Friday, September 02, 2005

An unnatural disaster

From a free column in the WSJ, by Sharon Begley:
More than one million acres of Louisiana's coastal wetlands, or 1,900 square miles, have been lost since 1930, due to development and the construction of levees and canals. Barrier islands and stands of tupelo and cypress also vanished. All of them absorb some of the energy and water from storm surges, which, more than the rain falling from the sky, caused the current calamity. "If these had been in place, at least some of the energy in the storm surge would have been dissipated," says geologist Jeffrey Mount of the University of California, Davis. "This is a self-inflicted wound."
And tonight on NOW, a re-broadcast of a program from 2002 about the disappearance of the delta.
The Mississippi River delta is disappearing. One of America's most vibrant and productive ecological regions is slipping into the Gulf of Mexico at an alarming rate. [...] Some of this loss can be blamed on the levee system, which has channelled water and sediment into the Gulf of Mexico instead of depositing them on the coastal wetlands.
Other topics:

A primer on the Incident Command System.

From the discussion on the NewsHour tonight.
DAVID BROOKS: I think it is a huge reaction we are about to see. I mean, first of all, they violated the social fabric, which is in the moments of crisis you take care of the poor first. That didn't happen; it's like leaving wounded on the battlefield.

So there is just -- in 9/11 you had a great surge of public confidence. Now I think we are going to see a great decline in public confidence in our institutions. And so I just think this is sort of the anti-9/11 as one of the bloggers wrote. [...]

TOM OLIPHANT: I would say the fault lines are much deeper than that. I mean, on the one hand there is no question that we can see now with our own eyes the two Americas of which John Edwards began speaking a year and a half ago.

But deeper than that, I think, is the anger that is going to come from the realization that virtually all public policy -- state, local, federal, where this area is concerned, has been against the public interests for decades. And the realization that government is one of the reasons we have government has been violated by virtually everything government has done for decades.

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