Opinion In Brief

Delayed reaction

The most devastating natural disaster in the United States since the Galveston hurricane of 1900 and the 1906 San Francsico earthquake – perhaps combined – and it took the better part of a week for us to react fully to the widespread damage caused by one of only four Category 5 hurricanes to hit the United States in recorded history.

Evacuation orders sent out days ahead doubtless saved hundreds of thousands of lives, but the tens of thousands left behind faced a large amount of debris, damage, contaminated floodwaters and a near total lack of public services as some 30,000 New Orleanians huddled in a damaged Louisiana Superdome waiting for relief in the form of evacuation buses that never came.

Given the lack of proportional response to Katrina’s size and scale, an aptly titled editorial in the New York Times by Gen. Wesley Clark said that America was “Waiting for a Leader.” Even the sharply conservative Manchester, N.H., newspaper the Union Leader criticized the president for carrying on plans to give a speech last Tuesday on the anniversary of World War II’s end instead of attending to scenes of crisis.

Apparently, the president who was so quick to come to the scene of a disaster 4 years ago was less willing to face people affected by the lack of aid during a much larger natural disaster today.

Congress, too, which was once able to convene an emergency special session on a moment’s notice to intervene on behalf of the life of one person, had to wait until Thursday evening to facilitate a $10.5 billion special funding request from President Bush.

At least the president and Congress were able to manage to cut their respective vacations a few days short.

Ounce of prevention

Once the work of restoring public order has been achieved and survivors have been accounted for, the first work of government planners is to rebuild.

Speaker Dennis Hastert’s controversial comment that rebuilding New Orleans “doesn’t make sense” had a kernel of truth in that rebuilding the same way we did before is only inviting disaster once more, especially as storms are expected to grow stronger in the decades – or worse, sea levels rise as is predicted by global warming experts.

The lack of immediate aid for a disaster of this scale may be understandable given the few days’ notice involved, but the long-term signs were there. The subject of federal government research and several documentaries – both real and fictional – the prospect of New Orleans facing devastating floods in the face of a strong hurricane was not a new idea by any stretch of the imagination.

In the years before Katrina, while the Bush administration pushed tax cuts and Iraq war funding through Congress, shoring up New Orleans’ levees and improving their drainage system became lesser priorities. Since 2001, according to documents obtained by Reuters, the Army Corps of Engineers received only $166 million of nearly $500 million requested.

Bill Nye “the Science Guy” once commented on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country long before Katrina that society has a choice – it can continue to spend money after disasters rebuilding from billions of dollars in damage, or it can decide to spend money on the front end so damage and loss of life are avoided altogether – or at least greatly minimized.

Like so many priorities in politics that fall by the wayside because of lack of foresight- unwarranted optimism or dangerous complacency- the subject of better preparing for future hurricanes should not be allowed to slip from the forefront of Katrina rebuilding efforts in New Orleans and elsewhere.

Purpose to rebuild

For those who may question the viability of protecting such a fragile location as New Orleans from future storms, we need only look abroad to see how other nations cope with nature on a daily basis. Most of the Netherlands, for example, lie below sea level thanks to an intricate system of levees and dikes. Building codes in Japan help alleviate earthquake damage, and an adjustable concrete wall near Venice, Italy, helps protect the famed city from rising sea levels.

Even the developing nation of Bangladesh had a floodwall in place before January’s Indian Ocean tsunami that spared them the worst of the devastation. Here in Richmond, our own floodwall helps protect historic Shockoe Bottom.

New Orleans is nothing short of a national treasure. Home to jazz, cajun culture, Mardi Gras, the French Quarter, Bourbon Street and a centuries-old history, giving up on the city- as Speaker Hastert seemed to suggest- last week should not be an option.

Beyond sentimental reasons, there is the crucial nature of New Orleans as the world’s fourth largest port, exporter and importer of some of the world’s most basic commodities such as grain, oil and coffee.

What’s needed is a sense of national purpose to protect the area from future storms so that devastation on this scale can never happen again.