Religion journalists, including Alan Cooperman at the WaPo are busy reporting on Katrina-evoked religious attitudes. Is Katrina, many ask, a result of God’s wrath because of a particular sin? (Environmentalists and liberal theologians will, at this point, pick one set of sins. Religious and political conservatives another.) Theologians call this debate Theodicy Bloggers will have much to say about it.
Debate away, the question does not interest me. Better heads than mine may reach an answer. Even if they could establish that God’s punishment were to environmental or moral shortcomings, these are almost all sins of commission.
Given my interest in workplace spirituality and personal growth, I am more interested in the sins of omission – actions that might have prevented, or alleviated the flooding of New Orleans and the subsequent casualties.
Institutions, just like people, are able to deny unpleasant realities for a long period of time. In the case of Katrina, the situation is even more complex because interlocking institutions at the local, state, and federal level are all involved.
People tend to get into messes one day at a time. The day is usually tomorrow, as in “I’ll start that diet, quit smoking, clean up that mess, (you fill in the next one), tomorrow.” We, like New Orleans, recover one day at a time – and that day is today. This is human trait as old as Aesops fables. In this case, the problem wasn’t so much one of denial as of procrastination. Louisiana knew that it would have a problem and had taken some measures to deal with it. They just ran out of time.
In July, 2004 FEMA ran a table top exercise along with state and local officials. The exercise is what we used to call a “reasonable worst case scenario”. When we were doing threat analysis we figured that the worst case would be so expensive that we could not possibly afford to meet it.) FEMA assumed a direct hit on New Orleans by a Category Three Hurricane. They further assumed that the levee’s would be topped.
Participants drew up action plans for dealing with the storm's aftermath in which calls for evacuation were partially heeded, water pumps were overwhelmed, corpses floated in the streets and as many as 60,000 people died -- mostly by drowning.If the current estimates of 10,000 deaths are correct, Louisiana and Mississippi may have done better than everyone now believes.
Still, the preparedness was glaringly inadequate. Even if authorities had been thoroughly prepared and responded promptly, we still need to ask: what were the conditions that led people in the public and private sector to ignore – actually deny – that a disaster was coming.
Ellen Ruppel Shell, writing in this morning’s’ Washington Post, gives us a clue:
A study done at the University of Colorado at Boulder a few years ago found that in a presidential election year, there are twice as many federally declared disasters than in other years. Americans love heroes, and there is nothing more appealing to politicians, including presidents, than comforting victims of national disasters with promises of resources and money. But these dollars are rarely earmarked for mitigation measures, such as bolstering coastal flood plains and wetlands around New Orleans to provide some degree of natural defense. Nor do these efforts often lead to a spurt of regulations to help prevent the damage from occurring again. This is not due to a lack of understanding -- government officials know full well that humans were not meant to build on flood plains. They also know that overdevelopment creates huge swaths of impermeable surfaces like roads and parking lots, giving water no place to go, and making even moderate flooding more dangerous. But when faced with a developer who might contribute to the community's tax base, these same officials rarely have the strength to insist on sensible measures.
Shell also points out
The Midwestern flood of 1993 broke flow records along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, causing an estimated $12 billion to $16 billion in damages. The havoc wrought by this disaster sparked a new emphasis on flood-damage prevention, including widely publicized government buyouts of flood plain properties. But these buyouts were soon eclipsed by new construction on flood plains, many of them centered in the St. Louis metropolitan region, with an estimated $2.2 billion spent on new development on the very land that had sunk below the waterline in 1993.
Based on this argument, we are not building in wetlands and flood prone areas out of a desire to exploit the environment; we are doing it as a result of federal tax and spending policies.
There’s more. NYT columunist John Tierney contrasts fire insurance with flood insurance. Fire insurance is private. Insurance companies work to reduce the risk, educating customers, charging higher rates for risky ventures and refusing to insure extremely high risk. They cannot assume that the politicians will use public money to bail out their clients, as was the case with the 1993 floods.
This, in an abstract sense, is also a sin of omission: failure to adopt policies that force builders and public officials to be responsible for their own risks.
Here is the tough part: Ask yourself what will happen if you agree with this. If you are a politician and try to change our tax and federal spending policies so that anyone who builds in a flood prone area or in a way that worsens future floods, you will run into opposition from both sides. The left will accuse you of heartlessly refusing to help victims of Katrina. Developers will cut off your campaign funds.
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