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Sun. Dec 11, 2005

The Times Revisits New Orleans

A week ago, in Revisiting New Orleans, I wrote “The next hurricane season begins in less than seven months,” and wondered if New Orleans would even get the necessary repairs on their design-defective levee system to handle the category 3 storm for which it was originally intended. It seems highly unlikely. And an editorial in the New York Times takes the next logical step in that thought process: “Death of an American City.“

We are about to lose New Orleans. Whether it is a conscious plan to let the city rot until no one is willing to move back or honest paralysis over difficult questions, the moment is upon us when a major American city will die, leaving nothing but a few shells for tourists to visit like a museum.

We said this wouldn’t happen. President Bush said it wouldn’t happen. He stood in Jackson Square and said, “There is no way to imagine America without New Orleans.” But it has been over three months since Hurricane Katrina struck and the city is in complete shambles.

There are many unanswered questions that will take years to work out, but one is make-or-break and needs to be dealt with immediately. It all boils down to the levee system. People will clear garbage, live in tents, work their fingers to the bone to reclaim homes and lives, but not if they don’t believe they will be protected by more than patches to the same old system that failed during the deadly storm. Homeowners, businesses and insurance companies all need a commitment before they will stake their futures on the city.

New York Times: Death of an American City

Again, the levee system must be quickly rebuilt to at least handle a category 3 storm, or every dollar spent and every hard man hour put into cleanup and rebuilding will be flushed away with the next hurricane. I don’t want to lose track of that urgent priority. But the President promised … pledged ... a whole lot more than just what the editorial quotes:

And tonight I also offer this pledge of the American people: Throughout the area hit by the hurricane, we will do what it takes, we will stay as long as it takes, to help citizens rebuild their communities and their lives. And all who question the future of the Crescent City need to know there is no way to imagine America without New Orleans, and this great city will rise again.

And the federal government will undertake a close partnership with the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, the city of New Orleans, and other Gulf Coast cities, so they can rebuild in a sensible, well-planned way. Federal funds will cover the great majority of the costs of repairing public infrastructure in the disaster zone, from roads and bridges to schools and water systems. Our goal is to get the work done quickly.

In the long run, the New Orleans area has a particular challenge, because much of the city lies below sea level. The people who call it home need to have reassurance that their lives will be safer in the years to come. Protecting a city that sits lower than the water around it is not easy, but it can, and has been done. City and parish officials in New Orleans, and state officials in Louisiana will have a large part in the engineering decisions to come. And the Army Corps of Engineers will work at their side to make the flood protection system stronger than it has ever been.

In the life of this nation, we have often been reminded that nature is an awesome force, and that all life is fragile. We’re the heirs of men and women who lived through those first terrible winters at Jamestown and Plymouth, who rebuilt Chicago after a great fire, and San Francisco after a great earthquake, who reclaimed the prairie from the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Every time, the people of this land have come back from fire, flood, and storm to build anew — and to build better than what we had before. Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature — and we will not start now.

White House: President Bush, Jackson Square, Sept. 15, 2005

Those words are about as clear as they can be. It’s the actions that have been, at best, vague, and mostly absent. And it’s a cowardly inaction.

Lawmakers need to understand that for New Orleans the words “pending in Congress” are a death warrant requiring no signature.

The rumbling from Washington that the proposed cost of better levees is too much has grown louder. Pretending we are going to do the necessary work eventually, while stalling until the next hurricane season is upon us, is dishonest and cowardly.

Estimates to rebuild the system to handle a category 5 storm have run about $32 billion, which is indeed a lot of money. But the Times editorial points out, “it is barely one-third the cost of the $95 billion in tax cuts passed just last week by the House of Representatives.”

We see the priorities of Congress, by their actions. And they don’t include rebuilding New Orleans, or even the bare minimum, its levee system.

But never mind the full $32 billion load to upgrade the system two notches, how about the renovation and rebuilding of the current levee system, which it has now been proven was, and is, defective in its design?

Why would a business or a homeowner want to invest tens or hundreds of thousands rebuilding in a place where the federally provided levee system was not, and is not, enough to handle the category 3 storms for which it was designed?

And time has essentially run out. Without a massive and immediate commitment from Congress, and leadership from the White House, there is simply no way the existing system will be able to handle a category 3 storm come June 1 when the hurricane season starts anew.

Any further commitment to upgrade that levee system to handle a category 5 storm is an undertaking of five to ten years. New Orleans doesn’t have that long. It needs a clear and visibly obvious commitment to reinforce the current levee systems, particularly the flood walls on the drainage canals. All of the weak points they’ve now found through the ultimate stress testing.

It needs to be a six month plan, it needs a quick commitment of the resources required, and, yes, a PR effort to promote it. Personally, I think it sounds tailor-made for a positive election year ploy by the party that controls the government, but what do I know? It may be more politically expedient to just stay in attack mode.

But it does leave the hard question no one in DC has the courage to talk about:

If the rest of the nation has decided it is too expensive to give the people of New Orleans a chance at renewal, we have to tell them so. We must tell them we spent our rainy-day fund on a costly stalemate in Iraq, that we gave it away in tax cuts for wealthy families and shareholders. We must tell them America is too broke and too weak to rebuild one of its great cities.

I wouldn’t have thrown in the seemingly obligatory Iraq reference, but otherwise, it’s a fair cop.

It will be horrifically ironic if we created an entire new department of government costing tens of billions of dollars because we had a fear of losing an American city to a terrorist attack, yet we stood by and watched an American city die because we said the problems were too big and too expensive, and well, it might happen again.

Because, at that point, you can stop rebuilding the Trade Center, too. More importantly, you can shut down the Department of Homeland Security. Its annual budget exceeds the cost of a five year plan to rebuild New Orleans.

And that means the Department of Homeland Security is too expensive, too. If we’re not willing to spend the money to “defend” one city, why should we spend it on any of them?

Also, know that if your city suffers under an attack, from terrorists or nature, the precedent is being set. You may just have to leave everything behind and start over somewhere else. Because we don’t have the will to rebuild, it’s easier for you to just relocate.