In the midst of troubled economic times is never the best time to ask your neighbor to open their pocketbook and their heart to help you out, yet that is what New Orleans and the metro area is asking from the nation. 
Several massive, federally-funded hurricane-protection projects are kicking off and it is interesting watching the nation react to the high price that it will take to protect New Orleans – especially if they might not work.
Spending billions of dollars on flood protection becomes an even harder sell when those in charge of protecting New Orleans say that they can’t do it, as a story that first appeared in The Guardian about how the Army Corps of Engineers could not protect New Orleans reinvigorated the debate.
“If you ask can I protect the city, the answer is no,” said Gen. Robert Van Antwerp of the Army Corps of Engineers, who heads up the city’s defense. “Can I reduce the risk? Yes.”
The Paralysis of Fear
Comparing the price tags of funding billion-dollar military projects to that of relieving the threat to New Orleans-area, Franklin C. Spinney writes in an editorial:
“The most immediate threat to New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta is the clear and present dangers posed by man's efforts to tame the Mississippi River by controlling and canalizing its route, together with the ecological damage to the freshwater marshlands wrought by the canal and pipeline systems that now move 35 percent of our natural gas and oil through the Delta. To be sure, recent rises in the sea level exacerbate the problem, but they are not the proximate cause of the catastrophe.”
Spinney puts the price tag of fixing the problem, using Corps estimates, at $200 billion, which he says, “the Corps' underestimate for ‘fixing’ the Delta is less than the current underestimate of the $298 billion it will cost to procure the planned fleet of Joint Strike Fighters over the next 25 to 30 years, a kludge of an airplane plane the Obama Administration just committed to in order to buy off political opposition to its plan to terminate the equally unneeded F-22.”
He argues that while politicians will likely bristle with the sticker shocker at the Corps estimates’, they will have no problem throwing billions to military projects, drawing interesting parallels of addressing environmental issues, massive rebuilding projects like after Hurricane Katrina and huge military spending budgets -- all of which are often full of waste and fraud and makes the public, rightfully so, uneasy, even when rebuilding one of their own cities like New Orleans.
“If we cannot muster the will to tackle the human, ecological, and economic detritus left over from Katrina in some way (perhaps the only choice would be to abandon/move New Orleans and redesign the energy infrastructure), it is patently absurd to imagine our political system will tackle global warming in any substantive way. That is why the grim reality of Katrina, when compared to the intractable political reality MICC (Military Industrial Congressional Complex) and the political fantasy of mustering meaningful action on global warming, becomes a metaphor for the emptiness of contemporary American politics.”
A false sense of security
Post-Katrina, those slivers of land that in the metro area that didn’t flood, those rare places of high ground, became valuable property -- places like Uptown and the West Bank. But in the West Bank’s case it wasn’t because it was high ground, rather blind luck. An Associated Press story in The Dallas Morning News uses the groundbreaking of the West Closure Structure in Harvey as an example, saying that the West Bank regained all of its pre-Katrina population, is an area of growth, but at the same time an area that 70 percent could flood is big storm hit – a scenario that nearly became a reality during Hurricane Gustav.
To combat this doomsday scenario, the Corps, according to AP is spending approximately $1 billion to build the closure structure.
“The new flood protection is already having a potentially dangerous consequence, though: It's encouraging more people to move into another bowl-shaped area that experts consider perhaps the city's most vulnerable flank.”
“Many of those who moved to the area did so under the mistaken impression that it was safer than the East Bank, much of which flooded when levees failed during Katrina. But the fact that the West Bank didn't flood was mainly chance; engineers say the area's 250,000 residents are exposed to a surge from a storm coming in at the wrong angle, in part because of navigation and drainage canals in the area.”
The Weakest Link
One of the weakest links in the defense of the metro area is the northern flank of the city, where water can be pushed from Lake Pontchartrain into the Industrial Canal during a hurricane or storm event. This was exposed to be one of the city’s many Achilles heels during Hurricane Katrina.
But according to an article in The St. Business Journal, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded $154.2 million contract to a St. Louis contracting company, Alberici Constructors Inc, to build a safeguard at the Seabrook Bridge.
“The Seabrook Gate Complex will be a massive concrete and steel structure across the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal in New Orleans, the St. Louis-based contractor said Wednesday,” says the article. The Seabrook project is the second for Alberici, which was awarded, along with another company, a “$300 million contract to raise and strengthen levees and concrete walls along a 5.3-mile stretch of levee along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway.”
Another “bad” list New Orleans tops
While only a footnote, New Orleans reared its ugly head at the top of lists that nobody wants to lead.
In “Unhealthy America,” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff uses some staggering statistics to highlight the health care woes in the United States, in an attempt to deflate the argument made by a plethora of conservative commentators, such as Sean Hannity, that America has the best heath care system in the world.
“The United States ranks 31st in life expectancy (tied with Kuwait and Chile), according to the latest World Health Organization figures. We rank 37th in infant mortality (partly because of many premature births) and 34th in maternal mortality. A child in the United States is two-and-a-half times as likely to die by age 5 as in Singapore or Sweden, and an American woman is 11 times as likely to die in childbirth as a woman in Ireland.”
But the kicker is that an African American in New Orleans, Kristof writes, “has a shorter life expectancy than the average person in Vietnam or Honduras.” Kristof cites this report.
