{"id":73074,"date":"2021-09-14T14:54:20","date_gmt":"2021-09-14T14:54:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chinadialogue.net\/?post_type=opinion&#038;p=73074"},"modified":"2024-04-12T15:13:45","modified_gmt":"2024-04-12T15:13:45","slug":"why-did-ida-cause-so-much-less-damage-than-katrina","status":"publish","type":"opinion","link":"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/climate\/why-did-ida-cause-so-much-less-damage-than-katrina\/","title":{"rendered":"Why did Ida cause so much less damage than Katrina?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The most significant&nbsp;images from Hurricane Ida\u2019s devastating landfall on the Gulf Coast, in the extreme south of the United States, are the ones we did not see: no refugees huddled in the Superdome, no shots of block after block of New Orleans under water, no miles of overtopped and crumbling levees.&nbsp;As the table below suggests, Ida, which hit New Orleans more directly than Katrina did in 2005&nbsp;\u2013 and mustered greater and more concentrated destructive power \u2013&nbsp;wreaked only a fraction of the loss of life and property damages.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe src=\"https:\/\/flo.uri.sh\/visualisation\/7212543\/embed\" title=\"Interactive or visual content\" class=\"flourish-embed-iframe\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" style=\"width:100%;height:300px;\" sandbox=\"allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-scripts allow-downloads allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation\"><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<p>Why is this so significant?&nbsp;Because the biggest reason that, as the mayor of New Orleans said, \u201cWe didn\u2019t have a second Katrina,\u201d had nothing to do with Ida\u2019s relative strength.&nbsp;It had to do with US$14.5 billion in federal investment in disaster prevention, mostly&nbsp;spent raising, strengthening and hardening the levees, surge barriers and pumping systems that protect New Orleans. These investments saved the city.<br><br>The lesson here is clear enough: Prevention works.&nbsp;Investment pays off.&nbsp;We do not need to wait for \u201cstuff to happen\u201d and then clean up the bodies.&nbsp;A focused and competent federal government, getting ready for disasters that haven\u2019t yet happened, is an absolute key to the safety of millions and millions of Americans.&nbsp;FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) alone spent $76 billion on Katrina disaster relief in Louisiana, most of that&nbsp;in New Orleans. So, the $14.5 billion spent on prevention has already, at the most conservative estimate, been repaid several times over&nbsp;to the Treasury&nbsp;and the taxpayers.&nbsp;<br><br>But the strengthened and hardened dike ring around New Orleans almost didn\u2019t happen. Many Republicans&nbsp;resisted these investment and improvements,&nbsp;citing the impact on the federal deficit and taxes. Then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert initially&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/mailchimp.us4.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=d0dc59a49209de51d4f6f4999&amp;id=1740013777&amp;e=aff3004152\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">said the city<\/a>&nbsp;should be bulldozed and abandoned. Congress at first refused to apply normal loan forgiveness policies to FEMA loans after Katrina.&nbsp;Eventually a well-organised Louisiana delegation was able to obtain recovery assistance \u2013&nbsp;and it paid off big time.&nbsp;<br><br>Ida has shown us one thing \u2013 appropriate&nbsp;investment&nbsp;in disaster prevention means a smaller, not&nbsp;larger,&nbsp;deficit and&nbsp;tax burden.&nbsp;<br><br>Along with investing in the future, we need to behave more prudently today.&nbsp;Again, government is the&nbsp;key to making that happen. Those parishes in Louisiana whose levee hardening had not yet been completed suffered the same kind of disastrous impact that Katrina left behind.&nbsp;Further to the north, we saw in Tennessee two weeks earlier&nbsp;how a meteorologically local event can&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.weather.gov\/lix\/katrina_anniversary\">devastate<\/a>&nbsp;communities&nbsp;\u2013&nbsp;particularly in counties that have refused to&nbsp;prepare themselves in recent years, continued to allow the construction of buildings with no safety or construction codes at all, and chose not to participate in the federal Flood Plain Insurance Program. (Neighbouring Nashville, after earlier floods, adopted building codes designed to protect residents in a flood. It\u2019s much better prepared&nbsp;than it used to be.)&nbsp;<br><br>These lessons ought to become the centre of the congressional debate on both of the Biden administration\u2019s pending infrastructure bills.&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/mailchimp.us4.