[Mb-civic] Catastrophe - Editorial - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Catastrophe

The Boston Globe - September 1, 2005

JUST AS Californians have always feared ''the big one" in a devastating 
earthquake, residents of New Orleans have always known that they were 
vulnerable to a hurricane that would overwhelm the city's levees and 
flood its streets. At first it looked as though Hurricane Katrina had 
passed enough to the east to leave the city's levees intact, but the 
Category 4 storm was so immense that even its glancing blow broke 
through the city's defenses. ''The big one" has hit.

It is a natural disaster -- perhaps the greatest in US history -- and a 
national disaster, calling forth a national response. All the relevant 
federal agencies, from the Coast Guard to the Centers for Disease 
Control and Prevention, have been mobilized to send staff and equipment 
to the city and other affected areas. Texas is opening up Houston's 
Astrodome to provide shelter to New Orleans residents who had sought 
refuge in the Superdome, which itself became flooded. Other states have 
made hospital beds available. Soon there will be more than enough 
accounts of Samaritans to balance the looters.

But even before engineers repair the damaged levees and begin the long 
process of pumping New Orleans out, the city's residents deserve to know 
whether human actions or inactions bear a share of responsibility for 
this catastrophe. There is strong evidence that they do and that the 
entire Gulf area will be at risk of future Katrinas if policies and 
priorities are not changed.

Wetlands are the water storage protection that nature itself offers 
against massive flooding. But in the past 70 years, coastal Louisiana 
alone has lost 1,900 square miles of wetlands, an area larger than Rhode 
Island. The disastrous upper Mississippi River flooding of 1993 
demonstrated how little protection levees can provide when wetlands are 
allowed to be developed or turned into cropland.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/editorials/articles/2005/09/01/catastrophe/
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