Looking back at Hurricane Katrina also means looking ahead to the future impacts of global warming.
One year ago, Katrina's winds shredded through the Gulf South like a giant scythe. But it was the flood in New Orleans that jolted the national psyche and left the deepest memory. The flood turned the Big Easy into a disaster zone, planting the image of a Third World backwater. Television pictures across the globe showed people trapped on rooftops, sloshing knee-high past bloated corpses and sunken cars, old folk in wheelchairs, women and babies, looters with grocery carts. Most people fled to far-flung places, many to stay for weeks and months. With 80 percent of New Orleans under water, the country that put men on the moon took five days to
evacuate hospitals.
Four years after the terrorist attacks of 9.11, the flood exposed an inept emergency response system. After telling his soon-to-be-sacked FEMA director, "Brownie, you're doing a
heckuva job," Bush's popularity plunged, swamped by an image of detachment and incompetence.
Now, as the media gears up for Katrina anniversary packages, we can expect fresh video of New Orleans' dead neighborhoods,
panning abandoned streets and houses still etched
with brown waterlines like domestic shells after a neutron bomb. With only 181,000 of the pre-Katrina population of 463,000 back, the infrastructure is fragile-electricity reaches only 60 percent of the pre-Katrina customer
base. The water system needs an estimated $2 billion in repair. The flood punctured 17,000 leaks in the 136-mile piping system. As a reduced work force scrambles to repair the worst leaks, the city is losing millions of gallons of water a week.
There is a shadow-story to this devastation that reaches across the country. In exposing the shoddy system of federal emergency preparedness, the New Orleans flood highlights a far greater crisis: the impact of climate change.
Katrina was a billboard for global warming. For years, emissions
from fossil fuels used by industry and automobiles sent carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that allowed sunlight in but kept heat from escaping, creating what's been called a greenhouse
effect. As a scientific consensus emerged, Al Gore, then a US senator, made global warming a political issue.
Today's Congressional majority scorns the issue. US Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., calls global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." For years,
ExxonMobil has engaged in a disinformation campaign to discredit the scientific findings. With no hint of irony, Inhofe calls global warming "the big lie," comparing the science behind it to Nazi propaganda leading up to World War II.
An Inconvenient Truth
, the film based on Gore's ongoing lectures (and the title of his companion book), shows stark scenes of glaciers crumbling and the browning of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania-gone are the
snowcaps Hemingway adored. As gases from burned fossil fuels accumulate in the atmosphere, a long melt is under way in Greenland and Antarctica. The melted ice causes seas to rise. As seas rise, so do their temperatures rise in hot months. Hotter air and warmer water ignite more powerful storms. (Inhofe told the Tulsa World that every claim in the documentary "has been refuted scientifically," although he conceded he had not seen the film.
The hottest year on record, 2005, saw the greatest concentration of hurricanes with record winds-Katrina, Rita and Wilma. But the summer of 2006 has brought continuing destruction, only more spread out.
"We'd have to go back over three decades to find anything comparable to the flooding we're seeing in the Northeast," National Weather Service meteorologist Dennis Feltgen
told USA Today in late June. He was referring to the wash of destruction in New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Virginia.
Perhaps the most chilling scene in
An Inconvenient Truth
is an aerial map of Manhattan turning blue-green from flooding. Don't laugh. One hard turn from a Cat 3 hurricane and the Big Apple could be a mess.
A mild version of that scenario happened in December 1992 when a northeasterly storm sent the sea level up
eight feet at the southern edge of Manhattan
Island. LaGuardia Airport had to close, the Brooklyn tunnel flooded, and the subway system shut down.
Perhaps those memories, coupled with TV coverage of Katrina, explains why people in Manhattan are buying flood insurance. At present, only 28 percent of homes in the Northeast carry flood insurance, compared to 49 percent nationwide, in areas that are considered high-risk.
In his new book,
The Ravaging Tide
, Mike Tidwell writes that a rise in sea level of one to three feet will have an
impact on "every inch of American shoreline from the Texas coast to the Florida Keys to the Outer Banks of North Carolina to Cape Cod. The low-lying areas of San Diego and San Francisco and much of Puget Sound on the West Coast are at great risk too." He cites an EPA study in saying that "no fewer than one in four US buildings within five hundred feet of a coastline will be destroyed by erosion by mid-century."
In New Mexico, heavy rains over the last month have led to flooding throughout the state. Last week,
FEMA representatives, along with New Mexico Emergency Management officials, surveyed the damage from severe flooding in Doña Ana County and the village of Hatch, and Gov. Bill Richardson subsequently announced he would sign a presidential disaster declaration request.
Indeed, while drought is certainly part of the picture for New Mexico's climate future, flood damage also is one of the potential dangers to New Mexico's infrastructure cited in a report on the impact of climate change in the state [see
below].
