Light On Dark Water

A Few More Hurricane Notes

I haven’t felt much like writing since the hurricane,
and still don’t. I don’t, in fact, feel like doing
very much of anything. I realized a couple of nights before the
storm, as we made merry in a restaurant after a high-school
football game, that the discomforts I kept feeling were the early
symptoms of a cold. That was over two weeks ago, and I
haven’t felt entirely well since. And there’s been
quite a lot of work to do, along with a vague uneasiness that
seems to be some sort of effect of the disaster.

So here, in lieu of anything requiring that I think very hard,
are some additions to the hurricane story:

First, regarding the question of global warming and its role
in this year’s epidemic of hurricanes:
this chart from NOAA
seems to put that question pretty well to rest for the time
being, at least as far as this country is concerned. There is no
correlation between whatever warming has occurred since the 1850s
and either the number or severity of hurricanes striking the U.S.
The possibility remains, of course, that the U.S. is not
representative of the entire planet.

This piece by Quin Hilyer
strikes me as a pretty sound appraisal of the
events surrounding the storm. Hilyer is an editorial writer at
our local newspaper, the Mobile Register. He grew up in
New Orleans and knows (or knew) the Mississippi coast well. He
gets at the agony of knowing that a place one loved is, for all
practical and near-term purposes, gone. He’s also seriously
ticked off at everybody who had anything at all to do with the
government’s response in New Orleans.

If this is not too paradoxical a thing to say, I’m not
sure that all the anger is reasonable, although it’s
certainly understandable. That is, I’m not sure exactly how
much culpability to assign, and to whom. It can’t be denied
that the failure of the levees was a possibility that could have
been foreseen and prevented, and it certainly appears that the
response, after the storm, was bungled in many ways. But I would
like to see a serious and reasonably dispassionate investigation
into both problems.

Regarding the first of them, let’s note that the
widely-cited Times-Picayune story
about the potential damage a big hurricane could do to New
Orleans discussed the levees mainly with regard to the
possibility of their overflowing, not breaking. FactCheck.org,
which seems to be a reasonably even-handed source, confirms that
yes, it’s true that the Bush administration cut funding for
levee work, but that the failure of the levees was not considered
a high probability. As a co-worker said when we were discussing
this the other day, nobody builds for the absolute worst-case
scenario. That’s why your car can move at speeds far
greater than any at which it could protect you from the effects
of a head-on collision.

Regarding the second, well, there seems to be hardly any doubt
that some egregious errors were made, but I’m waiting for a
balanced appraisal before I pass judgment on the entire effort.
In sheer scale, if not in loss of life (at the moment reports on
this count are encouraging), this is one of the worst natural
disasters in the country’s history. But it’s also
been one of the largest rescue efforts, with an enormous number
of relatively happy endings (I mean, how happy can the ending be
if it involves losing everything you own?). This editorial
provides a needed reality check. I don’t think we should be
surprised that things did not go smoothly, but I also
don’t think we should leave it at that. There are worse
things that could happen, and, wherever the blame may lie, we
need to be better prepared to deal with them.

I’m afraid that the political climate is going to
prevent an honest appraisal of what went wrong. My most intense
disdain right now is for those who have leapt upon the crisis to
exploit it for immediate partisan advantage. In that war,
truth is not just a casualty but a primary target.