. It was there all along.

The National Guard’s response to Katrina was even more robust than I suspected in my reporting for RealClearPolitics in September, and in more detail for National Review, where I revealed for the first time that rescue operations saved up to 50,000 lives, with perhaps an equal number making their way to shelters on their own.

Fifty thousand New Orleans residents were in danger of death from drowning, heatstroke, dehydration and disease. That was a tough one to get through the media reality-distortion field, but the numbers have since been confirmed by Congress, the White House, Louisiana state officials and the relevant agencies themselves. If anything, I understated the size of the rescue effort. What I didn’t understand was the critical role the Superdome headquarters played.

I initially heard about the Dome headquarters from Maj. John T. Dressler, who serves with the National Guard Bureau in Washington D.C, an organization that coordinates efforts of State Guard units which serve under their respective governors. Dressler was present in the command tent there and pulled together after-action reports for the Guard as a whole from its fifty-plus individual state commands. His account was so far at variance with the picture the media portrayed that I suspected a hoax, as did my RCP editor. As it turns out, various Guard documents, personal memories, and sworn testimony support his story, which in Louisiana is no great secret. It’s just the rest of the country that’s been kept in the dark.

[...]

What’s more puzzling is why the White House hasn’t joined Blanco in trying to rehabilitate its reputation. The handling of Katrina by FEMA is one of the most-cited reasons for the President’s low poll numbers. The national Democratic Party, meanwhile, continues to try to hang Katrina around the President’s neck. As Adam Nagourney recently wrote in the New York Times, “Democrats are looking to this city as the symbol of an administration that is at once incompetent and heartless.”

The president’s side isn’t a complicated story. He sits atop a huge bureaucratic machine. He’s responsible for how the pieces of the pyramid work, not every last detail. “The rescues happened way below the radar screen and that’s not bad,” Carafano said. “You want this kind of decentralized execution. If we have to sit around for someone in Washington to make a decision, we’re all going to die.”

…That’s the real story of Katrina. But the national media isn’t about to acknowledge it unless the administration makes its own case, something that, so far at least, it hasn’t begun to do.

Much more…[ht: Michael Barone's commentary including several key reference links]

Katrina: Forget everything you thought you knew

Published on 8/31/2006 in Media . Closed Tags: .

If you’ve only gotten your news about Hurricane Katrina from the mainstream media, everything you think you know about Katrina flooding New Orleans is probably wrong. On this first anniversary of the tragedy, while the networks congratulate themselves on their often wildly inaccurate reporting in the days following Katrina, there’s a far more important story not being told.



I wouldn’t have seen Kevin Aylward’s analysis without Captain Ed’s referral and commentary. Kevin’s opening quoted above is a true statement. Read on for a succinct summary of what we now know.

Surprisingly, the video gives us every indication that New Orleans was doomed with or without Katrina. The amount of water in the canal was not unusual and, in fact, that wall had held far more water on previous occasions; that was before it was undermined for the better part of a year.

All this leads to the even more shocking conclusion that Hurricane Katrina probably saved 50,000 lives.

That levee was doomed. While Katrina was the last straw, it was destined to fail. Studies done before the storm indicated that if a major hurricane overwhelmed the city’s levees, as many as 100,000 people would die as a result.

If the levee had failed without warning, there would have been no evacuation, no preparation, no state/federal support, no Coast Guardsmen in helicopters etc. If you think Katrina was bad with governmental preparations, consider an event half that size without it.

Captain Ed wrote

The same bad reporting that happened when the eyes of the nation were fixed on New Orleans — do you recall news reports of cannibalism, roving bands of rapists, hundreds of homicides, toxic flood waters that would kill on contact — persisted in the weeks afterwards. The news agencies seemed so intent on scoring points off of the Bush administration that they neglected to research the real problems in New Orleans: the lack of any coordinated local response, the refusal of Louisiana to authorize military intervention, and the real reason for the levee failure.

Incredibly, the evidence was available almost from the start. A video taken by firefighters at the start of the collapse showed the water levels behind the levees as far below what had been assumed, and far below water levels in the past. This led investigators to look further into symptoms of an engineering failure — and they discovered that residents had warned for months about seepage under the levees, a sign that the walls had already begun to catastrophically fail.

Katrina spending is five times larger than past disasters

Published on 8/29/2006 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment Tags: .

Editorial 082906ChartThis is not really a surprise in this age of vast porkiness, but the scale is shocking:

The post-Katrina spend-fest in Louisiana will be remembered as one of the greatest taxpayer wastes in U.S. history. First came the FEMA $2,000 debit-cards fiasco intended to pay for necessities that were used for things like flat-panel TVs and tattoos. Then came the purchase of thousands of mobile homes that cost as much as $400,000 per family housed; the $200 million for renting the Carnival Cruise Ship; millions more in payments that went for season football tickets, luxury vacation resorts, even divorce lawyers. Federal flood insurance policies surely will encourage many to rebuild in the same flood plains and at the same height as before.