In fact, flooding is America's most common natural disaster. In the decade before Katrina, flooding caused $7.1 billion in losses to homes and businesses. As the intensity and frequency increase, the
average 30-year mortgage has a 26 percent chance of taking damage from rising water, compared to a 4 percent chance of fire. As more people buy flood insurance, the financial pressure on the federal government-which backs flood insurance-will escalate in kind.
"Hurricane Katrina's $23 billion [insurance] hit has triggered a full-blown debate about the federal program that insures property in flood-prone areas," author Neil Peirce wrote recently in
. "Critics are charging the program's rates are so cheap and its loopholes so broad that it actually puts pressure on local governments to permit new development in extraordinarily flood-prone areas-territory that should never be built on in the first place."
Human error produced the New Orleans flood-huge flaws in
Mississippi River levee projects built by the US Army Corps of Engineers and environmental negligence by government and oil companies that caused wetlands south of the city to erode. The
lost wetlands gave tidal waves an open alley to the city. But the dynamics of this failure are national in scope.
"The cost of a collapsing coast is one of fundamental survival," says Mark Davis, director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana in Baton Rouge, a group that has worked on the issue for years. "What happened last year was also the failure of a
value system. We assumed we had tamed the forces of nature. We need to understand that if we want there to be a New Orleans, or a Los Angeles, or a Miami, or a New York, 500 years from now, we can't assume they'll be there. We have to plan for them to be there. That's why the rise in sea levels and freshwater management are so extraordinary."
As Davis runs down a list of other cities-including San Francisco, Orlando and Atlanta-where rapid growth has overwhelmed environmental-defense planning, it is worth noting that FEMA considers New Orleans, Miami and New York as the cities most vulnerable to hurricane disasters. More than a third of the 167 hurricanes that struck
America in the last century hit Florida. Miami is about three feet above sea level, with a vast wetlands complex to the west. Beachfront development and a building boom have packed the area with people. If the ocean levels continue to rise, the area's marshy buffer won't be enough to halt a massive flood. That is what happened to New Orleans.
In the 24 hours before Katrina made landfall, the storm doubled in size, blanketing waters "of the Gulf equal in area to California," report John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein in another new book,
Path of Destruction
. As the Category 5 storm with 175 mph
winds neared Louisiana, winds dropped to 127 mph, a Category 3 level, still strong enough to produce huge waves.
Katrina hit early on Monday, Aug. 29. The eye flattened the coastal town of Buras, sending thunderous waves across villages and hamlets south of the city, tossing cars and boats onto trees and roofs. Winds roared through Lake Borgne, pushing waves 20 feet high. The giant water sheets rolled toward New Orleans East on a passageway between man-made canals. One side of the vast lane straddles a levee along
the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway; the other levee hugs the eastern side of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, known locally as MR-GO (pronounced, without a trace of irony, "mister go").
"The funnel," where the Intracoastal and the MR-GO meet, sent water throttling between and over the tops of those levees and into the city as well as nearby St. Bernard Parish-the end result of decades of dredging by the Corps of Engineers. Building MR-GO destroyed 20,000 acres of marshland in the 1960s. Junior Rodriguez, the barrel-chested president of St. Bernard Parish, railed against MR-GO for years. As the Corps dug the alternate shipping lane for moving cargo from the Mississippi to the Gulf, the dredging opened an artery 500 feet wide. MR-GO was finished in 1963.
The Lower Nine and St. Bernard Parish were destined to flood because of MR-GO. Even Louisiana's Republican Senator, David Vitter-who before Katrina promoted legislation to allow commercial destruction of cypress trees-has come
around to saying that the 76-mile canal should be closed. Such a move would allow for some of the lost wetlands to be restored.
Yet alongside the Corps' mistakes and FEMA's incompetence, the city bears a measure of blame. The city's levee district in the early 1980s pressed the Corps to confine its design scope to a 100-year hurricane defense, which meant the city would pay
proportionally less for its cost-share of levee work, thereby freeing funds for lakefront development. The Corps wanted to build canal floodgates in the lake, which might have prevented flooding in much of the city.
The flooding put in sharp relief a central challenge to south Louisiana's survival: coastal erosion, and how to remake wetlands as a protective buffer to Gulf hurricanes. The damage was chronicled by Times-Picayune reporters Schleifstein and McQuaid in a 2002 series; by Mike Tidwell in his 2003 book,
Bayou Farewell
; and by Christopher Hallowell in his 2001 book on wetlands loss,
Holding Back the Sea
, among others.
The land south of New Orleans has been sinking as Gulf waters rise. Tidwell found fishing communities with submerged cemeteries, people whose property had disappeared into the Gulf. A million acres of wetlands have been swallowed by the Gulf, eroding
nature's defense against hurricane tidal waves, opening a destructive path to the city.
