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Second Guessing Katrina

September 3, 2005 10:01 AM

Katrina was a hurricane, but the damage in New Orleans was from the flood when the levees were breached. The city is below sea level and there is no place for the flood to drain. The power was shut down to the pumps. So, it will be a long time before the water is pumped back into the sea.

Floods are harder than most natural disasters to deal with because there is little access to the flooded areas.

These factors would have made a pre-positioning of troops counterproductive, in spite of what the "pundits" are now telling us about the lack of response. The pre-positioned troops and their equipment would have been flooded too had they been in the city. Unlike the Tsunami where the waters swept back out to sea, there is no place for the water to go until the pumps come back up and the levees are sealed.

It is an enormous challenge, but the pace of the response is too slow and uncoordinated. It is how government bureacracies and divided responsibilities among city, state and federal agencies operate. We can't depend on them to protect us. The pace and nature of the response is typical of centralized, monolithic agencies. It would be far better to delegate local areas to local agents who can plan their responses to contingencies and have the resources required to implement them. This could be done by bringing quick response private contractors into the process and assigning them to sectors, infrastructure or medical tasks. Local knowledge and resources are responsive to local information. Higher levels pools of resources can be created for these local responses to draw from. And then there can be regional pools for deeper needs. It must be hierarchical, the best known structure for dealing with complexity.

As for the Army Corps of Engineers, we would do best to disband this legacy of early Progressive politics. I wrote a book on this agency and the management of our waterways some time ago; they build canals where they ought not to and canalize rivers and waterways so that they do not bleed off their energy. The result is they gain height as they fill and pick up enormous speed and force. Then, when they do go over the levees they are devastating.

You never have flood protection, all you can do is to mitigate smaller ones and then bear the awful ones that result from the mythical storm of the century. And the damage is increased because more buildings are put in harm's way on the false premise that they are protected.

· Uncertainty

Comments

Posted by: Flower Online [TypeKey Profile Page] at September 27, 2006 8:35 AM

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