News & Views item - September 2005

 

 

Academic Experts Say They Were All Too Aware of the Devastation That Would Claim New Orleans. (September 7, 2005)

     news@nature.com has published a report by Tony Reichhardt, Erika Check & Emma Marris under the header After the flood -- Academic experts say they were all too aware of the devastation that would claim New Orleans and its surroundings in the wake of a fierce hurricane. Could they have done any more to convince politicians of the need to protect the city?

 

And they then cut right to the chase:

Nothing about last week's hurricane and the subsequent flooding of New Orleans should have come as a surprise. Experts knew such a storm would come at some point. They knew the coast's natural defences were degraded; they knew the levees were not designed for anything stronger than a category-3 storm; and they knew that a significant proportion of the population - the poorest and weakest - would not evacuate.

So what went wrong between the analyses by the boffins and the politicians and administrators charged with preparing to assuage the destructive power of the inevitable?

 

The consequences of a large hurricane striking New Orleans have been predicted for years, precisely because of the risk of flooding. Just under a year ago (September 23) Nature reported "Hurricane Ivan highlights future risk for New Orleans. Wetland restoration could prevent disastrous flooding... a disaster was only narrowly avoided. Hurricane Ivan missed the deeply vulnerable city of New Orleans by a tiny margin. In the face of future such storms, they are calling for action to restore the area's wetlands, to act as a barrier against flooding.

    "The Louisiana city was directly in Ivan's path on 14 September, when the storm was classed as 'Category 5' with winds upward of 240 kilometres per hour. Almost a million people were evacuated. But Ivan's centre came ashore more than 160 kilometres east of New Orleans on 16 September, and no major flooding was reported in the city."

 

Seven years ago state officials promulgated a report, Coast 2050, calling for restoration of the sandy barrier islands and marshy bayous that used to protect the Louisiana coast. However, the full cost of the project is estimated as $14 billion.  Louisiana has received a tiny fraction of the request.
 

Nature also reports, "A project looking at upgrading the system [of levees and floodwalls] is in the works, but after five years it is still in the pre-study phase. To be ready for Katrina, 'we would have had to start working on category-5 twenty years ago', says Alfred Naomi, a senior project manager for the Army Corps of Engineers, which maintains the levee system.

 

But the Advanced Circulation Model (ACM) that is used by Louisiana State University (LSU) in Baton Rouge and the Army Corps of Engineers and has become increasingly accurate at predicting storm surges predicted "days ahead of the [Katrina's] arrival" through computer simulations the expected surge and showed that water would probably overflow levees, flooding the city, which lies below sea level. Unfortunately those who have developed and used the ACM have had little success in getting in getting those responsible for the public's wellbeing to act.

 

Ivor van Heerden, director of LSU's Center for the Study of the Public Health Impacts of Hurricanes said simply, "Academia tends to be discounted, but we called this 100% right."

 

New Orleans' mayor, Ray Nagin, did not issue a mandatory evacuation order until the day before the hurricane hit and while an "estimated 80% of the city's 470,000 residents evacuated using extra highway lanes that had been opened for the emergency - one of the few parts of the disaster plan that worked well... that still left roughly 100,000 people in the city."

 

Just last year LSU sociologists Jeanne Hurlbert and John Beggs based on analysis of survey data suggested that 21% of the population would stay in their homes during a hurricane, and that 32% would remain in the area. People in poor health were especially likely to stay, as were those suffering from depression, disabilities and other life stresses.

 

Ilan Kelman, an expert on disasters at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado says bluntly there should have been strategies in place to ensure that the most vulnerable populations were evacuated. Public officials should be "entirely proactive"and not rely on news reports to convey information.

 

David Ozonoff, an environmental epidemiologist at Boston University in Massachusetts, is just as forthright, "This should have been anticipated. People moving is not an unknown and unsolved problem. It can be very difficult, but if you've thought it out ahead of time you should be prepared," and he joins a host of commentators in concluding that "after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 a shift in federal priorities crippled the US public-health and disaster-response agencies. The US Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] was taken under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, which is supposed to coordinate local and national responses to all kinds of disasters." According to New York Times columnists Paul Krugman and Moreen Dowd, no friends of the Bush administration to be sure, the result has been catastrophic with regard to the functionality of FEMA.

 

But Nature also reports that there is also the opinion that:

scientists should take part of the responsibility. "Folks have talked about this scenario for decades, yet I've watched George Bush senior and Bill Clinton both comment that no one could have anticipated this sort of event," says Roger Pielke, director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "That raises some real questions for the academic and scholarly community. What does it mean if scholars are aware of something with practical importance, but it doesn't get to the people who can take action?"

Of course that still begs the question of just how hard do you have to rattle the cage before you get active attention and just what is required to get elected officials to consider a matter to have importance.

 

A frustrated Nedra Korevec, from LSU who has studied the scenario of a category-4 storm striking New Orleans told Nature, "We do the research and we try to make things happen, but then we have to hand the ball to delegations and lobbyists."

 


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