Former Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster (who served from 1996 to 2004) gave petrochemical industries an easy ride for toxic waste disposal. But Foster, a bluff, Falstaffian fellow, liked the great
outdoors and became concerned about coastal erosion thanks to a cross-section of business people, fishermen, industrialists, state officials and ecologists who collaborated on a long report in 1998 called
Coast 2050: Toward A Sustainable Coastal Louisiana
. Foster gave George W Bush copies of Hallowell's and Tidwell's books. (There is little evidence that he read them.)
Coastal 2050
estimated it would cost $14 billion to restore the lost wetlands-big money, but a fraction of the $200 billion in estimated losses from Katrina. In 2004, Bush cut the Army Corps' funding request for levee maintenance by more than 80 percent.
Louisiana's southern parishes are sinking-just as other rural and metropolitan areas along the Atlantic coast will effectively sink as ocean levels rise. For now, the Louisiana
case is more severe; it stems in part from 20,000 miles of pipelines that criss-cross the coastal floor to deliver oil and gas from offshore rigs. Another factor for the mass sinkage is the impact of levees built by the US Army Corps of Engineers developed in response to the Great Flood of 1927. Containing the Mississippi's currents with stronger levees kept the city safe from the river, but bottled up diversionary outlets, which drove streams of river silt like a chute into the Gulf rather than letting the sediment generate sluiceways to replenish tidal marshes. Starved of river nutrients, gouged by pipe excavations, the wetlands eroded and lower Louisiana began sinking in the process.
Through the winter, as members of Congress flew down to tour
the dead neighborhoods, offering condolences and support (the meaning of which remains opaque), the Democrats failed to make an issue of Katrina-why the flood happened, how to prevent future ones. The war in Iraq was keeping Bush down in the polls, but the flood is
what put him there. Perhaps the portents of mass ecological breakdown are a migraine for most pols in the daily rush of seeking money at the trough. Apart from the environmental lobby, it was left to certain members of the media, and Al Gore, to stay on point.
"Environmental defense" is not an issue in most people's mind. The stirrings of a Louisiana plan to prevent
future disasters are based on that idea, though no one is calling it that. Here again, the implications are national in scope.
On Aug. 1 the Senate approved a bill by US Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., that would give Louisiana and other Gulf states a 37.5 percent royalty on 8.3 million acres newly designated for drilling in the Gulf, providing an estimated $200 million annually in the next decade. A House bill by US Rep. Bobby Jindal, a Republican who
represents suburbs of New Orleans, called for higher royalties, netting $2 billion a year. A compromise bill working through a House-Senate conference should give the state sorely needed funds for coastal erosion. For her part, Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco sued the federal Minerals Management Service to halt a scheduled lease of oil and gas exploration in the Gulf, arguing that the agency ignored environmental damage caused by offshore drilling. A windfall in offshore royalties would give the state some leverage in shoring up erosion and preventing future destruction.
On Aug. 14, a federal judge denied Blanco's request to halt the lease, but warned potential bidders that the state is likely to prevail on its argument, which could stop drilling on the leased tracts. The federal agency has a 90-day window to accept the bids, just about the time of the scheduled trial.
For now, there is no institutional mechanism to rebuild the eroding coastline. Mark Davis, the outgoing
director of the coastal restoration coalition, says that "awareness is at an all-time high, but the
decision-making apparatus is not there to do what needs to be done. It's like watching a revival movement, with everyone talking about how good heaven is, but you don't see a great shift in behavior as if people are planning to get there."
Davis, who has worked with everyone from bank presidents to shrimpers, faults a forest of red tape and inertia in Washington. Even if revenues materialize, the state lacks jurisdiction over levees and navigational structures-they fall under federal authority. "The state's ability to change is not just a question of money," he says. "Blanco has come to the realization that the state has to lead the federal government to the answers."
Davis credits Blanco for suing the minerals management agency; she sent a message that the feds must participate in rebuilding the coast.
What kind of institution should guide coastal restoration? And how do you pay for it? "A big problem with major environmental projects is that Congress authorizes funds that take forever to materialize," says Davis. Authorized funding has lagged in delivery in restoration of the Everglades and in a California project to prevent flooding from the Sacramento River that threatens San Francisco Bay. Finding a dependable revenue stream is a big hurdle. Congressional committees have annual appropriations that go through endless negotiations over special interests, like a revolving door, every year.
The Tennessee Valley Authority delivered electrification to the middle South during the Great Depression, as a
federal agency. Why couldn't a similar agency rebuild Louisiana's wetlands as
part of an Atlantic coastal protection agenda, with immunity from Congressional pork-barreling?
Whatever the mechanism necessary for a solution, it is way overdue.
