January 15, 2010

Why Haiti is not New Orleans

Posted by johnmcquaid under media, politics | Tags: , , , , , , , |
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When disaster strikes, it’s invariably followed by a rush of memes and metaphors about What It All Means. In the aftermath of the disaster in Haiti, one of the ideas circulating is particularly facile and wrong-headed: likening the Haitian quake and Hurricane Katrina.

There is a superficial comparison to be made, of course: impoverished city, its residents overwhelmingly of African descent, chronically neglected by richer, whiter centers of power. So reporters who covered both disasters are freely comparing the two: “Several times in the continuing cable news coverage, [Anderson] Cooper and other reporters drew comparisons to the scenes they witnessed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The CNN correspondent Gary Tuchman said: ‘Roll back the clock four and a half years ago. What déjà vu.’”

Others are using the two disasters to analyze Barack Obama’s presidential leadership and his political fortunes. Will he screw it up, like Bush did Katrina? What calculations are going on right now in the White House to avert Bush’s post-K, post “heckuva job” fate? A skeptical Dan Kennedy expertly parses some of these reactions. Of them, Howard Fineman offered the purest distillation of this point of view:

Elected in part out of revulsion at the Bush administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina, Obama now finds himself confronting an even more devastating and complex humanitarian crisis.

And, adding irony upon irony, the racial context of New Orleans is writ large in Port-au-Prince. Katrina cost George W. Bush what little standing he had among moderates in his own party in part because the shocking images of suffering in New Orleans were so racially imbalanced.

Now the Obama administration’s competence and compassion will be tested in a similar racial context—and with a much worse infrastructure. Obama and his aides understand all of this.

This doesn’t make sense even on Fineman’s own narrow political terms. (more…)

 

August 28, 2009

K+4

Posted by johnmcquaid under environment, natural disasters, New Orleans, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , |
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Barge sits in Lower 9th Ward, December 2005

Barge sits in Lower 9th Ward, December 2005

The fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is upon us, and New Orleans continues to slowly rebound, with a smaller footprint than before but abundant community spirit. But, alarmingly, its long-term predicament remains unchanged, and the opportunity the nation had to confront it has been mostly squandered.

I refer, of course, to the challenge of protecting the city and surrounding coastlines from hurricanes. Three centuries of experience have proven time after time this is a deadly serious risk. And time after time, various government agencies – from New Orleans’s earliest colonial administrations to the Obama White House – have responded in a haphazard fashion, doing just enough to make people feel safe again, but not enough to prevent the next big disaster.

The Katrina disaster was deeply ironic. Turns out America, the nation that tamed rivers and the continent, won World War II and emerged as the globe’s lone superpower, couldn’t build a floodwall. America, the nation of the mass media and instantaneous communication, couldn’t figure out where the New Orleans Convention Center was, or deliver food and water a few blocks to the thousands of people gathered there. Post-K, there was reason to believe these outrages might force a reassessment of how the nation handles not just emergency response – what you do after disaster strikes – but prevention. The rapidly-eroding Louisiana coast seems like an outlier, but this is deceptive – climate change is going to raise the risks not just for coastlines (higher sea levels and – possibly – stronger storms) but for any area where rapid environmental shifts take place and communities built for yesterday’s conditions suddenly find themselves under water, consumed by fire or afflicted by drought or other problems. New Orleans is, in this sense, an important test case.

But no such reassessment took place. Instead, the same institution that screwed this up the first time – the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, was put in charge of the effort to protect New Orleans and the surrounding coastline. This was crazy and irresponsible, and the results were predictable. The Corps is building a $14 billion stopgap levee system, an upgrade to the old one that is certainly better than what was there before, but not nearly enough to protect the city from a Category 5 hurricane storm surge.

The Corps has been studying the options for bigger and better protection, and how to integrate it with efforts to restore the rapidly-eroding marshlands of south Louisiana, for four years. This is an ambitious project, and (in my view) an essential one. It should have been fast-tracked. It should have gotten some stimulus money. Instead it bogged down. . But there’s nobody really calling the shots at the upper levels of government. It’s not a national priority. President Obama says it is, and is creating a task force that may cut through some of the seemingly hopeless skein of red tape. So, we’ll see. But given the fiscal and political pressures on the Obama administration and the severe bureaucratic inertia holding this thing back (which results from basic power arrangements between Congress, the Corps, and successive administrations) I’m skeptical.

This is human nature, you might say, the way government institutions work. We’re always preparing for the last disaster. We don’t anticipate the “black swans.” But that’s no longer an adequate excuse given what’s at stake – not just a unique American city and cultural treasure, but the shape and structure of the American community in an era of change. Do shrug off these challenges – about which we know a great deal – and consign the vulnerable parts of the country to a slow attrition by disaster? Or do we learn from history, and science, and our own mistakes?

