Resilience Science » New Orleans

Haiti, Disaster Sociology, Elite Panic, and Looting

Garry Peterson — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 05:42:28 +0000

In her book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster writer Rebecca Solnit describes how people responded to disasters – from San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake to the Halifax explosion of 1917 to New York City after 9/11, and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina – by taking care of one another (She’s interviewed on CBC’s the Current here; podcast here). Solnit’s Harper’s article The uses of disaster: notes on bad weather and good government preceeded the book, and outlined some of its themes.

That the victims of disaster have a substantial ability to self-organize to help themselves is one of the recurring themes of disaster sociology, as I mentioned on Resilience Science previously:

A prime example of spontaneous cooperation was the extraordinarily successful evacuation of Lower Manhattan during the September 11 attacks. James M. Kendra, an assistant professor of emergency administration and planning at the University of North Texas, estimates that nearly half a million people fled Manhattan on boats — and he emphasizes that the waterborne evacuation was a self-organized volunteer process that could probably never have been planned on a government official’s clipboard.

Or following the Haitian earthquake a New York Times article Fighting Starvation, Haitians Share Portions writes:

At 59 Impasse Eddy on Monday, three women behind a blue house stirred a pot of beans and rice, flavored with coconut, spices and lime juice.They started cooking for their neighbors the day after the earthquake. On many mornings, they serve 100 people before 10 a.m.

“Everyone pays a small amount, 15 gourd,” or a little less than 50 cents, said Guerline Dorleen, 30, sitting on a small chair near the bubbling pot. “Before, this kind of meal would cost 50.”

Smiling and proud, the women said they did not have the luxury of waiting for aid groups to reach them in their hilly neighborhood. The trouble was, they were running out of food. They used their last bit of rice and beans on Monday.

However, there is a more negative side to the response to disasters in which authorities, fearful of disorder, take a command and control approach that at best stops people from helping themselves and at worst ends up with massacres of civilians. What disaster sociologists, like Lee Clarke call the panic myth (pdf) – that people will run wild in the absence of authority – is the opposite of what is found in disasters, rather there is sometimes “elite panic”, when after a disaster the powerful imagine that the public is a source of danger, and then elites begin protecting property and stop people from acting to help themselves.This reponse was vividly demonstrated in the incompetent and inhumane response to Hurricane Katrina (e.g. The bridge to Gretna and Zeitoun).

Elite panic is amplified by the media. In Tom’s Dispatch, Rebecca Solnit writes about how the media shapes the response to disaster in When the Media Is the Disaster : Covering Haiti:

After years of interviewing survivors of disasters, and reading first-hand accounts and sociological studies from such disasters as the London Blitz and the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, I don’t believe in looting. Two things go on in disasters. The great majority of what happens you could call emergency requisitioning. Someone who could be you, someone in the kind of desperate circumstances I outlined above, takes necessary supplies to sustain human life in the absence of any alternative. Not only would I not call that looting, I wouldn’t even call that theft.

Necessity is a defense for breaking the law in the United States and other countries, though it’s usually applied more to, say, confiscating the car keys of a drunk driver than feeding hungry children. Taking things you don’t need is theft under any circumstances. It is, says the disaster sociologist Enrico Quarantelli, who has been studying the subject for more than half a century, vanishingly rare in most disasters.

Personal gain is the last thing most people are thinking about in the aftermath of a disaster. In that phase, the survivors are almost invariably more altruistic and less attached to their own property, less concerned with the long-term questions of acquisition, status, wealth, and security, than just about anyone not in such situations imagines possible. (The best accounts from Haiti of how people with next to nothing have patiently tried to share the little they have and support those in even worse shape than them only emphasize this disaster reality.) Crime often drops in the wake of a disaster.

The media are another matter. They tend to arrive obsessed with property (and the headlines that assaults on property can make). Media outlets often call everything looting and thereby incite hostility toward the sufferers as well as a hysterical overreaction on the part of the armed authorities. Or sometimes the journalists on the ground do a good job and the editors back in their safe offices cook up the crazy photo captions and the wrongheaded interpretations and emphases.

… The belief that people in disaster (particularly poor and nonwhite people) are cattle or animals or just crazy and untrustworthy regularly justifies spending far too much energy and far too many resources on control — the American military calls it “security” — rather than relief. A British-accented voiceover on CNN calls people sprinting to where supplies are being dumped from a helicopter a “stampede” and adds that this delivery “risks sparking chaos.” The chaos already exists, and you can’t blame it on these people desperate for food and water. Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they’re unworthy and untrustworthy.

… Even more urgently, we need compassion for the sufferers in Haiti and media that tell the truth about them. I’d like to propose alternative captions for those Los Angeles Times photographs as models for all future disasters:

Let’s start with the picture of the policeman hogtying the figure whose face is so anguished: “Ignoring thousands still trapped in rubble, a policeman accosts a sufferer who took evaporated milk. No adequate food distribution exists for Haiti’s starving millions.”

And the guy with the bolt of fabric? “As with every disaster, ordinary people show extraordinary powers of improvisation, and fabrics such as these are being used to make sun shelters around Haiti.”

For the murdered policeman: “Institutional overzealousness about protecting property leads to a gratuitous murder, as often happens in crises. Meanwhile countless people remain trapped beneath crushed buildings.”

And the crowd in the rubble labeled looters? How about: “Resourceful survivors salvage the means of sustaining life from the ruins of their world.”

That one might not be totally accurate, but it’s likely to be more accurate than the existing label. And what is absolutely accurate, in Haiti right now, and on Earth always, is that human life matters more than property, that the survivors of a catastrophe deserve our compassion and our understanding of their plight, and that we live and die by words and ideas, and it matters desperately that we get them right.

