What Makes a Natural Disaster Worse? When it's Man-Made
Dr. Figley writes this:
Hurricanes are acts of God, people can actually accept it more readily. But trauma caused by people on purpose is another matter completely. Most especially terrorist-induced trauma to frighten people is very different from natural disasters. Even Katrina with all its human-caused problems, then and now, they are more manageable knowing that we can fix what went wrong. It is comforting.
Yeah, great load of comfort the people of New Orleans, of whom I am one, have experienced knowing that the Katrina-spawned flooding was not an act of God, but--according to the three forensic engineering teams that investigated the disaster--the result of design and construction flaws of the Congressionally-mandated "Hurricane Protection System", a project under the exclusive supervision and control of the US Army Corps of Engineers. How comforting to know that the very same Corps, which stonewalled those reports, while denouncing their pro-bono investigators as liars, is now doing the rebuilding of that system, and (a) choosing the "technically not superior" to at least one of the projects (the pumping systems for the outfall canals) due to an alleged lack of funds--this is in the year of the $3/4 trillion stimulus bill and (b) slow-walking a Congresionally-mandated report calling for a plan to build more robust hurricane protection, so called Category 5 protection.
How comforting that national media, and even people in our own community, cannot call this event what it was, what the ILIT report called it, the "greatest man-made engineering disaster in American history". How comforting that, when we dare to bring up these unpleasant facts, New Orleanians are accused of being whiners looking for a handout. No city in the country has had a culture and history of such resiliency in the face of so many disasters (New Orleans was the site of the last yellow fever epidemic in North America, in the early 1900s).
My comfort is in that resiliency, in the deep and irrational and unbounded love New Orleanians have for our town. I'm back there tomorrow, and I can't wait.
Now Harry, no reason to be "shrill."
Is it TV culture that has so anaesthesized the US electorate that despite serial catastrophic failures by its collective elite (political, economic, media), that elite remains essentially unscathed, even complacent? Sure Bush's popularity was hurt, but he still had plenty of legislative accomplishments after Katrina. Vitter and Landrieu continue as senators. Anderson Cooper got his own TV show thanks to his heart-on-sleeve reporting, has he been back to cover the aftermath? Far from law enforcement officers facing any consequences for their conduct, people have had to resort to civil lawsuits, some settling out of court due to lack of resources. Meanwhile people cheer that "those people" were kept out of their parish.
And is anyone reading the posts here about Katrina?
July 29, 2009 6:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
I love the city of New Orleans too, but I'm wondering: Is this a battle against sea level change brought about by global warming?
If so, can the city ever win? Please correct me if I'm wrong. Most of New Orleans--except for the Vieux Carre and the main riverfront area downtown-- is below present sea level.
July 29, 2009 9:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
The problems of New Orleans' flooding are due to multiple problems. The sea isn't rising around New Orleans so much as the marshes are subsiding, thanks to salt water incursion, thanks to oil industry canals cut into the marshes and the Army Corps of Engineers' decisions to dump all the silt from the Mississippi off the Continental shelf instead of on the marshes. The loss of the marshes means a loss of shelter from storm surge due to hurricanes (and lesser storms). Storm surge is the biggest threat to the city. Even if New Orleans were ABOVE sea level, it would be extraordinarly vulnerable to storm surge without the levees. So, the answer to your question is complex.
It is possible to protect the city from most storm surge damage with extra levee protection. It is possible to reverse marsh subsidence (takes time and the diversion of river water to the marshes, which is starting to happen in mini-projects). Keep in mind that New Orleans is more than just Bourbon Street and people whose homes have been flooded: it is also one of the most important ports in the country. There are any number of critical infrastructures in New Orleans that need to be protected, even if no one lived there. I am not, of course, trying to minimize the issue of the lives of people who DO live there, just addressing Carey's question.
July 29, 2009 10:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
It is worth noting that it is very possible to competently protect a population living in an area below sea level - the Netherlands is the obvious example.
July 29, 2009 3:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
Must the Cajun always rub European efficiency in all our faces?
July 29, 2009 3:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wish I could find some Louisiana efficiency to rub...
July 29, 2009 3:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Carey, you're wrong. Over 50% of New Orleans is actually at or above sea level.
http://blog.nola.com/times-picayune/2007/04/study_bust_myth_that_new_orlea.html
July 30, 2009 6:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
And just to add to Harry's point: I don't think that Figley is right that human-made disasters are more comforting anyway. An act of God doesn't have the racial bias and the regional bias of the (failure) of response we saw after Katrina--and still continue to see. When one is faced with the fact that a disaster could have been prevented but wasn't, due to ignorance, greed, prejudice, or laziness, it is almost too much to bear. One is helpless in the face of nature, but when someone else RENDERS you helpless unnecessarily, it can be maddening. Whether one responds to the fact that the disaster was preventable with rage, depression, psychosis, suicide, or murder depends a lot on one's own character. But I think that Figley's emphasis on our sense of empowerment in being able to fix man-made disasters completely ignores the sense of fury that attends the feeling that the disaster could have been prevented in the first place. Not just prevented. This particular disaster was FORESEEN. It was MODELED.
In the recent Chinese earthquake in Chengdu, people were traumatized by the event as such but they were outraged and some even became completely overwhelmed by the fact that their children had died due to shoddy construction. Their children died due to human error, greed, laziness, and chicanery. Comforting? I don't think so.
July 29, 2009 10:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
Studies have shown that man-made catastrophes usually result in a state of domestic lawlessness as people go into survivor mode. Curious if this is playing out in New Orleans.
And then there's what people usually do to overcome unhappiness. Either they behave as aggressively as posssible or they cling to a fixed moral code - don't know if that applies to New Orleans, but it certainly applies to most of the American electorate for the last 8 years.
Maybe a throwaway, but the Fed put up $160 billion to cover all combined fund-starved American cities/states while at the same time it put up $180 billion to bail out AIG. Interesting priority.
July 29, 2009 11:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
. . . the sense of fury that attends the feeling that the disaster could have been prevented in the first place. mrnola
In most cases the "victims" of a man-made disaster will, upon looking in the mirror, view the men-who-made-the-disaster looking right back at them.
What was the New Orleans Levee Board doing at its annual get togethers? What was the Tulane Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering doing? The rest of New Orleans' elite? Letting the good times roll? What the hoi polloi who didn't think it was their job to elect honest, responsible leaders?
"Fury" is just another word for the all-too-human tendency to refuse to take responsibility.
July 29, 2009 1:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Harry, have you read John McPhee's The Control of Nature, written 20 years ago? He describes in great detail how the Corps has so far successfully prevented the Mississippi from changing its exit to the Gulf (it wants to go through the Atchafalaya River, substantially shorter and more attractive to the water thanks to gravity), which change would utterly negate the entire economic geography of lower Louisiana.
His conclusion is that no matter how many billions of dollar we spend, the control of nature is futile.
While New Orleans is beautiful city with an incredible culture, there will come a day when our country's tax dollars will cease to sustain its precarious location, thanks to the laws of gravity . . . and politics.
July 30, 2009 3:49 PM | Reply | Permalink