 

June 24, 2008

New Orleans is not a libertarian experiment, part II

Posted by johnmcquaid under natural disasters | Tags: , , , , , |
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In the wake of the Midwest floods, we’re about to embark on another long and fitful recovery and rebuilding effort. Given that and the post-Katrina mess in New Orleans – a morass of programs that either half-work, work too slowly or don’t work at all – should the federal government simply pull back and focus on the fundamentals, such as infrastructure, while letting private entities do the heavy lifting in restoring the fabric of the community? That’s a recurrent theme these days in conservative and libertarian circles. Here is another take on it from Daniel Rothschild of GMU’s Mercatus Center:

Government has a critical but constrained role to play in rebuilding, beginning with quickly setting and enforcing clear rules for redevelopment. That means that government-paid compensation should emphasize speed and simplicity. Don’t do means-testing for disaster relief. Don’t subtract out insurance payments that homeowners receive for their damaged home. And, by all means, don’t use disaster-relief programs to conduct social engineering or “replanning.”

Officials need to focus on the fundamentals. Allow communities to fix sewer lines, restore electricity, resume trash collection and make sure emergency services are able to handle the workload confronting them. Announce which infrastructure projects will be undertaken first and establish timelines for completion. And by all means, make these commitments credible and realistic. Revelations of sloppy work or promises made in haste only to be reneged upon do immense damage to rebuilding.

…

Unfortunately, the scale of major disasters leads many people to conclude that only governments have the resources to deal with the aftermath. This could not be further from the truth. What makes sustainable rebound possible is the rebuilding of communities and the organizations that support them: businesses, civic groups, religious communities and nonprofits. Governments that can’t even write checks to those whose homes were destroyed can’t be trusted to re-establish day-care centers, religious services or grocery stores.

I agree wholeheartedly with some of this – certainly people should get their aid money faster, without having to jump through dozens of bureaucratic hoops. Government can only do so much, and politicians and agency heads overpromise. But the notion that most ambitious government recovery efforts a) cannot work, and b) are inimical to the restoration of civil society, doesn’t make sense. Obviously, the failure of government recovery programs can result in a kind of secondary disaster. But the lesson of New Orleans is essentially a lesson of failed leadership, not generic government dysfunction. The solution to this is not to throw up our hands and pull back, but better leadership and programs that actually work.

This notion that we can return to an early 20th-century model of disaster recovery, in which the government builds roads and private organizations focus on the community, is appealing but fundamentally unrealistic.

The federal government’s increasing involvement in disaster relief over the past 50 years wasn’t just random, or the result of Great Society overreaching or the efforts of pork-crazed politicians. It came about because there was a need for it. Urban-suburban footprints became ever bigger and more complex, and infrastructure and development themselves increasingly influenced both the shape and scale of disasters.

That is, a 21st-century catastrophe is not something that “just happens” to a place. There is a real, and ever-growing, element of blowback from decades or centuries of decisions on where stuff was built and how. New Orleans, for example, is sinking because of the long-ago leveeing of the Mississippi; many neighborhoods were built far below sea level in a filled swamp when nobody thought much about hurricane floods, et al. The current Midwest floods are part of the same man-made phenomenon.

This means we need to be more intelligent in how we rebuild, and view this system as a whole – how development and nature influence one another. Private entities trying to maximize their short-term interests are just not well-equipped to recognize these problems or respond to them by retrenching after a disaster. Not that government agencies are much better – they’re not. But they at least theoretically represent the broader interests that can take this into account and devise policies to address these problems. Just watch – as disasters get bigger and more complicated, the role of government in disaster recovery and urban planning will have to grow. Let’s try to actually improve it as well.

 

June 11, 2008

Megaquakes

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Joel Achenbach tells us just how much we don’t know about earthquakes:

Many scientists were caught by surprise by the magnitude of the China earthquake, estimated at 7.9 by U.S. scientists. Sichuan province has a history of earthquakes, but none so devastating. It was not near the top of anyone’s list of the most likely locations for a great quake. The data from satellites, which can track the motion of vast plates of the Earth’s crust, suggested a relatively moderate amount of strain building up in the rugged mountain front along the edge of the Sichuan basin.

“The lesson that one gets from this Sichuan earthquake is that we don’t yet fully understand where all the hazard is,” said Eric Kirby, a Penn State geologist who has extensively studied faults in that part of China. “We knew this was an active mountain belt, but we didn’t quite realize what it was capable of.”
…
[USGS geophysicist Kenneth] Hudnut and his colleagues say they believe, based on preliminary data, that at least three different faults ruptured in succession. Rarely has such a cascading event been documented.

