A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall.

Jack Grant has a good post on priorities today. I left a comment there but wanted to elaborate a bit over here.

As frustration and anger and despair mounts, blame will be meted out with as much focus as a plague of locusts. Stories like this one, in which the most salient portion tells us of the randomness of our lives and the futility of trying to assess blame on a straight-line form of logic:

No one expected that weak spot to be on a canal that, if anything, had received more attention and shoring up than many other spots in the region. It did not have broad berms, but it did have strong concrete walls.

Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said that was particularly surprising because the break was "along a section that was just upgraded."

"It did not have an earthen levee," Dr. Penland said. "It had a vertical concrete wall several feel thick."

Get that? The mere acknowledgment that our efforts are nothing compared to the power of Nature and the whims of Fortuna should really make at least most thinking people to shut up about blame. But it won't because we can't point to Osama bin Laden and God or Nature couldn't care less, so George Bush or Bill Clinton must be held accountable. We need a villain. We can't handle the thought that possibly all of our human striving is folly.

There will be things to do. Governmental reform won't likely be one of them, but Congress should immediately repeal the Highway Bill.

New Orleans will be rebuilt, no matter what Dennis Hastert says.

Dutch engineers should be enlisted to help figure out how to better protect the city. Much of The Netherlands are below sea level, and each year more land in reclaimed from the ocean. The series of dikes that protect the population themselves are a result of tragedy. In the 1950s thousands died in terrible floods.

We will hear that the war in Iraq must be stopped now in order to turn out attention to rebuilding the Gulf Coast. That won't happen, either, but we could use some better, stronger action over there. Enough of the loitering this administration has been doing.

There have been many countries offering help. We should take it. The United States can gain much here by humbly accepting aid and being grateful for the kindness. That gain would be a greater connection with the world. This is no time for stoicism.

The impact on GDP is not likely to be as great as feared by many. It will hurt, and we will see gas prices shoot up and stabilize. (The call for price controls, by the way, needs to be immediately written off). But we will have choices to make. And it is likely that at least some, and if we're lucky not most, of our choices will at some point turn out to have been wrong. We'll deal with that and get over it, hopefully learning something in the process.

That's life.

Comments

[Vavoom]

Finger pointing is senseless. From http://www.nola.com/newslogs/breakingtp/:

Al Naomi, project manager for the east bank Lake Pontchartrain hurricane levee system, said the high water that the strong Category 4 storm pushed into the lake overwhelmed the levee’s design when the lake backed up into the canal.

“They were designed to withstand a surge for a Category 3 or less storm,” Naomi said. “You might have had one or two feet of water pouring away over the top of the wall, cutting away at the earth below it, and as that happened, the walls began to collapse..."

Naomi said the levees failed because they weren’t designed for a hurricane as strong as Katrina.

“This is an extreme event that the system could not handle,” he said. “It was designed for a Category 3 hurricane or less, and it has protected us from those for a while.

“But there’s no way we could have this type of event without some type of failure,” he said. “It’s going to stress the system tremendously and you should not be surprised with failures. When you put the physical properties of the concrete and steel walls built on the canal under this kind of stress, there’s going to be a catastrophe.”

Now, we could spend the entire day arguing, "Why the hell was the levee only designed for a Category 3 hurricane?" Seems like a fruitless endeavour -- people are in desparate need of help. Understanding why the levee broke is critical. We'll build a stronger one later. Helping victims is what's needed now. For every finger that's pointed, a refugee dies.

[Daniel]

Very well said, Vavoom. Thanks.

[Dash]

Great post!