Dams limit wetland restoration in Mississippi Delta

Garry Peterson — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 08:56:25 +0000

Cornelia Dean in the New York Times writes Dams Are Thwarting Louisiana Marsh Restoration, Study Says. She describes recent research by Michael Blum and Harry Roberts Drowning of the Mississippi Delta due to insufficient sediment supply and global sea-level rise (doi:10.1038/ngeo553) that estimates that dams have reduced sediment outflows by 50% reducing the potential for New Orleans wetland restoration:

Desperate to halt the erosion of Louisiana’s coast, officials there are talking about breaking Mississippi River levees south of New Orleans to restore the nourishing flow of muddy water into the state’s marshes.

But in a new analysis, scientists at Louisiana State University say inland dams trap so much sediment that the river no longer carries enough to halt marsh loss, especially now that global warming is speeding a rise in sea levels.

As a result, the loss of thousands of additional square miles of marshland is “inevitable,” the scientists report in Monday’s issue of Nature Geoscience.

The finding does not suggest it would be pointless to divert the muddy water into the marshes, one of the researchers, Harry H. Roberts, said in an interview. “Any meaningful restoration of our coast has to involve river sediment,” said Dr. Roberts, a coastal scientist.

But he said officials would have to choose which parts of the landscape could be saved and which must be abandoned, and to acknowledge that lives and businesses would be disrupted. Instead of breaking levees far south of New Orleans, where relatively few people live, Dr. Roberts said, officials should consider diversions much closer to New Orleans, possibly into the LaFourche, Terrebonne or St. Bernard basins.

“It’s going to be an excruciating process to decide where that occurs,” Dr. Roberts said of the levee-breaking.

Sediment carried by the Mississippi built up the marshes of Louisiana over thousands of years, but today inland dams trap at least half of it, Dr. Roberts said. He pointed out that there were 8,000 dams in the drainage basin of the Mississippi.

In their article Blum and Roberts conclude that significant sea level rise is inevitable even if sediment loads are restored, because sea level is now rising at least three times faster than the building of the Mississippi delta.

Kim Stanley Robinson on nature, architecture, and society

Garry Peterson — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 02:52:19 +0000

Geoff Manaugh recently interviewed ecological science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson about ecology, architecture and socieities on BLDGBLOG. Manaugh writes:

Robinson’s books are not only filled with descriptions of landscapes – whole planets, in fact, noted, sensed, and textured down to the chemistry of their soils and the currents in their seas – but they are often about nothing other than vast landscape processes, in the midst of which a few humans stumble along. “Politics,” in these novels, is as much a question of social justice as it is shorthand for learning to live in specific environments.

Robinson responds to a question about the idea that catastrophe can allow new forms of social organization to emerge:

It’s a failure of imagination to think that climate change is going to be an escape from jail – and it’s a failure in a couple of ways.

For one thing, modern civilization, with six billion people on the planet, lives on the tip of a gigantic complex of prosthetic devices – and all those devices have to work. The crash scenario that people think of, in this case, as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed; your ability to feel confident about your own – and your family’s and your children’s – safety would be gone. People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario.

It’s easy to imagine people who are bored in the modern techno-surround, as I call it, and they’re bored because they have not fully comprehended that they’re still primates, that their brains grew over a million-year period doing a certain suite of activities, and those activities are still available. Anyone can do them; they’re simple. They have to do with basic life support and basic social activities unboosted by technological means.

And there’s an addictive side to this. People try to do stupid technological replacements for natural primate actions, but it doesn’t quite give them the buzz that they hoped it would. Even though it looks quite magical, the sense of accomplishment is not there. So they do it again, hoping that the activity, like a drug, will somehow satisfy the urge that it’s supposedly meant to satisfy. But it doesn’t. So they do it more and more – and they fall down a rabbit hole, pursuing a destructive and high carbon-burn activity, when they could just go out for a walk, or plant a garden, or sit down at a table with a friend and drink some coffee and talk for an hour. All of these unboosted, straight-forward primate activities are actually intensely satisfying to the totality of the mind-body that we are.

So a little bit of analysis of what we are as primates – how we got here evolutionarily, and what can satisfy us in this world – would help us to imagine activities that are much lower impact on the planet and much more satisfying to the individual at the same time. In general, I’ve been thinking: let’s rate our technologies for how much they help us as primates, rather than how they can put us further into this dream of being powerful gods who stalk around on a planet that doesn’t really matter to us.

Because a lot of these supposed pleasures are really expensive. You pay with your life. You pay with your health. And they don’t satisfy you anyway! You end up taking various kinds of prescription or non-prescription drugs to compensate for your unhappiness and your unhealthiness – and the whole thing comes out of a kind of spiral: if only you could consume more, you’d be happier. But it isn’t true.

I’m advocating a kind of alteration of our imagined relationship to the planet. I think it’d be more fun – and also more sustainable. We’re always thinking that we’re much more powerful than we are, because we’re boosted by technological powers that exert a really, really high cost on the environment – a cost that isn’t calculated and that isn’t put into the price of things. It’s exteriorized from our fake economy. And it’s very profitable for certain elements in our society for us to continue to wander around in this dream-state and be upset about everything.

The hope that, “Oh, if only civilization were to collapse, then I could be happy” – it’s ridiculous. You can simply walk out your front door and get what you want out of that particular fantasy.

Lessons of Katrina

Garry Peterson — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 05:05:32 +0000

It was roughly two years ago that New Orleans spectactularly failed to cope, technologically and socially, with Hurricane Katrina. Over 1,8oo people died, neighbourhoods and livlihoods were destroyed, and the storm is estimated to have caused over $80 billion in damage.

One of the fundamental principles of successful ecological management is learning from your mistakes, and incorporating those lessons into management practices. Two recent retrospectives, one in Time and the other in Mother Jones, on what has followed the storm indicate not a lot has been learned by the various institutions responsible the ecological management of the Mississippi and the Gulf Coast.

