[Mb-civic] Natural Acts of Terror - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Natural Acts of Terror

By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, August 30, 2005; Page A17

Until this week, New Orleans had been unnaturally lucky with hurricanes 
since the monstrous Camille roared through in 1969. Maybe the immunity 
was a voodoo thing, or thang , to use the local term of art. But 
amulets, fetishes and dolls don't work forever. The city sits a bayou 
away from the Gulf of Mexico, which is basically a giant nursery for 
hurricanes. The law of averages guarantees that most will miss the Big 
Easy, but also that a few won't.

Katrina, one of the few, was at least polite enough to have its deadly 
eye just graze the lovely city on the east, meaning that maximum winds 
there were "only" 120 miles an hour. Gulfport and Biloxi, in 
Mississippi, seem to have had the worst of it -- not that I would try to 
tell that to the 10,000 people who huddled in the New Orleans Superdome 
while chunks of the roof blew away, or the others who didn't make it to 
safety and whose fate is not yet known.

None of this was a surprise -- New Orleans is below sea level, wedged 
between Lake Pontchartrain, the Mississippi River and the Gulf, and is 
kept dry by a system of levees, dikes, canals and massive pumps. 
Everyone knew these defenses could handle an average hurricane but not a 
really big one such as Katrina. Yet a million people living in the New 
Orleans area, not to mention the rest of us, managed to put that 
inconvenient fact out of their minds.

It's paradoxical, when you think about it, that we have such a sense of 
urgency about preventing acts of terrorism that we will spend any amount 
of money to reduce the risk. But we are so laid-back about natural 
disasters -- which are absolutely inevitable, take more lives and can 
have devastating economic impact -- that we buy protection only 
grudgingly. There are plenty of plans on the books for new floodgates, 
levees and pumps in New Orleans, but funding comes in at a trickle.

It's not just Americans who have this bias: Imagine how many people 
might have been saved last December if a few million dollars had been 
spent on an early warning system for Indian Ocean tsunamis. Then again, 
tsunamis are so rare that they almost never come up on anyone's list of 
things to worry about. Hurricanes, by contrast, are common, reliable and 
deadly -- and it's long been known that New Orleans, because of the 
minus sign in front of its elevation, was a soft and vulnerable target.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901447.html?nav=hcmodule
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20050830/989e223e/attachment.htm