Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans ten years ago on this date. Since then, there has been a lot of retrospective on the aftermath of the hurricane and the recovery of New Orleans. The attention is well deserved considering the devastation and the importance of learning from it. Sadly, too much of it is misdirected.
Five years ago, the most popular opinion was that New Orleans was rebuilding too slowly. People expressed concerns about the hundreds of thousands of former residents who had not returned; the neighborhoods dominated by destroyed homes and empty lots; the unviable business environment; and the lack of infrastructure in the city. But after spending $9-billion on federal housing programs in New Orleans, more than half of the city’s 72 neighborhoods have recovered ninety percent of their pre-Katrina population and the population in the city overall is only twenty percent less than it was a decade ago.
But insurance companies stopped covering real estate against flooding in New Orleans. Rather than complaining that this is unfair to residents who stayed in New Orleans, no one should be surprised insurance companies have done so. They sustained monumental costs in New Orleans related to the hurricane. Insurance companies won’t be able to insure anyone if they can’t make a profit to stay in business. When their actuaries calculate the probability that New Orleans will sustain a catastrophic flood in the future, it comes out to one hundred percent. It is not possible to profitably insure against something that is certain to occur.
New Orleans is surrounded by the great Mississippi River on one side, a large lake on the other, and the Gulf of Mexico on the third side. The city itself sits as much as eight feet below sea level with only some levees keeping the ocean out. The federal government spent $14.5-billion rebuilding the levees but only did so to 100-year-flood levels, not the 500-year-flood levels to which the Netherlands’ dikes are built. With rising oceans and increasing severity of storms from Climate Change, New Orleans will be lucky if it goes even a decade or two before the next catastrophic failure of its levees. Other than that, New Orleans’ only protection from the hurricanes that are sure to periodically make landfall nearby are rapidly dwindling wetlands. But the entire area should be mangrove swamps and other wetlands acting as a natural buffer against hurricanes. New Orleans should be a community of marine life, not humans.
The wise former residents of New Orleans took the money their insurance companies paid them for damages from Katrina and relocated elsewhere to rebuild their lives. The government should have made relief to victims of the hurricane contingent on using it to relocate away from New Orleans. Had the billions of tax dollars spent on rebuilding New Orleans been spent instead on helping New Orleans residents rebuild their lives elsewhere, the Americans who would have benefited the most from it are those poor souls who instead are still living in New Orleans. Insured or not, the only thing certain in their lives is that a day will again come when their closest neighbors will be red snapper.
Nonetheless, although it’s not a matter of if it will become victim to another catastrophic flood, it’s a matter of when, America will continue to squander her treasury on rebuilding New Orleans. And the city has grown large enough that the damage will be about as great as from Katrina when the next major hurricane makes landfall there. Meanwhile, the only road to the permanent recovery of New Orleans is paved under the waters of a coastal wetland.
The Progressive Zone 