Michael Grunwald, an ecologically literate reporter for the Washington Post, wrote The Threatening Storm in Time (Aug 1 – 2007). He begins his article:

The most important thing to remember about the drowning of New Orleans is that it wasn’t a natural disaster. It was a man-made disaster, created by lousy engineering, misplaced priorities and pork-barrel politics. Katrina was not the Category 5 killer the Big Easy had always feared; it was a Category 3 storm that missed New Orleans, where it was at worst a weak 2. The city’s defenses should have withstood its surges, and if they had we never would have seen the squalor in the Superdome, the desperation on the rooftops, the shocking tableau of the Mardi Gras city underwater for weeks. We never would have heard the comment “Heckuva job, Brownie.” The Federal Emergency Management Agency (fema) was the scapegoat, but the real culprit was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which bungled the levees that formed the city’s man-made defenses and ravaged the wetlands that once formed its natural defenses. Americans were outraged by the government’s response, but they still haven’t come to grips with the government’s responsibility for the catastrophe.

They should. Two years after Katrina, the effort to protect coastal Louisiana from storms and restore its vanishing wetlands has become one of the biggest government extravaganzas since the moon mission—and the Army Corps is running the show, with more money and power than ever. Many of the same coastal scientists and engineers who sounded alarms about the vulnerability of New Orleans long before Katrina are warning that the Army Corps is poised to repeat its mistakes—and extend them along the entire Louisiana coast. If you liked Katrina, they say, you’ll love what’s coming next.

He concludes with:

Since Katrina, New Orleans has lost more than one-third of its population, and only two of St. Bernard Parish’s 26 child-care centers have reopened. In the Lower Ninth Ward, floodwalls have been rebuilt and reinforced, but behind them stand blocks full of overgrown lots, where the remains of a gas meter or front step here or there provide the only evidence of the houses and lives washed away. “I look at this, and I think of the shortsighted people who crippled a great city,” Dashiell says. She knows that city needs better hospitals and more jobs. But first, better levees and more wetlands. Otherwise, it’s going to need an obituary.

The article is accompanied by a dynamic map of showing depopulation, water depth, and levees. It shows how entire neighbourhoods in New Orleans have been depopulated.

A second series of articles, in Mother Jones (Aug 26th, 2007), is written by John McQuaid a former writer for the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He lays out four problems with the US Army Corps of Engineers and four challenges that they need to face:

Skewed priorities. The Corps’ traditional domestic mission is to aid navigation, and for more than a century its bread and butter has been big-ticket projects that promoted shipping: river levees, locks, dredging harbors, and channels. … Hurricane levees, by contrast, have no political constituency except the public. Their principal economic benefit is warding off total destruction, something people and politicians often don’t fully appreciate until it’s too late. …

Backward science. The Corps designed the hurricane levee system in the 1960s and never updated its basic layout, despite 40 years of progress in hurricane forecasting and computer modeling that revealed many weaknesses in those designs. …

Funding. As construction of the levees dragged on for decades, Congress and successive presidential administrations starved the system. Corps officials and Louisiana politicians protested at times, but generally went along with the cuts and shortfalls. …

Outsourcing. …. Outsourcing weakens accountability by spreading responsibility around. The flawed floodwalls, for instance, were designed by an outside firm and then approved by Corps reviewers. …

Obstacles for the future:

Abortive Reform. After Katrina, the Corps was handed the task of getting to the bottom of what went wrong with the levees—in other words, investigating itself, something that experts in government accountability say is a recipe for trouble. The investigation was vetted by outside engineers and did find serious engineering errors. But its narrow, purely technical scope may come back to haunt the agency. Investigators never attempted to answer why the mistakes were made or analyzed the institutional flaws that set the stage for them. …

The Vision Thing. Traditionally, Corps projects come about from a combination of lobbying, pork, and questionable analyses of costs and benefits. If the United States means to protect New Orleans and other vulnerable coastal areas, it needs to junk this process. The Corps needs a vision for coastal protection, one that incorporates the effects of shifting populations, global warming, and rising seas. …

Politics. Even if the Corps gets its act together, it can’t act independently. It gets its marching orders from Congress and the White House, and their priorities shift depending on who’s in power. A project may start out with a bang, only to lose momentum 5, 10, or 20 years down the line. The New Orleans levee system was begun under President Lyndon Johnson, and it was an incomplete and incongruous mess when Katrina hit 40 years later during the second Bush administration.

Nature. The Corps’ stock-in-trade for two centuries has been controlling nature—shifting river courses and diverting floods. Often, it has failed. What happens if nature becomes progressively more uncontrollable?

Mississippi meanders

Garry Peterson — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 03:30:32 +0000

NASA’s Earth Observation newsroom presents satelite images to go with the geological map of Mississippi Meanders used to make the top image of this blog.

NASA explains:

As it winds from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, the Mississippi River is in constant flux. Fast water carries sediment while slow water deposits it. Soft riverbanks are continuously eroded. Floods occasionally spread across the wide, shallow valley that flanks the river, and new channels are left behind when the water recedes. This history of change is recorded in the Geological Investigation of the Alluvial Valley of the Lower Mississippi River, published by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1944.

This map of an area just north of the Atchafalaya River shows a slice of the complex history of the Mississippi. The modern river course is superimposed on channels from 1880 (green), 1820 (red), and 1765 (blue). Even earlier, prehistoric channels underlie the more recent patterns. An oxbow lake—a crescent of water left behind when a meander (bend in the river) closes itself off—remains from 1785. A satellite image from 1999 shows the current course of the river and the old oxbow lake. Despite modern human-made changes to the landscape, traces of the past remain, with roads and fields following the contours of past channels.

In the twentieth century, the rate of change on the Mississippi slowed. Levees now prevent the river from jumping its banks so often. The levees protect towns, farms, and roads near the banks of the river and maintain established shipping routes and ports in the Gulf of Mexico. The human engineering of the lower Mississippi has been so extensive that a natural migration of the Mississippi delta from its present location to the Atchafalaya River to the west was halted in the early 1960s by an Army Corps of Engineers project known as the Old River Control Structure (visible in the full-size Landsat image).

