Thursday, September 15, 2005
Truth is a harsh mistress
Near the climax of his 1966 novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, sci-fi legend Robert Heinlein details an attack on earth by a rebelling colony of humans exiled to the moon.
The moon rebels hurl bombs with pin-point accuracy at strategic targets on earth. They want to cause structural damage and frighten rather than kill human beings. So, in the case of St. Louis, Kansas City and New Orleans they aim for the nearby rivers.
Such action, as Heinlein's narrator mentions: "will probably flood New Orleans" . No excessive risk is mentioned in the case of the other two cities.
Heinlein is reputed as a visionary, but not for identifying the susceptibility of New Orleans to flood damage.
It is by now well-known in France that Jacques Chirac said in his 1951-4 university economics thesis ,The Development of the Port of New Orleans, inter alia:
"(T)he site of New-Orleans, if it were appropriate for the establishment of a port, was unfavorable to that of a city ... From the very start, indeed, it had to be protected from the floods"
Everybody now knows that New Orelans is/was a city below sea level. It was sinking further below sea level every year.
Pre-Katrina FEMA warnings about the susceptibility of New Orleans seemed jaw-droppingly prescient when they were flash-highlighted after the flood, but less so now that the floodgates of truth have opened.
Why was nothing done? Well, the usual array of tendentious Bush-bashing windbags have been quick, of course, to deliver their own verdicts.
The truth is more complicated and involves much failure over many decades.