“Now that we see the cascading behavior, we get even more nervous. We see the potential here” in the Los Angeles area “for an earthquake that’s larger than what we thought it was capable of. We could get our comeuppance from Mother Nature any day here,” Hudnut said.

James Dolan, a University of Southern California geologist, has put together a map that shows faults in the Los Angeles area butting up against one another like passengers on a subway at rush hour. “Some of these faults could link up in ways we had never anticipated, which could lead to larger events,” Dolan said.

There is, as always, far more going on in nature than we give it credit for, while urbanization and development in America and elsewhere in the world are predicated on nature being relatively stable and quiescent. There hasn’t been a major earthquake in the center of a large U.S. city in a century. In that time, urban areas have become vastly larger and more built up, and the systems that make them run several orders of magnitude more complex. In other words, the true level of exposure/vulnerability here is quite high and continuing to rise, yet not meaningfully factored into our society’s decision-making. Add to this the potential for the kind of mega-quake the Post article mentions, and you have a potential outcome we really ought to work harder on mitigating with whatever limited tools are at our disposal.

Update: More here.

 

May 14, 2008

More on Burma

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I have a piece up on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site on the problems of intervening in Burma. If I may quote myself:

Lamentably, the international community has few options when the rulers of a xenophobic police state decide to shut it out. Some food and supplies can be airdropped into targeted areas, but the risks would be high and the benefits limited. To have an impact on a disaster of this scale, you need organised supply chains, with people on the ground – lots of them – to distribute food, provide medical care and supplies, to clean up and rebuild. And they need to operate in safety. In other words, the cooperation of local authorities is necessary.

 

May 12, 2008

China’s turn at disaster response

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James Fallows has been watching Chinese TV news cover the Chengdu earthquake:

- The coverage included a long segment of premier Wen Jiabao reading a speech about his deep concern for the people of Sichuan, from aboard an airplane en route to the disaster scene. Background: after the country was paralyzed by unexpected snow storms in February, the leadership was criticized for a Katrina-like slowness in dealing with the problem. Prominent coverage now of the main officials responding immediately to this disaster.

He compares this to TV from Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Germany and finds it lacking in visuals and detail. But it does show that Chinese leaders do have to respond, and look like they are responding to, disasters for the sake of their own domestic standing first and foremost. Not necessarily because they care about people’s welfare, but because the system is open enough to create political problems if they fumble. One can assume that the constituency here is the growing middle and entrepreneurial classes, which are plugged into the media, strongly nationalistic, and have a lot to lose in a major disaster.

Earlier, Fallows noted the Burmese leaders’ failure to respond to the cyclone:

My wife and I have been to Burma several times over the last twenty years. The first time was in the summer of 1988, around the time of the August 8 uprising and subsequent bloody repression of monks and students. The most recent was a little more than a year ago, a few days before another bloody round of repression. Like almost everyone who has been in the country, we have viewed its regime as a peculiarly pre-modern and backward form of evil. It does not seems capable of thoroughly-organized evil and repression, as in the old Soviet system. Rather it displays a benighted, superstitious, and almost unthinking indifference to whether its people suffer and die.

A minor illustration would be the decision that effectively bankrupted many Burmese people and helped bring on riots 20 years ago. This was the out of the blue decree that most denominations of Burmese currency, except those in “lucky” denominations like 45 and 90 kyat, would be valueless. The major illustration is of course its refusal to allow relief workers from around the world to spare tens of thousands of Burmese people disease and likely death in the wake of the cyclone.

The sheer weirdness here does not lend much hope for disaster victims, nor for any end to the regime other than through violence.

 

May 9, 2008

Burmese barriers

Posted by johnmcquaid under natural disasters, science | Tags: , , |
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Can you “disappear” a huge natural disaster with the whole world watching? This is the experiment that the government of Burma now seems to be conducting. The generals evidently have two purposes in keeping the country virtually locked down – preventing the population from being exposed to direct contact with foreign aid workers, and keeping the world from hearing too much about its own criminal non-response to the horrible aftermath of Cyclone Nargis. (The latest: Burma seized the first aid shipments, but more are on the way.)

Totalitarian states disappear things as matter of course – people, crimes, and history itself. No one knows how many died in the North Korean famine of the 1990s, though some estimates put the figure as high as 3 million. It’s hard to contemplate the horror of such events precisely because so much suffering and death occurred out of sight of the world, of history.

