There were two disasters in New Orleans: one natural and inevitable, the other social and, if not totally avoidable, at least manageable.
In a world of obvious climage change and increasingly bizarre, severe weather events, New Orleans won't be the last American city pummeled by Mother Nature. Your city could be next. The good news is that we are in a position to learn from New Orleans. We can't do much about the next big natural disaster -- it is going to happen -- but we can mitigate the social disaster.
(Warning: The next paragraph will seem cruel and heartless to some who don't read so well, but it's the truth. If you can't deal with it, that's not my problem.)
In a way, New Orleans was asking for it. (Look, it literally hurts me to think about the suffering of the victims; I'm not blaming them so please hear me out...) The city's precarious position -- situated in a bioregion far better suited to snakes, alligators, and crawdads than to a high human population -- sealed its eventual fate. The levees could have been shored up, but at some point a storm big enough to breach them was bound to occur. Coastal swamps are the shock absorbers of hurricanes and the kidneys of the earth. You plop a big industrial center in the center of one, don't be surprised when things don't work out on the natural disaster front. In a way, New Orleans is, itself, a natural disaster.
But then, that's not really fair, is it? All cities are aberrations, great middle fingers thrust at Mother Nature. We have constructed a society that drives hard against nature. The struggle against nature, the scary nature of nature, is branded into our psyche from the first time we read Little Red Riding Hood. This notion has been ingrained in our rational, scientific western culture far longer than that. We work at right angles to nature rather than in tandem with her. That's just the way we roll, and I'm not making any normative judgment on that. In many ways, it has worked out well, but nature-battling western civilization is also fraught with its own kind of peril. Call it entropy. Call it hubris. Call it what you will.
We have constructed mighty cities. Any one of these, through various scenarios playing out in the natural world and thus beyond our control, could end up like New Orleans.
Yesterday somebody got mad at me because they interpreted one of my comments as equating the snow in Denver with the disaster in New Orleans. I did not mean to suggest such an equivalence. My point was that Denver could just as easily be driven to chaos as New Orleans was. "They have snow every year in Denver." Yeah, well, they have hurricanes every year on the Gulf Coast, too, smartypants.
A few more feet of snow in the Rockies plus a blast of warm weather could lead to real problems in Colorado. Unlike New Orleans, Denver is landlocked. Goods can't be shipped in except by air or ground. What happens if the highways and rail lines get washed out? Are they going to airship eveything 1,000 miles inland? That's not even remotely feasible from a logistical standpoint.
What happened in New Orleans? Goods could not be shipped to the people who had been flooded out of their homes. There was a total breakdown in law and order. People fled, their lives reduced to great heaps of waterlogged garbage. The natural disaster was the easy part. The social disaster continues to fester.
Could this happen in Denver? It wouldn't look the same on TV, but, yeah, pretty much it could. Denver's landlocked. Shipping goods overland when roads have been washed out like sand castles at high tide is not as easy as it sounds. I grew up in Denver. I've seen what happens when walls of water explodes the canyons. If I-70 or I-25 sustained serious damage, if the power went out and people couldn't pump gas, if law and order broke down, if store shelves went bare -- Denver could get really ugly, really fast, just like New Orleans. So could Chicago, Miami, Pittsburgh, Seattle -- any city.
Some geographies lend themselves better to big cities, but at the end of the day, every big city is vulnerable to the vengeance of nature. New York could lose a couple of bridges or tunnels in a hurricane/flood. Chicago could get hit by a series of mega-tornadoes. Miami, Pittsburgh, Seattle, Phoenix: All are vulnerable to different sorts of extreme weather events.
Does anyone doubt that these sorts of events are becoming more frequent? Probably, but those people haven't read this far.
My heart goes out to New Orleanians, and I hope their pain was not in vain. Let's learn from this. Let's set up the leadership and infrastructure to prevent another Katrina-sized natural disaster from becoming a New Orleans-sized human disaster. We can count on more Katrinas. I just hope we don't have to see another New Orleans.