The delta switching has occurred every 1,000 years or so in the past. As sediment accumulates in the main channel, the elevation increases, and the channel becomes more shallow and meandering. Eventually the river finds a shorter, steeper descent to the Gulf. In the 1950s, engineers noticed that the river’s present channel was on the verge of shifting westward to the Atchafalaya River, which would have become the new route to the Gulf. Because of the industry and other development that depended on the present river course, the U.S. Congress authorized the construction of the Old River Control Structure to prevent the shift from happening.

For some related reading, John McPhee discusses the Old River Control Structure and US Army Corps attempts to regulate the Mississippi in his great 1989 book the Control of Nature. John Barry provides a history of the regulation of the Mississippi in his book Rising tide: the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America.

I previously wrote about the ecology of the Mississippi, Michael Grunwald has an article in Grist Rotten to the Corps arguing that the Corps is behind New Orleans destruction, and wikipedia has an article about levee failures in New Orleans.

Ecological Engineering and New Orleans

Garry Peterson — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 05:17:13 +0000

Robert Costanza, William Mitsch, and John Day, three ecologists with long experience with wetlands, New Orleans, and ecological economics, have an editorial in the journal Ecological Engineering on Creating a sustainable and desirable New Orleans (pdf). Their arguement is a more ecological version of the vison of a new bright green city presented by Alan AtKisson in his post Dreaming a New New Orleans.

Costanza et al write:

The Federal government has pledged over US$ 100 billion for the New Orleans and Gulf coast region to be rebuilt after this terrible (but predictable) tragedy. The question is not if but how it should be rebuilt. What was there can simply be replaced, but this would merely be setting the pins up to be knocked down again by a future big hurricane, the destructive powers of which are increasing worldwide, probably due to global warming. In addition, sea level is rising and New Orleans continues to sink, making the city even more vulnerable over time.

What is needed is a new vision of a truly New Orleans—one that can provide a sustainable and high quality of life for all of its citizens while it works in partnership (not in futile opposi- tion) with the natural forces that shaped it. This New Orleans can serve as a metaphor and a model for the sustainable devel- opment of western industrial society more generally.

…

The built capital of New Orleans has been radically depleted and must be rebuilt. We can recreate the vulnerable and unsustainable city that was there, or we can reinvent New Orleans as a model of a sustainable and desirable city of the future. To do this, we need to redesign and restore not only the built infrastructure, but also the social, human, and natural capital of the region. How do we do this and what would a truly sustainable and desirable New Orleans look like? Here are some of the elements of a sustainable vision:

1. Let the water decide: Building a city below sea level is always a dangerous proposition. While parts of New Orleans are still at or above sea level, much of it had sunk well below sea level since the first quarter of the 20th century. It is not sustainable or desirable to rebuild these areas in the same way they were before. They should be either replaced with coastal wetlands which are allowed to trap sediments to rebuild the land (see below), or replaced with buildings that are adapted to occasional flooding (i.e., on pilings or floats). Wetlands inside the levees can help clean waters, store short-term flood waters, provide habitat for wildlife, and become an amenity for the city. Coastal wetlands outside the levees should be rebuilt so that the city has both wetlands and levees to protect the city.

2. One should avoid abrupt boundaries between deepwater sys- tems and uplands. Gentle slopes with wetlands are the best division, and avoid putting humans, particularly those who have few resources to avoid hydrologic disasters, in harm’s way. Of course the abrupt boundaries of the levees are nec- essary, since wetlands alone cannot protect the city, but we need to use both as appropriate.

3. Restore natural capital: Coastal wetlands in Louisiana have been estimated to provide US$ 375/acres/yr (US $940/ha/yr—these and all subsequent figures have been converted to US$ 2004) in storm and flood protection services. Hurricane Katrina has shown this to be a large underestimate. Restoring Louisiana’s coastal wetlands and New Orleans levees has been estimated to cost US$ 25 billion. Had the original wetlands been intact and levees in better shape, a substantial portion of the US$ 100 billion plus damages from this hurri- cane probably could have been avoided. Prevention would have been much cheaper and more effective than recon- struction. In addition, the coastal wetlands provide other ecosystem services which when added to the storm pro- tection services have been estimated to be worth about US$ 5200/acres/yr (US$ 12,700/ha/yr). Restoring the 4800 km2 (480,000 ha) of wetlands lost prior to Katrina would thus restore US$ 6 billion/yr in lost ecosystem services, or US$ 200 billion in present value (at a 3% discount rate).

4. In order to do this we should use the resources of the Mississippi River to rebuild the coast, changing the current system that constrains the river between levees, and allow the resources of freshwater, sediments, and nutrients to flow into the deeper waters of the Gulf. Diversions of water, nutrients, and sediments from the Mississippi are a major component of the LCA plan. These planned diversions should be greatly expanded in order to allow more rapid restoration of the coastal wetlands. Levees are necessary in some locations, but where possible the levees should be breeched by structures in a controlled way to allow marsh rebuilding.

5. We should restore the built capital of New Orleans to the highest standards of high-performance green buildings and a car-limited urban environment with high mobility for everyone. New Orleans has abundant renewable energy sources in solar, wind, and water. What better message than to build a 21st-century sustainable city running on renewable energy on the rubble of a 20th century oil and gas production hub. In other words, New Orleans should be built higher, stronger, much more efficient, and designed to make extensive use of renewable energy. One can imag- ine a new pattern for the residential neighborhoods of New Orleans with strong, multistory, multifamily buildings surrounded by green space, each with enough water and fuel storage for several weeks, and operating principally on wind and solar energy.

6. We should rebuild the social capital of New Orleans to 21st-century standards of diversity, tolerance, fairness, and justice. New Orleans has suffered long enough with social capital dating from the 18th (or even the 15th) century. To do this the planning and implementation of the rebuilding must maximize participation by the entire community. This will certainly be difficult for a number of reasons, including the historical antecedents of racism and classcism in the region, and the fact that much of the population has been forcibly removed from the city. But it is absolutely essential if the goals of a sustainable and desirable future are to be achieved.

