Originally published on the CGS blog on June 1, 2007.
Peter Whoriskey’s article in the Post today on the reconstruction of New Orleans’ flood defenses blows my mind. He reports that, when completed in 2011, the projects will provide “100-year protection.” Which basically means that, on average, a storm heavy enough to overcome the protections will come along once every hundred years.
This doesn’t even come close to cutting it.
As Whoriskey points out, Hurricane Katrina itself is a “400-year event.” So the new-and-improved, “come back and feel safe in your homes, this national disgrace will never happen again” protections would not even protect the city against a weather event four times as likely… Am I the only one who thinks that this takes fuzzy math to a whole new level?
And so the residents of New Orleans are being shortchanged again.
But the New Orleans debacle raises another red flag for me… Has anyone heard of climate change? Over the next hundred years, regardless of whether we manage to hit the brakes on greenhouse gas emissions, we are already committed to a certain amount of warming thanks to the carbon we have already pumped into our atmosphere, which means (as anyone who has been reading the front page of any newspaper for the past twelve months should have memorized by now) STRONGER STORMS and RISING SEA LEVELS. (sorry, just couldn’t resist)
Now I’m neither a scientist nor a mathematician, but might this just mean that the 1 in 100 odds New Orleanans are depending on to safeguard their lives and livelihoods turn out to be even flimsier than it originally appeared?
And what does this mean for communities beyond New Orleans, not just in the U.S. but around the world? While the international community has been almost exclusively focused on negotiating limits on greenhouse gas emissions (or, in the case of the Bush administration, focused on negotiating the possibility of negotiating a non-binding goal to limit greenhouse gas emissions) to limit the extent of climate change, the need to adapt has slipped under the radar screens.
For the sake of vulnerable communities, especially those in developing countries, I hope this changes, and fast.
