This posting will likely piss everyone off

[drwex]

I'm really sick and tired of the obsession over hurricane Katrina. Nonstop updates, speculation, dire predictions. Enough already.

Let me first say that I love the city of New Orleans; I was lucky to be there for a few days earlier this year, once again and though it's gone downhill (into mass commercialization) compared to 10 years ago when I was there before I still think it's a great city to visit. I'll be sad to see it damaged, though I don't believe it'll be destroyed.

I'm also very sorry for the people who've had to evacuate and for the likelihood that they'll return to destruction and loss.

But that said... people seem to be losing sight of two things that I think ought to put this storm into perspective. One: this isn't the first Cat4 (or 5 or 3 or whatever it is this very second) storm to hit the US this season and I don't think I'd lose money by betting that it won't be the last. The situation sucks just as much if you're in the Florida panhandle, or Atlantic coast, or wherever when one of these massive storms slams in and wipes out your life, livelihood, childhood home, or whatever. Yes, New Orleans is a magical city, but I don't think it means more to the people who grew up there than homes do to people all along the coast who've had them wiped out by hurricanes this year or last. A misery contest is just stupid.

Second, the fact that we've had this many powerful storms isn't an accident. They're referred to as forces of nature and in one sense they are, but hello, we (humanity and particularly the industrialized United States) have been fucking up Nature for the past, oh, hundred and fifty years at least. Hurricanes are one of the major ways that (excess) heat is transferred from the hot tropical regions to the cooler northern regions. Anyone stop to ask why the hell there's so much excess heat to be transferred? Nope, just turn up the AC in your SUV and applaud the government being owned by the carbon industry. To a first approximation you can model the Earth's atmosphere as a heat pump. When you add energy to a heat pump it runs faster and with more extreme cycles. Hotter hots and colder colds.

Meanwhile people blither and dither about climate change - I'm sure I'll get plenty of response comments from the deniers who, as far as I can see, are in the same position as those denying that smoking causes cancer. OK, fine. If you won't do anything about the sources of the problem (and, frankly, it's unclear to me that any of us individually can, at this point) then that's your prerogative. But please don't get sanctimonious about this because as far as I can see there's a direct line from A to B and it's pissing me off.

If there wasn't any risk to actual human beings I'd be sitting here wallowing in the schadenfreude of the fact that Katrina is going to pound the crap out of refinery row.

Comments

[tisana.livejournal.com]

OK, you're right, this shouldn't be worse than any other natural disaster, and we brought it on ourselves.

But for various reasons, this one is hitting me harder, and I won't apologize for that. This isn't to say Florida and all the other places getting hit deserve no sympathy, but I knew some people in NO, and I've been there, so it's more personal to me. If that weren't enough, the city's just poorly designed to handle this, so it's scarier.
Florida?
They're used to it, like we're used to blizzards. Of course it sucks, but they're more prepared.

And I am sick of hearing about it, but I'm also really concerned for the people down there.

[heinleinfan.livejournal.com]

One of the advantages of pretty much avoiding most news sources....I sorta realized it was coming, then at some point heard or saw that, yeah, it's gonna hit New Orleans. But I wasn't getting flooded by information or lamentations about it.

I am watching the streaming video now, as it's moving inland and it's going to hit my hometown soon.

And I think some of the coverage and the obsession over it is that Florida gets pounded by these storms all the time, yes. It's a given. It's expected. But New Orleans does not expect this kind of storm. Not like this. This part of the gulf hasn't seen a storm this bad since Camille, forty some years ago. It's almost like...people who live in storm paths are almost asking for it.
"Look honey, what a view of the ocean!"
"But Frank, isn't this area where they get four or five hurricanes a year?"
"Who cares, Flo, we'll just board up the windows, think of the deal we got!"
And people who don't ask for it, they are not ready for this sort of damage and destruction. And, because of it moving inland...that's just insane. No one in Jackson Mississippi was expecting to be hit by a hurricane this year.
While the coastal folks might be used to storms and survived Camille forty years ago and all that...the inland folks aren't prepared. Lots of flooding, that's going to be the worst part and cause the most destruction.