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=d0dc59a49209de51d4f6f4999&amp;id=9c7b742631&amp;e=aff3004152\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">As I wrote recently,<\/a> these bills are being misleadingly treated as one-time fixes, when&nbsp;the reality is that they should represent a new normal, in which the US, like other industrial nations, regularly&nbsp;invests&nbsp;in making the nation\u2019s infrastructure secure in the face of increasingly likely extreme weather events. We should maintain our roads, power systems, water supplies, broadband and other infrastructure at above average levels, not at a D-minus.&nbsp;<br><br>As for the argument that either budgetary concerns or a desire for lower taxes&nbsp;warrants clinging to our \u201cjust let stuff happen\u201d attitude about the future, it should no longer get even momentary traction.&nbsp;It&nbsp;is just not a serious response to the obvious challenges before us.&nbsp;Ida showed us that a&nbsp;safer future is fiscally responsible and tax-positive \u2013 and, far more important,&nbsp;will&nbsp;save&nbsp;enormous numbers of lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>A version of this article was first published in <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/mailchimp.us4.list-manage.com\/track\/click?u=d0dc59a49209de51d4f6f4999&amp;id=edfbd72e9e&amp;e=aff3004152\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\"><em>Salon.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The government had done its job by investing billions in levees and other infrastructure to protect New Orleans<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":73130,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","categories":[761],"tags":[519,20000192,543],"country":[50040700],"class_list":["post-73074","opinion","type-opinion","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-climate","tag-climate-impacts","tag-disasters","tag-extreme-weather","country-united-states-of-america"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.0 (Yoast SEO v26.0) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Why did Ida cause so much less damage than Katrina?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The government had done its job by investing billions in levees and other infrastructure to protect New Orleans\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/climate\/why-did-ida-cause-so-much-less-damage-than-katrina\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why did Ida cause so much less damage than Katrina?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The government had done its job by investing billions in levees and other infrastructure to protect New Orleans\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/climate\/why-did-ida-cause-so-much-less-damage-than-katrina\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Dialogue Earth\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2024-04-12T15:13:45+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/floodgates-New-Orleans_2EKJPHC.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"2100\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1400\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/climate\/why-did-ida-cause-so-much-less-damage-than-katrina\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/climate\/why-did-ida-cause-so-much-less-damage-than-katrina\/\",\"name\":\"Why did Ida cause so much less damage than Katrina?\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/climate\/why-did-ida-cause-so-much-less-damage-than-katrina\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/climate\/why-did-ida-cause-so-much-less-damage-than-katrina\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/floodgates-New-Orleans_2EKJPHC.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2021-09-14T14:54:20+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2024-04-12T15:13:45+00:00\",\"description\":\"The government had done its job by investing billions in levees and other infrastructure to protect New Orleans\",\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/climate\/why-did-ida-cause-so-much-less-damage-than-katrina\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/climate\/why-did-ida-cause-so-much-less-damage-than-katrina\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"inLanguage\":\"en\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/en\/climate\/why-did-ida-cause-so-much-less-damage-than-katrina\/#primaryimage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/floodgates-New-Orleans_2EKJPHC.jpg\",\"contentUrl\":\"https:\/\/dialogue.earth\/content\/uploads\/2021\/09\/floodgates-New-Orleans_2EKJPHC.jpg\",\"width\":2100,\"height\":1400,\"caption\":\"2EKJPHC Sep 14, 2020; New Orleans, LA, USA; Floodgate 5 at Lakeshore Drive by Lake Pontchartrain was one of many floodgates closed Monday by the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority as New Orleans begins to feel the effects of Hurricane Sally. on Monday, September 14, 2020. 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