As is, many argue, a mass campaign to reduce global warming. A national policy that rewards industry for cutting carbon dioxide emissions, developing energy-efficient cars and homes and shifting the economy from dependency on fossil fuels may seem unreachable in this maddened time of terrorism and oil wars. The alternative? We'll fill up at $5 a gallon and head for the heartland each time the next big one comes.
Fire and Water
What will global warming mean for New Mexico?
By
and
Greater drought, more wildfires, reduced water supplies. These are a few of global warming's potential impacts in New Mexico.
And though the state is actively involved in efforts to curb emissions and slow climate change, questions still remain about how well prepared New Mexico's infrastructure would be in the event of weather-related disasters.
For some emergency responders, a first-hand look at the fallout in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina reinforced concerns about disaster management.
Capt. Daniel Lopez, of the New Mexico State Police, led a team of 21 state cops to Baton Rouge and New Orleans to help with relief and evacuation efforts. While Lopez says all of his men are proud of the work they did, there's also a sense that disaster planning remains inadequate-not only in New Mexico but across the country.
"So many things are done just to get the public aware of safety and security, but when the crap hits the fan, there's a lot of flying by the seat of your pants." Lopez says. "Emergency response is still centered around this idea of shared command. But it didn't work during Katrina. Sooner or later you need to have one person making all the tough calls."
Bob Lineback agrees that planning needs to be improved. Lineback is incident commander of the New Mexico Incident Management Team, an interagency task force that works disasters all over the country. During Katrina, Lineback's team was stationed in rural Louisiana where it helped construct and operate a makeshift truck supply depot to distribute food, water and medical supplies throughout the Gulf Coast.
Lineback says the main obstacle his team encountered during its 23-day tour of duty in Louisiana involved systemic problems communicating with Katrina victims. Though he believes New Mexico is well prepared for traditional Southwestern disasters like forest fires, he says an event like a massive earthquake would "put us in challenging shape."
"The same thing could happen [as Katrina]," Lineback says. "FEMA says it is better prepared now, but nothing has been tested in terms of communication. We could find that the same organizational problems could fail here."
On the other hand, Carrie Moritomo, spokeswoman for the Governor's Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, says she's "fairly confident in how we operate in New Mexico."
Moritomo says the state has an "All-Hazard Emergency Operation Plan" that involves coordinating disaster preparedness and relief operations between various state agencies. That plan was fine tuned and subsequently updated following Katrina. The 2006 product is simply waiting for final review from Gov. Bill Richardson and his cabinet, Moritomo says.
"We made additions to the plan that are devoted to a Katrina-type event. Something on the scale of an earthquake." Moritomo says. "It speaks to how all different state departments would interact and what our standard operating procedure would be."
At the same time, the state has been working to curtail future climate changes associated with global warming that could exacerbate such events.
Just a few months before Hurricane Katrina, Richardson signed an executive order that established the state's Climate Change Advisory Group. That group's job is to inventory current and future state greenhouse gas emissions, and come up with a plan to reduce those emissions such that by 2012 they would be back to 2000 levels.
The potential effects of climate change in New Mexico do not include hurricanes. But they do include multiple impacts on the state's water supply and infrastructure as a result of warmer temperatures and reduced snowpack. A report issued at the end of last year by a CCAG technical work group lists flash floods and impacts on culverts and drainage systems as concerns. The Office of the State Engineer recently released a second report on the impact of climate change on the state's water supply.
"The real takeaway message is that our water supply is going to be impacted," Sandra Ely, the state's environment and energy policy coordinator, says. "What we know is that we'll have more precipitation as rain and less as snow, and with less snowpack, that really puts us in jeopardy."
The state also was the first state (and so far the only one; other members include companies and cities) to join the Chicago Climate Exchange, which requires participants to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or buy credits.
"The criticism that has come toward the Chicago Climate Exchange is that it doesn't go far enough fast enough," New Mexico Environment Secretary Ron Curry says. "Our response to that is, it's not perfect, but at least it's something that can show demonstrable results."
This year, New Mexico is expected to have to buy approximately $40,000 of emission credits.
Still, Curry says the efforts New Mexico is making could alter its climactic future.
"If you look at the catastrophic events that could take place in Greenland, there are some who say those events can't be changed, they are set in stone. I prefer to think we at least need to try to take some control over our destiny…" Curry says.
As for preparing for some of the future scenarios here as weather patterns change, both Curry and Ely say the state's Climate Change Advisory Group hasn't gotten there yet.
"Our focus has been on getting our emissions down," Ely says. "We feel that's the priority. As for how are we going to adapt to climate change, we know it's coming, we know we can't stop it totally. How are we going to make changes in our lives to deal with drought and insufficient food supplies? We have not tackled that yet."
More information on New Mexico's efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions can be found at
.