Not that I disagree with or am slapping your hand or anything. Humans suck and Americans in particular are really bad about "Oh, Woe Is Me".

Just being a voice of someone who grew up where destructive weather didn't happen every winter, it just hardly ever happened at all.

[drwex]

I spent the weekend with three folk who seemed to be obsessed about it, so my own personal avoidance of the news was obliterated.

I deliberately elided from the rant the whole section on "asking for it." I don't so much object to that - people are free to be stupid, but I object to the accompanying social philosophy that says loss must be socialized (insurance, charity, governmental assistance) but gain must be privatized (don't you dare tax my earnings, etc) and how that plays out particularly in disaster situations.

But then again, most people already know I'm an unrepentant hippie commie long-haired pinko anyway.

[heinleinfan.livejournal.com]

I get the hippie/longhaired part. But pinko/commie? I don't know enough about politics and the definitions of various thought schools, but I was leaning towards calling you a libertarian, not a commie.

[drwex]

I think the fundamental difference is that a libertarian thinks the government should withdraw support in case of loss (saying people should depend on private insurance/charity only) whereas a pinko/commie thinks it's OK to socialize the gains and keep public support in case of loss.

feste_sylvain and I used to have great free-range debates on elbows around this kind of thing. I'm sure he'll tell me if I've misrepresented that position.

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

It's not that government should "withdraw support" in case of loss; the government should never be supporting such things in the first place. (Nor should they be subsidizing insurance companies, nor protecting them from doing their jobs.)

The idea is that, absent such skewing factors as subsidies, insurance as a whole will figure out how often and how hard a given area will be hit with a given disaster, and will set premiums accordingly. When you have multi-million dollar beachfront homes in the Carolinas routinely being bailed out by FEMA after every hurricane so they can rebuild on the same spot, clearly there is something broken with the system.

In the case of New Orleans, it was created where it is because it's an ideal spot for a port. It is not geologically stable, when you factor in the various water tables and such. It has gotten away with being where it is for so long because hurricanes are relatively rare events there. But what with global warming, hurricanes will be more frequent and larger in the area, so rebuilding should be done a bit upstream.

[drwex]

Yes, I was sloppy in using the "withdraw support" phrase. I didn't mean in media res; I meant that you believe it shouldn't be part of the system at all. I hereby elide the usual rehash of our differing positions here; I'll simply say I miss that part of elbows.

right on...

[wisdombus.livejournal.com]

no complaints here, i agree. simple cause & effect. displaced karma, if you will.

Re: right on...

[drwex]

Thanks (though I disagree on the karma bit - that's a separate rant). Do we know each other? I couldn't find mutual friends links.

Re: right on...

[wisdombus.livejournal.com]

Nope, don't know you, just found your post on Technorati. Have you ever seen that site? It's like Google for blogs basically, I love it.

Re: right on...

[drwex]

I blog with and know some people who have Technorati profiles. I wasn't aware my stuff (esp. personal stuff!) showed up there. But I guess they're sweeping up all of LJ and it's a hot search topic now.

[donnad.livejournal.com]

Yes, well said.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

*shrug* I'm still wondering about Old River Control. Now *that* would be an event.

[drwex]

I agree. Back in the Dark Ages I took a course in Oceanography from a professor who, among other things, had been on a panel that advised the Army Corps of Engineers _not_ to muck with the river's shifting and instead work with it. He had some choice comments in class on that whole process. Of course the panel's recommendations were ignored and we got a concretized canal instead of a more natural river evolution. Some day it'll go back. Water is persistent that way.

[keyne.livejournal.com]

If you know of other Cat 5 storms that have hit the US this season, or are on their way, please let us know. Katrina, before it was downgraded to a Cat 4 at landfall, was only the fourth Cat 5 storm to graze the US in one hundred and fifty years.