7. Finally, we should restore the Mississippi River Basin to min- imize coastal pollution and the threats of river flooding in New Orleans. Upstream changes in the 3 million km2 Mississippi drainage basin have significantly changed nutrient and sediment delivery patterns to the delta. Changes in farming practices in the drainage basin can improve not only the coastal restoration process, but also improve the nation’s agricultural economy by promoting sustainable farming practices in the entire basin.

Rebuilding New Orleans: Don’t build on quicksand

Garry Peterson — Thu, 08 Jun 2006 09:19:55 +0000

Down to Earth points to a Washington Post editorial (June 7th) that writes:

… the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers admitted responsibility for much of the destruction of New Orleans. … As the Corps’ own inquiry found, the agency committed numerous mistakes of design: Its network of pumps, walls and levees was “a system in name only”; it failed to take into account the gradual sinking of the local soil; it closed its ears when people pointed out these problems. The result was a national tragedy.

…the New Orleans disaster has illustrated the folly of building flood defenses for vulnerable low land: Some of the worst-hit areas would not have been developed in the first place if the Corps hadn’t decided to build “protections” for them. Encouraging the Army Corps of Engineers to build Category 5 defenses for all of Louisiana, including parts that are sparsely populated for good reason, would not merely cost billions that would be better spent on defending urban areas. It would encourage settlement of more flood-prone land and set the stage for the next tragedy.

On Down to Earth, Daniel Collins comments on how this behaviour falls into the pathology of natural resource management:

The engineering that the Corps offers provides residents and residents-to-be with a false sense of security. There is an implicit belief that since we have re-worked nature as much as we have in the past, or that we have been given dominion over the Earth, that we can continue in the same vein without limit. Modern societies endeavour to isolate themselves from the vagaries of the environment. What that has given us is a higher quality of living, offset by disasters like Katrina. Hurricanes will continue to roll into Louisiana, with or without global warming; New Orleans will continue to sink; and eventually the Mississippi will transfer its discharge into the Atchafalaya.

Building buffers against nature is a sound strategy, but it should be supplemented by building into society a degree of resilience and flexibility. Part of this is the ability (strength even?) to impose limits on building in unsafe regions. This may constrain liberties, but Katrina constrained the ultimate liberty of at least 1,800 people.

Hurricanes, Risk Models, and Insurance

Garry Peterson — Fri, 21 Apr 2006 05:17:19 +0000

Roger Pielke Jr has an interesting post Are We Seeing the End of Hurricane Insurability? on the Prometheus weblog. The insurance industry uses models of expected losses to set rates for catastrophic losses – from things such as huricanes. However, the models that are properitarity and not open to public evaluation. Now consumer groups are attacking the providers of “catastrophe models” arguing that these models main purpose is to justify increases in insurance rates.

In the past consumer groups have argued:

Consumers were told that, after the big price increases in the wake of Hurricane Andrew, they would see price stability. This was because the projections were not based on short-term weather history, as they had been in the past, but on very long-term data from 10,000 to 100,000 years of projected experience. The rate requests at the time were based upon the average of these long-range projections. Decades with no hurricane activity were assessed in the projections as were decades of severe hurricane activity, as most weather experts agree we are experiencing now. Small storms predominated, but there were projections of huge, category 5 hurricanes hitting Miami or New York as well, causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. Consumers were assured that, although hurricane activity was cyclical, they would not see significant price decreases during periods of little or no hurricane activity, nor price increases during periods of frequent activity. That promise has now been broken.

While the catastrophe modelling firms argue:

Given a constant climatological state (or if annual variations from that state are short lived and unpredictable) the activity rate in a catastrophe model can best be represented as the average of long-term history. In this situation there is no need to characterize the period over which the activity is considered to apply because, with current knowledge, it is expected that rate will continue indefinitely. The assumption that activity remains consistent breaks down, however, where there are either multi-year fluctuations in activity or persistent trends. It then becomes necessary to characterize the time period over which the activity in the Cat model is intended to apply.

Pielke argues that the disaster modellers are implying

…that the historical climatology of hurricane activity is no longer a valid basis for estimating future risks. This means that the catastrophe models that they provide are untethered from experience. Imagine if you are playing a game of poker, and the dealer tells you that the composition of the deck has been completely changed – now you don’t know whether there are 4 aces in the deck or 20. It would make gambling based on probabilities a pretty dodgy exercise. If RMS [Risk Management Solutions - a catastrophe modelling company] is correct, then it has planted the seed that has potential to completely transform its business and the modern insurance and reinsurance industries.

What happens if history is no longer a guide to the future? One answer is that you set your expectations about the future based on factors other than experience. One such approach is to ask the relevant experts what they expect. This is what RMS did last fall, convening Kerry Emanuel, Tom Knutson, Jim Elsner, and Mark Saunders in order to conduct an “expert elicitation”.

…

… RMS conducted its elicitation October, 2005 with the intent that it will shape its risk estimates for the next 5 years. This is wholly unrealistic in such a fast moving area of science. It is unlikely that the perspectives elicited from these 4 scientists will characterize the views of the relevant community (or even their own views!) over the next five years as further research is published and hurricane seasons unfold. Because RMS has changed from a historical approach to defining risk, which changes very, very slowly, if at all over time, to an expert-focused approach, it should fully expect to see very large changes in expert views as science evolves. This is a recipe for price instability, exactly the opposite from what the consumer groups, and insurance commissioners, want.

From the perspective of the basic functioning of the insurance and reinsurance industries, the change in approach by RMS is an admission that the future is far more uncertain than has been the norm for this community. Such uncertainty may call into question the very basis of hurricane insurance and reinsurance which lies in an ability to quantify and anticipate risks. If the industry can’t anticipate risks, or simply come to a consensus on how to calculate risks (even if inaccurate), then this removes one of the key characteristics of successful insurance. Debate on this issue has only just begun.

