Giving up on New Orleans

From the LA Times:

As we near the 100-day mark since Hurricane Katrina hit, it’s time we ended our national state of denial and abandon New Orleans for good....

So stop the repairs. Close the few businesses that have reopened. Leave the levees in their tattered state and get out. Right now. It’s utterly unsafe to live there.

As someone who dearly loves New Orleans, it pains me immeasurably to call for this retreat. I mean what I say. Shut the city down. To encourage people to return to New Orleans, as Bush is doing, without funding the only plan that can save the city from the next Katrina is to commit an act of mass homicide.

Anyone who doesn’t like this news — farmers who export grain through the port of New Orleans, New Englanders who heat their homes with natural gas from the Gulf of Mexico, cultural enthusiasts who like their gumbo in the French Quarter — should direct their comments straight to the White House.

Did that get your attention? Unfortunately, I tend to agree with this editorial’s shock statement. Not because I want to see New Orleans disappear forever, but because it is going to disappear forever after a couple more Katrinas. The entire area is horribly vulnerable. There are few buffering marshlands and barrier islands left to reduce storm surges and slow hurricanes down. The marshlands and barrier islands are disappearing at a rate of about 50 acres a day. They have been for years - an area about the size of Rhode Island has disappeared since 1945.

But there was a plan called Coast 2050. For $14 billion, a portion of the silt rich Mississippi would be re-routed into the marshes and barrier islands. Within 12 months, the barrier islands would be naturally reconstructed and the marshes would be built up over time.

Environmentalists, big oil companies, and the National Academy of Sciences lauded the plan as technically sound and vital to restore/preserve New Orleans and the Port of New Orleans.

This plan was recently sent to Congress in a spending package, but the White House amended the $14 billion. They scratched out the $14 billion and replaced the figure with $250 million—which buys a whole lot of not much.

Sometimes you have to spend money to save money. Or are these gambling men in the White House who’d prefer to take their chances with hurricanes of increasing ferocity and then spend tens of billions in disaster relief and repairs every time luck runs out? We spend $5.6 billion per month in Iraq and can cobble together tens of billions in relief and reconstruction for New Orleans, but won’t spend the one time $14 billion package to protect, long term, this American treasure and the Port of New Orleans—the center of the busiest port complex in the world.

Stupid is as stupid does, Mr. President.