And the massive attention had a lot more to do with the massive potential for death and destruction than with anything "magical" about New Orleans. If the city had taken a direct hit, we'd have lost a major American city, seen up to a hundred thousand people die, and suffered an environmental disaster which could take a generation or more to clean up. Don't you think that's worth a little obsession?

[drwex]

I thought Dennis was Cat 5, but it was down to 4 when it hit. Ditto Charley from 2004 - was a Cat 5 at sea but down to 4 when it hit. Note that in the past year four hurricanes have made landfall with winds around 150mph, which is just about the top end of Cat 4.

I maintain that my major points are still valid - Katrina isn't as off-the-scale as people are making it out to be. And no, I don't think it's worth any more obsession than any other disaster and yes, I still think obsession with the disaster blinds us to questioning of its causes and our roles in that.

Bad Nasty Oil Getting More Expensive

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

So, what with the refineries being hit, will you be upping your contribution to Citizens' Energy to keep our own less-well-off from freezing this winter?

Or is that all just part of the Carbon Conspiracy (R)?

Re: Bad Nasty Oil Getting More Expensive

[drwex]

I haven't in the past contributed to direct-assistance winter heating charities. Finding one with a good ratio of donations:disbursements might be a good idea. Thanks for the prod.

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

My sympathies for your having to endure insipid coverage/people obsessing over doom and gloom.

[c1.livejournal.com]

Actually, I won't disagree with your primary points.
I'm tired of people deciding to make their home in disaster prone areas and then promptly line up for their government handout when Things Go Wrong. The loss of NOLA, while incredibly tragic, was anticipated- to paraphrase the director of FEMA: "we've been planning for this for years."
As for the future of the city- is the city the buildings, or is it the inhabitants? I say NOLA will endure. Maybe not in its historic location, but it will endure.
(And for a city that has always insisted on doing everything "over the top," if this is indeed its swan song, then it's about as over the top as it could be.)

[r-ness.livejournal.com]

Katrina is going to pound the crap out of refinery row.

To me, that's the bigger story.

But hey, I have no sense of proportion, really. :)

[golux-org.livejournal.com]

I think it's reasonable Katrina captivated people's attention. This storm had the 4th lowest pressure EVER recorded in an Atlantic hurricane, and that would have me fascinated even if the storm never came close to land.

I have been close to civil defense and media preparations for hurricanes. Katrina was a rare emergency because of the difficulty of evacuating New Orleans; intense coverage is appropriate when so many lives are at stake, and (literally) there are no minutes to spare in getting people out. For the population outside the affected region, the Katrina story was more relevant than most hurricanes because of the scale of the cultural and economic effects. And I write this as someone with no connection to New Orleans, but who lost a structure of personal significance in the 2004 Florida storms.

I believe that living in New Orleans is a foolish choice. I like John McPhee's writings about mankind's stubborn effort to build habitations in geologically unsafe locations. People just don't think in geological time, and they extrapolate future safety from a personal experience of past safety. It seems to be a gut-level instinct. When I worked with particle accelerators, I found that people were cautious for the first two weeks; when they didn't start glowing in the dark during the first fortnight, they lost respect for the hazards of the device. Bad instinct for rationally responding to low-frequency high-consequence dangers.

Speaking of geological time, the Atlantic hurricane basin shows significant cyclic behavior on the level of decades. The storm lull during the 70's and 80's encouraged lots of stupid coastal development, because people only seem to remember what they've personally experienced. Recent storm activity would be expected from natural variations, and should come as no surprise to anyone. I can't think of a more respected expert on hurricanes than Dr. Gray:

NY Times article on hurricanes

Global warming, of course, is a bad thing. And people ignore global warming for precisely the same reason that they flock to the Gulf coast -- a habit of thinking about risks on the order of 1-10 years, not 10-100 years. I'm not saying that global warming should be tolerated, or that it won't cause an increase in the severity of hurricanes ... just that the normal ocean cycles are more varied than recent experience suggests.