Tear New Orleans Down

If politicians and other public officials were held to the same standards of accountability as the private sector, we would soon be hearing of indictments of the former for negligent homicide. What happened in New Orleans this last week was not just predictable - it was inevitable. For decades warnings have been issued that the Crescent City was vulnerable to just the sort of disaster that befell it after Hurricane Katrina. In spite of all the predictions, when the disaster struck, New Orleans’s city government and Louisiana’s state government were totally unprepared.
When I travel to the Oregon coast, I see signs everywhere warning me of the tsunami hazard that threatens low lying areas. Roads leading to higher ground are marked as escape routes. The population is educated. A warning system exists. When the inevitable quake generates the inevitable wave, just about everyone knows what to do to save his or her life.
In Orting, Washington, the danger is Mount Rainier. The town sits directly upon ground deposited by lahars from previous eruptions. A lahar is an enormous mudslide generated by the sudden melting of the glaciers. The next time Rainier erupts, and it will, Orting will be buried. But, Orting residents know what to do. Orting has volcano drills and has mapped out escape routes.
In each instance, state and local governments have made preparations for events that will provide little warning, but occur only once every several centuries. And yet, in spite of the unlikelihood that any person living today will experience the emergency they have prepared for, the preparations are made.
On the other hand, the New Orleans disaster has been gathering since the first levee was constructed to keep water out. The very act of building the levees initiated the subsidence that has since dropped New Orleans below sea level. Everyone knew that someday these levees would fail and the city would suffer catastrophic flooding. And yet, when it finally happened, no one had a plan. I was just in New Orleans and I can tell that there were no emergency evacuation plans. Nowhere was an escape route described. So far as I could recall, there was no warning system. And, as was made abundantly clear after the levees failed, no thought had ever been given to dealing with the aftermath. All knew it was coming, and did nothing.
The thousands of deaths that have occurred and all the deaths that will occur in the next few weeks can be laid at the feet of Louisiana’s chronically corrupt politicians.
But now that New Orleans has been laid waste, the next act of criminal negligence would be to rebuild it. Geologists have pointed to the subsidence in the delta and predicted that New Orleans would become uninhabitable no later than 2100. Some have put that date as early as 2050. The levees that kept New Orleans dry before Monday disrupted the geologic history of the delta and is causing the entire region to sink into the Gulf of Mexico. Since 1930, more than a million acres have been lost. Just last year, 28,000 acres were lost.
Estimates are that rebuilding New Orleans will take years and tens of billions of dollars. And for what – to recreate a dangerous place for hundreds of thousands of people to live for a few more years until New Orleans sinks forever into the muck? Why not use those billions to construct a new city in a more geologically stable area?
Louisiana’s wetlands yield a third of the entire nation’s commercial fish and shellfish harvest. Trying to keep New Orleans where it is will cost us that resource. No one in his right mind would build a city in such a vulnerable spot.
Let’s hold politicians to the same standards as the rest of us. Accountants across America were laughing hysterically after King County Executive Ron Sims stated that the vote counting within his kingdom last November achieved an accuracy that would be the envy of banks. Every bank clerk knows that if his error rate were 1% of King County’s, he’d be spending his days dressed in an orange jumpsuit and would spend his nights at the Walla Walla State Penitentiary as somebody’s girlfriend.
Every living current and former politician who sold New Orleans out deserves a jumpsuit of his own, and the nickname “Shirley.”

Update: Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert has questioned the rebuilding of New Orleans. He's right of course, but the media and the Democrats will pounce on this as a political issue.