Freakonomics On Hurricane Katrina/New Orleans Flood
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Blogging, Hurricane KatrinaThe author of the wildly popular book ask some questions on their blog:
1) How much of the damage/human toll is because of the hurricane per se versus the levees breaking? If we had perfect foresight, would 1,000 well-placed national guardsmen and some heavy machinery have been enough to save the levees?2) If terrorists had thought of this first, could they have achieved the same effect as the hurricane, except more devastating because the attack would have come with no warning?
3) If so, are there other potential situations like this out there where a terrorist with a few explosive devices could cause such ruin?
4) Would the initial rescue response have been different if the victims weren’t poor and black?
Will you answer?
I’m particularly interested in your answers to the 2nd and 3rd questions.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 6th, 2005 and is filed under Blogging, Hurricane Katrina. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 6th, 2005 at 8:52 pm
If we look outside the US, the 7000 tonnes of explosives which sunk in the Themes a few decades ago is probably an answer to #3. Not sure how near major population centres this is, but it wouldn’t take much to set it off and it’s a lotta explosives.
September 7th, 2005 at 4:50 am
1. silly question because we will never have perfect foresight.
2. Yes, but they would have to think of knocking out the power source for the pumps first. The levee break probably could have been handled had not Katrina knocked out power.
3. Hard to conceive of a similar vulnerability. It is not like no one knew that, being below sea level, NO was uniquely vulnerable. The other great vulnerabilities are the West Coast’s almost certain destruction by an earthquake - it is just a matter of when and no one knows, and the havoc that could be wreaked by a massive volcano bursting in the Northwest. But it is hard to see how a terrorist could trigger a massive earthquake or volcano explosion.
4. I don’t think the response would have been materially different. It looks like Bush stocked FEMA with hacks and buried it in the DHS bureaucracy. So they would have bumbled no matter what the victims’ color. I don’t like any of the Bushes, but it looks like Florida’s successful coping with multiple hurricanes last year owed more to Jeb’s action and foresight than W’s inaction. Decision makers in NO were predominately Black, so it is hard to accuse them of racism. OTOH all decision makers are not poor, so it probably does not occur to them that evacuation orders are meaningless if one has no car and no place to go and no money to get by on.
August 7th, 2006 at 7:52 pm
Good job.
August 8th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
Jimbo’s response to #2 is inacurate. The pumping system in New Orleans can handle 1 inch of rainfall in the first half-hour, then 1 inch per hour afterwards. In a really heavy rainstorm, street flooding is common. The pumps, with or without power, would not have handled a catastrophic levee failure, they’re not designed for that purpose.
The other side of that is that blowing a floodwall would have caused some flooding, it wouldn’t have been as catastrophic as Katrina, it would have been more localized to a neighborhood.
Now, if a Mississippi River levee had gone, that’s another story. There’d be little left here to rebuild.
What failed were canal floodwalls, not Mississippi River levees, in the major population center.