Who Should Rebuild

This is a substantially different question than whether we should rebuild along the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. It is inevitable that rebuilding will be done, but the real question is who should be doing the rebuilding and what kinds of limitations should be imposed on reconstruction.

While much of the national focus is on New Orleans, one shouldn't forget that the overwhelming majority of the damage to the country from Katrina was for the hundreds of miles of shoreline communites East of New Orleans. From places like Slidell, LA, down to Waveland MS, Biloxi, and over to Pascagoula. Anything within a few hundred yards of the coast was obliterated. In fact, there were areas where the destruction was complete for a mile or more inland. That's the power of a storm surge.

It should force people to reconsider building right up against the shoreline. However, the lessons learned from Katrina aren't being heeded by commercial interests, who are busy rebuilding right up to the coastline in Biloxi. Shoreline properties are more valuable for any number of reasons, including the allure of having waterfront property. However, the allure of waterfront property must be weighed by the increased risk of catastrophic damage from storms and storm surges.

Biloxi ought to be Exhibit A in any discussion of whether current coastal development regulations make sense. The beachfront properties were devastated, but only a few hundred yards inland, damage was moderate. Maybe there’s a lesson there for developers? Apparently not. Compared to New Orleans, where whole neighborhoods remain deserted, Biloxi is crawling with construction teams. Most of them are busy rebuilding hotels right at the water’s edge.

It's interesting that after the South Asian earthquake and tsunami last year (the one year anniversary of that disaster is December 26), countries around the affected region considered laws to prohibit and limit construction or rebuilding of structures within a given distance of the normal high water tidal mark. This is usually 300 meters of the shoreline. That makes sense there, and it should make sense here. The further inland you went, the less damaging the storm was - and the storm surge dissipated with distance.

Businesses know that they have to make money, but also incur the risk of loss for rebuilding. If they think that the risks are slight, they will rebuild. If they think that the risks will be borne by others, they'll rebuild, knowing that they can make their profit and not suffer the consequences of poor decisionmaking. Government needs to step in to make sure that the rebuilding is orderly and does not push the risk of loss onto unsuspecting buyers or that the rebuilding puts entire communities at risk because they will eventually suffer the same fate as those that came before them in a catastrophic storm.

Hat Tip: Mister Snitch, who thinks that folks blaming Washington and particularly have animus for Bush personally for the slow pace of rebuilding should take heed of the rebuilding in places like Biloxi, which isn't waiting for the federal government. In fact, that particular article thinks that the Republicans simply don't care about what happens along the Gulf Coast.

I disagree. What we've seen in Louisiana is a product of decades of corruption and inept decisionmaking by both political parties - to spend on projects unrelated to infrastructure instead of assuring that the levee system that protects New Orleans was up to the standards set forth by Congress (Category 3 storm). Throwing money at the problems do not solve them. Not when there are institutional failures at the Army Corps of Engineers and the individual levee boards. Leadership is wanting at the state and local level as well. Their preparations were inadequate, sporadic, and failed to act decisively at the moment of truth.

Yet, these are the same people who are going to be in charge of rebuilding New Orleans. Might I suggest that these opponents to Bush chill out and actually come up with some ideas for how to fix the problems that they've identified - and throwing money at the problem isn't a solution. It's a bandaid that might make you feel better that you've 'fixed' the problem, but all that has been done is made people dependent upon a government that has shown itself unable to solve the problems in the first place. Failing that, might I suggest JibJab (205 Year in Review).

Meanwhile, as I and other commentators noted, the casualties of Katrina crossed ethnic lines - and was a cross section of the population of the affected areas. However, the storm did kill more elderly and infirm, which shows that disaster preparedness must better account for those least likely to get themselves out of harms' way. Wizbang had earlier noted the myth of New Orleans flooding because it was below sea level. It's far more complicated than that, but most folks simply gloss over that fact.

And rebuilding in New Orleans is complicated by one simple fact - the levees that failed may have been defective in one form or another. Figuring out how and why will be crucial to protecting the city in the future:

As teams of forensic engineers probe why levees breached during Katrina, the key question lies at the heart of the design process. Investigators, along with many New Orleans residents, are wondering how engineers with advanced degrees, using computers and detailed data on soil conditions, could design floodwalls with what, in hindsight, are obvious flaws.

Investigators are focusing on the 17th Street and London Avenue canals, which breached when water rose to a point that was, at the most, two feet below their tops. They suggest that, since the walls have common elements, there is a fundamental problem with the way the walls were built.

"There does appear to be a systemic failure along the drainage canals because the failure occurred at two places simultaneously," said David Rogers, a geotechnical engineer at the University of Missouri-Rolla who is on a National Science Foundation team studying the breaches. "There's got to be something big that's causing that. . . . This is a very bad failure mark. It's telling you they missed the mark by a country mile on the design."

The document trail is incomplete, and mysteries remain about key design decisions. But design memoranda and other documents from the construction of the floodwalls in the two canals offer clues to what might have gone wrong. They show that in addition to concerns dating back 25 years about the stability of levees in both canals, designers sometimes worked at the edge of acceptable standards and at times failed to account for layers of weak soil. All are problems that could have contributed to the failures.

In other words, caution should be exerted before committing to fully rebuilding because the city would still be vulnerable to flooding, disaster, and mass casualties without a proper flood protection system. Business and government realize that the pace of rebuilding may not be fast enough for their liking, but businesses are not going to rebuild unless the risks are minimized - and that means that the flood control situation is clarified and repaired.

UPDATE:
New Orleans' famous streetcars have resumed service. That's good news since it fits part of the bigger picture of infrastructure necessary to keep the city running.