The combination of famine with brutal government oppression a la Kim Jong Il or Stalin, however, is a slow-moving, manmade catastrophe, easier to shield from outside eyes. A natural disaster creates a sense of global urgency. Even China in the last days of the Cultural Revolution managed to mobilize itself to respond to the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which killed at least 250,000 people (though it refused outside aid, and Qiang Qing put things in perspective by saying, “There were merely several hundred thousand deaths. So what? Denouncing Deng Xiaoping concerns 800 million people.”)

The networked world makes it much harder to keep the lid on. Satellites see all. Giant natural disasters are prime material for 24-hour news operations. The constant gush of information ratchets up political pressure on nations and international organizations to act, and to strong-arm recalcitrant governments to do more. Journalists with satellite phones will sneak across borders. It’s not clear this will help get more aid to millions of cyclone victims, but it can’t hurt, and may make other autocrats think twice about how they respond to future disasters.

Photo: Desolate … a woman sits in front of her destroyed home in Bogalay, south-west of Rangoon. Whole streets have been destroyed in the city and water and food are scarce. (Reuters)

 

May 7, 2008

Heckuva job, Than Shwe

Posted by johnmcquaid under natural disasters, science, Uncategorized | Tags: , , |
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One additional thought on the Burma post below. I hadn’t seen much detail on conditions in Rangoon, which was directly in the path of the cyclone. Turns out things are quite bad there:

Residents of Rangoon, Burma’s largest city, faced the prospect Wednesday of weeks without electricity, a worsening drinking water shortage and spiraling food prices, even as authorities slowly began the massive task of cleaning up and repairing the city’s shattered infrastructure.

It also looks like the Burmese junta has a “Brownie” problem:

State-controlled newspapers have appealed for patience and public understanding of the difficulties now confronting the authorities. But among middle-class residents of the colonial-era former capital, anger at the Burmese military is growing. It has been perceived as slow to respond to the catastrophe, leaving citizens to fend for themselves.

“In the past, if one person came out holding a poster for a protest, dozens and dozens of soldiers and police came out in five minutes,” Ludu Sein Win, a prominent retired journalist, said in a telephone interview. “But now nobody can help us. They say we have to do everything by ourselves.”

“We have no electricity, no water,” he added. “A very big tree fell on the roof of my house, but when I told the municipal authorities, they told us we must clear it ourselves.”

When governments fail to respond to disasters because they are overwhelmed or indifferent, it sows political instability. This is another lesson in the rising risks of storms as we plunge into the 21st century. “Urban” storms will mean more infrastructure damage and a more severe economic toll. They also affect middle-class populations, and there’s no greater engine of political change worldwide than a pissed off middle class. Even (or especially) in Burma.

 

May 7, 2008

Catastrophe in Burma

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Human settlement is always intruding on nature, and sometimes nature intrudes right back. This week’s Burma cyclone disaster is one of the worst examples of that phenomenon in recent memory. Just look at this Washington Post map of Cyclone Nargis’s path across the Irrawaddy delta:

The storm’s eye made a beeline across the delta region, its counterclockwise winds driving storm surge tides up 13 feet. A delta, of course, is flat and wet. The sea basically rolls inland, swamping everything for miles – in this case, small fishing and rice farming communities with no flood control infrastructure at all.

This disaster is immeasurably compounded by the awfulness of the political situation – the secretive, kleptocratic Burmese regime doesn’t give a damn about such things (or, only inasmuch as they might lead to political instability). I don’t know if having Laura Bush blast the Burmese generals is productive at this point, when the most important thing is logistics. Chris Mooney has an interesting take on the cyclone here.

What worries me, though, is that as the world changes, the frequency and the character of these mega-catastrophes also changes – for the worse.

Obviously, the character of a natural disaster varies depending on where it takes place: urban or rural, the developed or underdeveloped worlds. In the United States and the developed worlds, almost all hurricane strikes are to some degree urban or suburban – the American landscape of homes, apartments, box stores, government buildings – and the population is protected by some kind of infrastructure along with evacuation policies and post-disaster aid. That minimizes loss of life but creates a moral hazard situation where we just keep rebuilding without ever reflecting on whether it’s wise to be there in the first place.

In the developing world, meanwhile, hurricane strikes are more rural – there’s considerably less infrastructure, but lots of people. So many more die. And since there wasn’t much stuff to begin with, it’s easy to rebuild. And so the same pattern repeats.

As time goes by, though, these two distinct scenarios may converge into something even more horrific. It’s the century of the megalopolis, after all. More developing countries will have populations concentrated in vulnerable, built-up areas. In rural areas, environmental degradation will reduce natural resilience to storms. There will be more people and more infrastructure, the oceans will be rising, and the pace of development will far exceed the capacity of governments to anticipate disaster. Katrina was a kind of hybrid, an urban-developed world-underdeveloped world disaster, and it may also be a model for what’s to come around the world.

 

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