Hurricane Katrina's not the worst case scenario

Hurricane Katrina's not the worst case scenario

Pundits, experts and politicians have long predicted and have called Katrina, the category 4 or 5 hurricane that devastated and then flooded New Orleans a worst case scenario

Unfortunately it’s not.

The worst case scenario is the real possibility of concurrent Catastrophes –such as a 2nd or 3 storm ( before evacuees recover from the first) topped by an Avian Flu pandemic or the likelihood of an opportunistic terrorist attack to aggravate the misery of a natural disaster.  (several strategically placed bombs behind levees on Lake Pontchartrain, would do the trick) Don’t forget it’s still early in the 2005 hurricane season

Future Atlantic storms will likely be both destructive and economically disruptive

Scientists now know that the 60’s, 70's and 80’s were a lull period in a normal 40 year period of storm intensity.  Several researchers predict that since 1995 , Atlantic hurricanes will be more frequent and severe - lasting for a period of up to 20-45 years.

Core sample studies and radioactive dating in the North Eastern USA states have identified a 3000 year cycle of extreme flooding episodes that have lasted over a millennium.  Yes, as luck would have it, this 3000 year flooding cycle is now due, overlapping the shorter term hurricane cycle above.

A double whammy that will not only affect the southern seaboard but the north eastern USA coast and possibly Canada as well.

Hang on to your hats.  !!

Will we see a new class of Weather Nomads?  (without a obvious Moses?  ) , Homeland Refugees ?  Mother Nature’s exiles?  Local expatriates ?  All escaping from the New Atlantis?  Will the new normal be evacuees spending a 1/5 to 1/10 of their lives uprooted in makeshift shelters. (like in the 1927 Mississippi Flood where 300, 000 African-Ameicans were forced to live in refugee camps for months)

The sad fact is that politicians will undoubtedly spend billions of dollars to rebuild New Orleans and other affected communities. Inhabitants will still be vulnerable to future assaults from Mother Nature, because of the obvious fact --they are still sitting below sea level.

It’s a wild card that I hope will never happen but in any case, must be explored and addressed in advance by our political leaders.

Walter Derzko

Expert, Consultant and Guest Speaker on  emerging smart technologies and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy

Comments

[Walter Derzko]

Tetrad for Hurricane Katrina

( The Tetrad is a "law" and a "predictive tool" developed by Marshall McLuhan that says that any technology or artifact has 4 effects on society. Something gets enhanced, retrieved, obscolesced and at the extreme flippes or reverses.-Walter Derzko)

Katrina Enhances: Despiration

Katrina Retreives : the Urban carnivore

"Television audiences may have been shocked to see people looting New Orleans retail outlets -- stealing food, beverages and guns. Such behavior, however, is common when normal social structure breaks down. Under normal circumstances, people go about their lives and conform, accepting that the regular social structure is in place. The situation quickly deteriorates when disaster hits and the daily social structure deteriorates. While some of the people looting are common criminals, the majority may be ordinary, everyday people who are in a panic because food and water are suddenly in short supply."
-Bryan Byers, criminal justice professor at Ball Sate universty

Katrina also Retreives: Fatalism- the world is seen as a hostile and menacing place

"What we are seeing in the devastated coastal communities is a fierce localism and attachment to place acting in concert with a traditionally southern fatalism in which the world is seen as a hostile and menacing place from which it is generally wiser to expect the worst. The result is an expectation of struggle as a natural part of life and a perception that life's hardships and struggles are better borne at home in a familiar place among familiar people."
-James Cobb, Ph.D., historian at the University of Georgia, is an expert in Southern history and wrote extensively about floods and flooding in the Delta, including the big 1927 flood:

Katrina Obsolesces: civility, conformity, social order

At the extreme Katrina Flips into: temporary social disorder, daily social structures deteriorate, barter, new laws of the jungle

[Walter Derzko]

Responding to a previous comment:

"Totally agree with your assessment and the way billions will be shafted awaiting the next disaster! Criminals!"

You don't have to wait for the next disaster. Money's been shafted even before Katrina...

Walter Derzko

KATRINA'S AFTERMATH
Louisiana Officials Indicted Before Katrina Hit Federal audits found dubious expenditures by the state's emergency preparedness agency, which will administer FEMA hurricane aid.
By Ken Silverstein and Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writers

September 17, 2005

WASHINGTON - Senior officials in Louisiana's emergency planning agency already were awaiting trial over allegations stemming from a federal investigation into waste, mismanagement and missing funds when Hurricane Katrina struck.

And federal auditors are still trying to track as much as $60 million in unaccounted for funds that were funneled to the state from the Federal Emergency Management Agency dating back to 1998.

In March, FEMA demanded that Louisiana repay $30.4 million to the federal government.

[ ]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-money17sep17,0,5249058,print.story?coll=la-home-nation

[Walter Derzko]

Update: Interesting Historical Note

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0684840022/002-1931588-8975211?v=glance

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and
How It Changed America
Paperback: 528 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster (April 2, 1998)
ISBN: 0684840022
by John M. Barry

Editorial Reviews

When Mother Nature rages, the physical results are never subtle. Because we cannot contain the weather, we can only react by tabulating the damage in dollar amounts, estimating the number of people left homeless, and laying the plans for rebuilding. But as John M. Barry expertly details in Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, some calamities transform much more than the landscape.

While tracing the history of the nation's most destructive natural disaster, Barry explains how ineptitude and greed helped cause the flood, and how the policies created to deal with the disaster changed the culture of the Mississippi Delta. Existing racial rifts expanded, helping to launch Herbert Hoover into the White House and shifting the political alliances of many blacks in the process. An absorbing account of a little-known, yet monumental event in American history, Rising Tide reveals how human behavior proved more destructive than the swollen river itself. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal
In the spring of 1927, America witnessed perhaps its greatest natural disaster: a flood that profoundly changed race relations, government, and society in the Mississippi River valley region. Barry (The Transformed Cell, LJ 9/1/92) presents here a fascinating social history of the effects of the massive flood. More than 30 feet of water stood over land inhabited by nearly one million people. Almost 300,000 African Americans were forced to live in refugee camps for months. Many people, both black and white, left the land and never returned. Using an impressive array of primary and secondary sources, Barry clearly traces and analyzes how the changes produced by the flood in the lower South came into conflict and ultimately destroyed the old planter aristocracy, accelerated black migration to the North, and foreshadowed federal government intervention in the region's social and economic life during the New Deal. His well-written work supplants Pete Daniel's Deep'n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi Flood (1977) as the standard work on the subject. Recommended for public and academic libraries.
-?Charles C. Hay III, Eastern Kentucky Univ. Libs., Richmond
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

[Brudder Andrusha]

Totally agree with your assessment and the way billions will be shafted awaiting the next disaster!

Criminals!