Hedging ones bets with insurance is a good strategy to deal with risk – where known outcomes are expected to occur with some known probability. However, when confronting more uncertain situations other approaches such as building resilience to potential classes of shock, engaging in experimental management to decrease uncertainty, and accelerating learning by integrating sources of knowledge across a wider variety of domains (e.g. meterology, ecology, and urban planning) and different regions (e.g. Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, and New Orleans).

Mapping Sea Level Rise

Garry Peterson — Fri, 24 Mar 2006 12:17:35 +0000

Jonathan Overpeck and others have a paper Paleoclimatic Evidence for Future Ice-Sheet Instability and Rapid Sea-Level Rise in Science (24 March 2006) that suggests that sea level rise due to anthropogenic climate change could occur much faster than people have previously expected. Possibly an increase of 5 to 10 m of several centuries. (For news articles see BBC, NYTimes, & Toronto G&M).

To visualize the consquences of sea level rise:

WorldChanging points to Flood Maps. A site that mashes up NASA elevation data with Google Maps, and offers a visualization of the effects of a single meter increase all the way to a 14 meter rise. Some examples are: Vancouver with 6m sea rise, New Orleans, and the Netherlands.

Also, Jonathan Overpeck’s lab also has a visualization of the consquences of sea level rise for the US and the world.

Richard Kerr writes in a news article in Science, A Worrying Trend of Less Ice, Higher Seas:

The ice sheet problem today very much resembles the ozone problem of the early 1980s, before researchers recognized the Antarctic ozone hole, Oppenheimer and Alley have written. The stakes are high in both cases, and the uncertainties are large. Chemists had shown that chlorine gas would, in theory, destroy ozone, but no ozone destruction had yet been seen in the atmosphere. While the magnitude of the problem remained uncertain, only a few countries restricted the use of chlorofluorocarbons, mainly by banning their use in aerosol sprays.

But then the ozone hole showed up, and scientists soon realized a second, far more powerful loss mechanism was operating in the stratosphere; the solid surfaces of ice cloud particles were accelerating the destruction of ozone by chlorine. Far more drastic measures than banning aerosols would be required to handle the problem.

Now glaciologists have a second mechanism for the loss of ice: accelerated flow of the ice itself, not just its meltwater, to the sea. “In the end, ice dynamics is going to win out” over simple, slower melting, says Bindschadler. Is glacier acceleration the ozone hole of sea level rise? No one knows. No one knows whether the exceptionally strong warmings around the ice will continue apace, whether the ice accelerations of recent years will slow as the ice sheets adjust to the new warmth, or whether more glaciers will fall prey to the warmth. No one knows, yet.

Ruin and Recovery

Garry Peterson — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 05:27:42 +0000

Ruin & Recovery is a special series of newspaper articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune on how other cities responded to disasters:

Galveston, TX – Galveston almost went under in the hurricane of 1900, but city leaders saved it, and a new economy reshaped it.
Charleston, SC – Historic Charleston survived Hurricane Hugo and rebuilt, keeping its charm
Grand Forks, ND – Lessons learned after devastating floods in 1997
Homestead, FL – Hurricane Andrew nearly wiped Homestead off the map. But after early stumbles, and a lot of help from private enterprise, the town is stronger than ever
Kobe, Japan – In seconds, buildings collapsed, bridges toppled and thousands died when an earthquake hit Kobe, Japan, 10 years ago. Despair was rampant. But with dogged determination, the city rebuilt, repopulated and rebounded
The Netherlands – After a North Sea flood killed nearly 2,000 peole in the Netherlands in 1953, building a state-of-the-art flood defense became a national priority.

Watermark: can southern Louisiana be saved

Garry Peterson — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 09:41:10 +0000

Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for the New Yorker, who also wrote a series of articles – Climate of Man – about climate change. Wrote a fairly grim article Watermark: can southern Louisiana be saved, in the Feb 27, 2006 New Yorker. She writes about geology, wetland loss, climate change, and people of New Orleans.

Five thousand years ago, much of southern Louisiana did not exist. A hundred years from now, it is unclear how much of it will remain. The region, it is often observed, is losing land at the rate of a football field every thirty-eight minutes. Alternatively, it is said, the area is shrinking by a large desktop’s worth of ground every second, or a tennis court’s worth every thirteen seconds, or twenty-five square miles a year. Between 1930 and 2000, some 1.2 million acres, an area roughly the size of Delaware, disappeared. Hurricanes Katrina and Rita stripped away an estimated seventy-five thousand acres—a loss as big as Manhattan and Brooklyn combined. The U.S. Geological Survey has published a map illustrating the process. Areas that have already vanished appear in red, and areas that are expected to vanish by 2050 in yellow. On the map, the southern coast looks as if it were on fire. According to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, “The rate at which Louisiana’s land is converting to water is probably the fastest in the world. [here is an animated map]

…

Dokka’s study, which he published in July, 2004, under the title “Rates of Vertical Displacement at Benchmarks in the Lower Mississippi Valley and the Northern Gulf Coast,” showed that for decades elevations in coastal Louisiana had been systematically overstated. Heights had been calculated on the basis of “benchmarks” that were supposedly stable but which, it turned out, were themselves subsiding. Dokka’s calculations showed that the fastest-sinking areas, among them the southern part of Plaquemines Parish, were losing elevation at the rate of more than an inch a year. In his study, he labelled this phenomenon an “inexorable slow disaster” whose economic effects would eventually “be felt by the entire country.”

…

The Mississippi swung into its present course—and began to lay down Plaquemines Parish and the Birdfoot—approximately a thousand years ago. At this point, it is ready to switch direction yet again. For several decades, the river has been trying to jump its banks to follow a steeper gradient that leads to the Gulf of Mexico through the Atchafalaya River Basin, between Baton Rouge and Lafayette. The Old River Control Structure, which is twelve hundred feet long and consists of an elaborate series of dams, locks, and sluices, has prevented this from happening. But while the control structure has preserved New Orleans’s viability as a port—were the river to change course, the city would face out onto slack water of the sort found in Bayou Lafourche—it has done nothing to solve the problem of land loss. Indeed, just the reverse. Instead of going into delta-building, most of the Mississippi’s sediment today gets dumped beyond the Birdfoot and off the continental shelf….