There has been some notable progress away from the most damaged areas of New Orleans. Coastal Mississippi is well on the way to full recovery, thanks in part to the leadership of Governor Haley Barbour. The number of building permits in Mississippi are four times higher than in New Orleans. The business district in New Orleans and the French Quarter, where flooding was minimal, are nearly back to the normal rhythm of life. But the neighborhoods that were overwhelmed with water remain mostly deserted wrecks, with electricity, hot water and sewage systems spotty at best.

Where rebuilding progress has been swiftest in New Orleans, it has been companies like Wal-Mart and Home Depot that have stepped up to make contributions along with the $4 billion in charitable donations. While billions of dollars of federal flood insurance payments and community development dollars remain tangled in red tape, the private insurance industry has made at least 80% of its payments to homeowners.

Given the famously ingrained culture of political corruption in New Orleans–a system designed to siphon public money of any sort away from its intended purpose–President Bush was right to call on Congress to convert New Orleans into a massive “enterprise zone.” That included tax breaks for new business investment, health savings accounts for those without medical insurance, school vouchers for families located where schools have been ruined and a reappraisal of all regulations.

Some of the tax incentives were enacted and have spurred more business investment. And charter schools will serve thousands of the kids still residing in New Orleans this fall. But Congress and Louisiana’s pols have ignored most of the promising free-market reforms, opting instead for red tape as usual.

After the hurricane, newspapers around the world showed photos of New Orleans under headlines that shouted: “America’s shame.” In truth, New Orleans was America’s shame long before Katrina. In large part the residents of the Big Easy were victims of the predatory behavior of their own politicians. Louisiana already ranked among the bottom five of all the states in crime, poverty, health care and school performance; the murder rate in New Orleans today is 10 times the national average.

For all the finger-pointing this week, Congress hasn’t spent much more than a dime to clear away the debris of corruption, patronage, welfare dependency, high taxes and racial division of decimated neighborhoods. What is still lacking in the life of New Orleans is the vital architecture of local capitalism.

Flirting With Disaster: The Inherent Problems with FEMA

Published on 7/11/2006 in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: .

I’m looking forward to the release of this Sobel/Leeson study. This short article “Can FEMA be fixed” summarizes a few if the key issues.

The “reform” bills currently on the floor are useless – following the familiar congressional pattern of org-chart tinkering. A recent awful example was the “Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 200″.

Wouldn’t the most effective reform be to abolish FEMA? Aren’t there existing channels for distribution of any appropriate federal-level aid funds? Other than aid funds, it seems that the only function available to a FEMA-type agency is interference with the markets.

…How should one go about coordinating thousands of people with different needs with thousands of people who have supplies that could help?

Take, for example, the Chicago Board of Trade, which coordinates millions of commodity exchanges a day. Although the trading floor seems chaotic, it works to connect those who demand things with those who can supply them. Using the trading floor for a few hours would have done infinitely more to coordinate relief efforts than FEMA ever could.

A version of this model went into effect after Katrina, with some enterprising types using eBay to facilitate exchanges and offers of assistance. The private sector responded admirably in other ways:

Weeks before the storm, Home Depot transferred generators, flashlights, batteries and lumber to its distribution centers near the strike area. Phone companies readied mobile cell towers and sent in generators and fuel. Insurers flew in special teams and set up claim-processing hotlines. Wal-Mart’s incredible response had even its staunchest critics praising the company.

Decentralized, market-based institutions utilize information and respond in a way that a centralized government planning agency simply can’t.

ILIT report: The Catastrophe Wasn't Katrina

Published on 5/30/2006 in Uncategorized. Closed Tags: .

This Washington Post op-ed by Eugene Robinson is just the first commentary I came across on the report of the Independent Levee Investigation Team:

The evidence, by now, is overwhelming: Beautiful, decadent New Orleans wasn’t doomed by Hurricane Katrina but by decades of human incompetence and neglect. As far as the drowned city is concerned, the greatest natural disaster in the nation’s history would have been just a messy inconvenience if not for the fumbling hand of man.

The mortal threat to New Orleans, as Katrina plowed into the Gulf Coast, was not the powerful winds — Mississippi took the brunt of those — but the massive storm surge the hurricane generated. We now know that the levees, floodwalls and other barriers protecting the city were, for the most part, plenty tall enough and theoretically strong enough to keep the waters at bay. On paper, New Orleans should have ended up wet and wounded, but basically intact.

What happened instead was “the single most costly catastrophic failure of an engineered system in history,” according to a report issued last week by the Independent Levee Investigation Team, a blue-ribbon panel led by experts from the University of California at Berkeley and funded by the National Science Foundation.

Some of the flood barriers were built using inadequate materials, the report says. Others were designed so poorly that they provided weak spots for the waters to exploit. Still others were left unfinished for lack of funds.

…etc.

Sadly, Katrina wasn’t caused by Bush, and worse, Bush didn’t cause the devastation. Oddly, CBS News carried a brief May 22 report marking the release of the draft ILIT report – though the CBS story doesn’t mention their own hysterical Katrina reports. No doubt CBS will be correcting their original Katrina coverage any day now…

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