The politicians are asking, “How much will it take to rebuild New Orleans?” and wondering how soon they can announce “mission accomplished.” The sociologists are questioning whether the city should it be rebuilt at all. The engineers are wondering whether they will get the permission and resources to do it.
None of these concerns is without merit, but they miss the mark. A great city such as New Orleans is not just a collection of buildings and infrastructure; it is a community of historical, cultural and social interactions. The reasons for having a New Orleans still exist, as will the city.
New Orleans will be rebuilt, but at what cost? It is too early to hazard a guess at a figure for physically rebuilding the city, let alone reconstructing the broken social fabric and mending some of the hurt felt by its people. Engineers can design it to be safer. But safety is relative, and never absolute.
No one can predict with complete accuracy whatever series of events, both natural and human caused, that will be experienced by the city over the next 10 years, let alone the next century or more.
A safer New Orleans can be built, but the cost of defying nature and re-creating the city as it used to be is too high. It is too high because funding should go to the creation of a strong, vibrant, educated, economically self-sufficient city. Rebuilding the old New Orleans would not be intelligent design, and it would ignore nature.
For historic, cultural and tourist reasons, the “heart” of New Orleans should be rebuilt. This should follow the “engineering” solution of designing protection systems that are capable of withstanding all foreseen hazards, including Category 5 hurricanes and 100-year river floods. And these systems must include emergency devices and procedures to limit the degree of devastation if their capacity is exceeded.
But most of the rest of the city should not be recreated in its old image to challenge nature another time. Housing should not be below sea level. Vital infrastructure should not be below lake level. Shipping channels should not cut through, and above, communities. Neighborhoods must be moved to higher ground, or built above danger. Factories and warehouses can occupy more vulnerable land.
If that’s done, losses can be evaluated and compensated in pure economic terms. Sports arenas can be rebuilt, and parks and recreational areas can be re-created. Unlike earthquakes, tornados and other of nature’s hazards, hurricanes are preceded by very accurate multi-day warnings, and severe river flooding along the Mississippi from upstream storms also is predicted.
At the very core of the welfare of society lies the creation of a secure and effective environment for living, working and cultural interaction. Yet both the built and natural components of such environments contain risk. Decisions regarding acceptable risk levels and the economic trade-offs belong to society at large; yet analyses of risks too often have been left solely to engineers.
Cities are social constructs, manifested in their physical constructions. Cities must exist in a sustainable fashion within the realities of the natural environment.
It’s at this interface of the built and natural environments where the myopia of politics repeatedly loses out to reality. Someone forgot to tell nature that we were going to base decisions on a four- to eight-year election cycle; that we were going to have to debate 100-year and 200-year investments in infrastructure during the same campaign in which we promise to cut taxes, build new schools and increase public safety.
The reality is that the chance of a 100-year hurricane happening during the next year is 1 percent. The chance of such an event during the next four years (a typical election cycle) is less than 4 percent, and the chances are still less than 15 percent of such an event occurring during a 16-year political career. Not bad odds compared with the pressure of issues like education quality, health care, police protection and the excitement of helping build a new convention center, sports arena or office tower.
We can change the political system. Not with 100-year election cycles, or with despots, but with systems that reward elected officials for making the tough trade-off decisions between the certain needs of today and the uncertain, low-probability, high-consequence events of the future.
We all need to be informed and involved in the kind of decisions that make the difference between future disasters and sustainable, resilient communities. We must demand of our elected officials the kind of tough decisions that are in the best long-term interest of a community by incorporating these discussions into election-year public rhetoric.
We can start with a simple idea: an infrastructure report card, presented at the start of each election season, that documents not only the new structures but also the changes in long-term risk and maintenance of existing infrastructure. We must stop the kind of decisions that led to continued over-development of New Orleans, that defied nature in the interest of improved shipping economics, and that cut the funding for maintaining and upgrading the levees despite professional assessments of dire consequences.
We must remember the world’s resources are not a gift to us from history; they are a loan to us from our children.
