Klarinet Archive - Posting 000149.txt from 2005/09

From: "kevin fay" <kevinfay@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] Katrina: the first blame
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 2005 12:49:20 -0400

Finger-pointing is easy. In this case, you could point in most every
direction and find significant fault. There will be no end of
investigations, commissions, and partisan bickering over this one.

Three observations:

(1) Affixing blame is a useless exercise in itself. Establishing fault and
"bringing them to justice" may help assuage the irrational desire for
revenge, but is not itself useful activity. What is important - and would
be useful - would be to analyze what happened and actually take action so
that the performance all around is better next time.

This is harder, and ultimately more expensive. It's also not good
television, so we'll likely never see whether or not the hard work of
improving emergency systems is done until the next calamity.

(2) One big hiccup in the disaster relief here was the belief that New
Orleans had actually dodged the bullet. It might have been better off (by
swifter action) if the storm had breached the levees rather than the surge
days later.

(3) New Orleans is an inevitable city in an impossible location. It's
absolutely necessary to have a port where the goods and food produced in the
American heartland that are floated down the Mississippi on barges get
transferred to ships for transoceanic shipment (and vice versa). If you
look at the geography of Louisiana, however, there is simply no good place
to do it. The oldest sections of New Orleans *are* the highest ground
available, which is why Bourbon Street, the French Quarter (actually built
by Spaniards) and the Garden District were relatively unhurt. The remainder
of the city is reclaimed land that grew up around it.

The Army Corps of Engineers (i.e. the Feds) were responsible for the levees,
as with all other navigable waterways in the U.S. They were designed and
built to withstand a category 3 hurricane. Unfortunately, Katrina was
bigger than that. Oops.

There's a fun radio program on NPR called "Car Talk" - two brothers that run
a car repair shop (and have advanced degrees from MIT) chat about the care
and feeding of automobiles. One of their maxims is that "it's the stingy
man that spends the most."

In this case, it would have been much less expensive in the long run to have
built better (and more expensive) levees. The decision not to however many
years ago is the root cause of this tragedy.

How many more levees (both literally and figuratively) have we cheaped out
on?

kjf

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