One thing is certain, after the lights go back on and the tap water starts to flow, the roads will fill up with billions of insurance dollars and this one big overwhelming disaster will become hundreds and thousands little, more manageable challenges. People will begin to be able to fend for themselves again, and the human force of recovery will improve exponentially. No doubt, the infrastructures will take years to fix, but the cuts and scrapes will heal in weeks if not days.
This morning, I listened to a new conference with the Adm. Timothy Keating, commander of the U.S. Northern Command. As he puts it, assets were in place or in motion even before Katrina made landfall. Good soldier that he is, Keating would not enter the morass of blame. Instead, his answers were calm and sensible and confident. Things could have gone better, he conceded, but now was not the time for evaluation.
I can already sense the anger draining away. Even during the course of that news conference the reporters questions were morphing from hardball to whiffle. I could feel my own emotional fury dissolve into the embarrassment that perhaps I had not fully appreciated the logistics of the big picture. But how could you not get swept up in the pleas of Mayor Nagin, Senator Landrieu and Parish President Broussard? How could you not feel that same frustration last Thursday -- days after the storm and still days before real relief?
I was in downtown San Francisco during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. The devastation in New Orleans is a richter octave worse, but having lived and worked through the San Francisco recovery, I think I've got a pretty good idea how New Orleans might begin to play out.
One thing is certain, after the lights go back on and the tap water starts to flow, the roads will fill up with billions of insurance dollars and this one big overwhelming disaster will become hundreds and thousands little, more manageable challenges. People will begin to be able to fend for themselves again, and the human force of recovery will improve exponentially. No doubt, the infrastructures will take years to fix, but the cuts and scrapes will heal in weeks if not days. The desperation we see now will dissipate next week like so much morning fog.
As the flood waters drain, bodies will be found, but the numbers may be less than the mayor's hyperbolic estimates of 10,000 or more. A nation prepared for the worst just might then be relieved that at least it wasn't as bad as it could have been. A few thousand dead already doesn't sound so bad -- as horrible as that really is.
The hero stories are also on their way. There is so much media down there that we might just get inundated with the sugary stuff. They'll all warm our hearts, though, and we'll all start to forget about last week.
Finally, with Cheney, Rove, Rice and Bush home from vacation, that machine of theirs will shift back into high gear and smooth over this rough patch just like every bump before. Who knows, Bush might yet become the hero of all this. I don't doubt it could happen. In fact, I expect it.