The fundamental problem of southern Louisiana—the fact that making the area suitable for permanent settlement also tends to make it that much more impermanent—has been understood for many decades. In the nineteen-twenties, Percy Viosca, a Louisiana naturalist, warned that flood-control and land-reclamation efforts were “killing the goose that laid the golden egg”; he advocated that the state adopt policies to reëstablish the “natural conditions” conducive to healthy marshes. Instead, though, virtually all the practices that exacerbate land loss were allowed to continue and, in some cases, even encouraged. Swamps were drained to create agricultural fields and housing developments; this caused the peaty marsh soils to oxidize and shrink, like a drying sponge, resulting, in many instances, in new expanses of open water. Navigational channels like the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet were dug; these carried salt water into what had been freshwater marshes, killing trees and grasses and inviting erosion. Thousands of miles of canals were cut into the wetlands to facilitate oil and naturalgas exploration; much like the navigation channels, these canals wreaked havoc on the local hydrology. Where oil was found, the process of extraction caused some areas to slump—Louisiana “floats on oil like a drunkard’s teeth on whiskey,” A. J. Liebling once wrote—further contributing to subsidence.

…

Although almost no one in or outside New Orleans seemed prepared for it, Katrina was probably the most comprehensively predicted catastrophe in American history. In the past few decades, storm-surge models have become increasingly sophisticated and the computers they run on increasingly powerful. When researchers began to adapt the models to New Orleans, they became convinced, as one of them put it to me, that “we had this train wreck imminent.” The city’s levees had been designed to protect it from what the Army Corps of Engineers calls a “standard project hurricane”—roughly, a fast-moving Category 3 storm. (Since fast-moving storms have less time to pile up water, they’re generally less dangerous than slow-moving ones.) But not all of the levees met this objective, even on paper. A project to upgrade them, begun in the aftermath of Hurricane Betsy, in 1965, was repeatedly delayed by funding cuts; by 1995, it was still twenty years from completion. Meanwhile, as the levees were slowly being raised, the land underneath them continued to subside. The models showed that, even if New Orleans’s defenses held up, many possible hurricanes could overwhelm them, and that in the fastest-subsiding coastal parishes a relatively minor storm could prove devastating.

…

[Judith] Curry pointed out that, thanks to global warming, not only were hurricanes becoming more intense but sea levels were rising, making storm surges that much more dangerous. “What used to be the once-in-a-lifetime flood, you could see every season,” she observed. In terms of rebuilding New Orleans, Curry said, “It’s a complex issue. But, speaking from the climate and the environmental-science perspective, a hundred years from now there’s just no way there’s going to be a city there. You just know that isn’t going to happen. We can fight it. We can rebuild it and wait until it gets wiped out again. If you look at the geological record, these coastal areas come and go. Sometimes they’re under water and sometimes they’re not. Maybe a colossal engineering effort can do something, but at some point that is going to fail. This is just the way geology and climate work. You can’t fight it forever.”

…

Percy and Solomon, Jr., had both grown up in the Lower Ninth, and in 1965 they had ridden out Hurricane Betsy in a two-story house a few blocks away. “Listening to the Mayor saying, ‘Come back,’ once you come back and see this city, you see he’s just saying that stuff,” Percy observed. “It’s hard to fathom.” He gestured toward his father’s house and the house next to it, which had also been swept off its foundation, and a third house, which was listing crazily. “Would you want to rebuild this? I mean, really? What happens next September? Every year, it’s going to be the same thing.”
Percy turned to his father and asked him if he thought he would return. The old man shook his head.
“No,” Percy said. “Let it go.”

The New Yorker has an online archive of all its articles on Katrina.

Recovering New Orleans: the Resilient City

Garry Peterson — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 05:12:08 +0000

Thomas J. Campanella, the co-editor The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster (Oxford University Press, 2005), a professor of urban design and city planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a visiting lecturer at Nanjing University’s Graduate School of Architecture, wrote about the resilience of cities and New Orleans in Sept 2005 on the urban planning website Planetizen:

Lost cities are in fact a relative historical rarity. True, Atlantis remains unfound, let alone rebuilt. Pompeii and Herculaneum were buried permanently beneath the hot ejecta of Vesuvius in 79AD. Timgad was sacked by both the Vandals and the Berbers and lost to history until archeologists uncovered it in the 1880s. Monte Albán, on the heights above the modern Mexican city of Oaxaca, flourished for 2,000 years before the Spanish crushed it for all time. But these are the exceptions. Much more common in the annals of urban history are cities that have rebounded again and again from even horrific devastation. The Romans leveled Carthage after the Third Punic War, salting it for good measure. But it was the Romans themselves who later resurrected the port city and turned it into an administrative hub for their African possessions; even today Carthage persists as a suburb of Tunis. By about 1800, urban resilience becomes the rule. No major city in the last 200-odd years has been completely destroyed, in spite of humankind’s ever-increasing power to do so. There are only a handful of exceptions; St. Pierre, Martinique — the “Paris of the Antilles” — was annihilated by a volcanic eruption in 1902 and never rebuilt. Only one man survived, and only because he was locked in solitary confinement. But for every St. Pierre, there are a hundred cities that bounced right back from catastrophic destruction.

The subject of urban resilience is one I explored with Lawrence J. Vale in an anthology entitled The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster (Oxford, 2005). Our comparative study revealed no short answers as to why urban sites in the modern age are rarely abandoned (factors such as embedded infrastructure, private property rights and insurance, even the political symbolism of reconstruction for a nation have all played a role). Our study did yield, however, a number of key points and common themes about both disasters and urban resilience, many of which have gained new relevance in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. For one, cities vary enormously in their resilience. Just as some people can fend off a traumatic illness while others succumb, not all cities are equally capable of rebounding from a shock to the system.

A person whose health is compromised to begin with has less chance of recovery than an individual in full health. So too a city. New York proved highly resilient in the wake of 9/11, mustering vast financial, political and cultural capital in its effort to recover from the destruction of the World Trade Center. New Orleans, on the other hand, was already burdened with huge social and economic problems long before Katrina’s arrival. Such “pre-existing conditions” will play a major role in determining how well the Crescent City will recover from the storm and its aftermath—and perhaps if it can recover at all.

Urban resilience, moreover, is not necessarily progressive. In spite of the seeming tabula rasa opportunity a major disaster can offer to correct old errors and put things right, reconstruction tends to favor the status quo. Even if a city’s buildings are toppled, foundations are often reusable and property lines remain. Insurance claims and simple inertia help push landowners to rebuild more or less what they lost. There is also a deep psychological need to see things put quickly back they way they were. While a disaster can trigger a host of long-term innovations, these tend not to surface in the immediate wake of a catastrophe. Visionary schemes are the stuff of good times, when people can afford the luxury of debating possible futures. The last thing people want to do in the middle of a disaster is wait around for the minutiae of a brave new plan to be refined for implementation. When London burned in 1666, grand schemes were floated by Christopher Wren, John Evelyn and others, full of axial boulevards and capacious plazas; all remained on paper. What Londoners returned to instead (and happily, I am sure) was a city that looked and felt much as it did before the conflagration. And while Chicago’s great fire of 1871 eventually yielded a city of fire-proof masonry buildings (as well as the first skyscrapers), the initial reconstruction phase fell back to erecting very kinds of rickety firetraps that caused the catastrophe in the first place.

This notion of “regressive resilience” extends also to a city’s social order and political culture. Just as the built environment is commonly reconstituted as before, the power structure and social hierarchy of a city can quickly replicate itself in the wake of a catastrophe. Divisive pre-disaster inequalities and injustices are resilient too. On the other hand, nothing reveals the fault lines in a society like a major calamity, exposing to public scrutiny long-hidden patterns of power, poverty, race and class. Such exposure can, in the right circumstances, precipitate positive change. This was the case in Mexico City following the devastating earthquake of 1985; the tremors not only shook up the city’s buildings but the very legitimacy of the political system and its leadership. As Diane Davis described it in The Resilient City, the earthquake exposed a raft of official corruption and abuses—in some cases quite literally: new government buildings pulverized by the earthquake were found to be of substandard construction quality, and the exposed cellars of ruined police stations contained evidence of torture). These revelations galvanized the capital’s “resilient citizens” to demand political accountability and a reordering of reconstruction priorities, including a new focus on low-income housing. It remains to be seen whether New Orleanians will prove as resilient as the people of Mexico City. For one, a scattered populace is very hard to organize politically; the social action that took place in Mexico City is unlikely in New Orleans if the city’s displaced and dispossessed never return.

All this underscores the fact that cities are more than the sum of their buildings. A city is a tapestry of human lives and social networks that are essential to the heart and soul of the place. A disaster can tear at this social fabric as terribly as at the physical infrastructure of a city. In New Orleans, this social fabric has long been intimately bonded to the unique geography of the city. The highest ground in New Orleans—the original “Crescent City” formed by Mississippi’s natural levee, including the French Quarter and Garden District—has long been occupied by the white elite. Blacks lived at the very crest of the natural levee, where they were safe from floods but endured the unpleasant noise and odors of riverfront industry. Creole blacks were concentrated in the triangular Seventh Ward, which begins in the lowlands but comes to a point on the Mississippi levee. “Anglo” African-Americans later settled in old “back of the city” neighborhoods such as Treme and in the lower reaches of Bywater and the Ninth Ward.

While there has never been a perfect correlation between elevation, flood risk, race and class in New Orleans (racially mixed middle class neighborhoods such as Lakeview and Pontchartrain Park, built on swampland drained by the Corps of Engineers decades ago, were also terribly flooded by Katrina), it most certainly determined who got out of town and who did not. Middle-class whites—and blacks and Latinos and Asians—loaded their SUVs and got out of Dodge; the poor were stuck without the means or money to find their way to safety. These people have now been scattered to the four winds, in perhaps the largest internal migration of Americans since the 1950s. With every passing day it becomes less and less likely that these and other displaced Orleanians will ever come home.

…Recovering a wrecked city involves much more than bricks, mortar and asphalt—or bits, bytes and electricity. As we pointed out in The Resilient City, it also “fundamentally entails reconnecting severed familial, social and religious networks of survivors. Urban recovery occurs network by network, district by district, not just building by building; it is about reconstructing the myriad social relations embedded in schools, workplaces, childcare arrangements, shops, places of worship, and places of play and recreation.”

…

None of this will come cheaply. Should the American people subsidize the immense costs of recovering New Orleans? Should residents of Massachusetts or Montana cough up tax money to house the returnees who lost their homes? The answer should come without hesitation: Yes. This is a great American city and it is the responsibility of both the federal government and the American people to help put it back on its feet. We can spend billions to rehabilitate Baghdad and Basra; surely we can do the same for one of our own. The stakes are terribly high. If New Orleans is not fully recovered—if little is done to meet the needs of all racial and class backgrounds; if social problems that have long bedeviled the city’s poorest communities are not tackled head on; if reconstruction focuses exclusively on high-profile projects aimed at getting the tourists and conventioneers back and spending—then the city will slip into a kind of glamorous but irrelevant afterlife. It will become what many urbanists fear most—a Crescent City theme park, an island of Fat Tuesday fun with a neo-Creole Starbucks on every corner, insulated by a “clean zone” of bulldozed neighborhoods where once lived the very peoples who gave us jazz and jambalaya and made New Orleans the gritty legend it will be again.