2 “Natural” Disasters?
Societies put their people in harm’s way. Modern societies do so with an especial vengeance because their technology and resources encourage risk. But sixteenth-century Holland and Venice swelled on unstable mud and have been pumping, filling, sinking piles, and building dikes ever since. Who is to say that their centuries of affluence were not worth the risk of being in harm’s way? However, harm’s way has been widening in recent decades. Global warming is playing a role, but the more immediate problem is development. Urbanization concentrates the targets of both “nature’s wrath” and industrialization. With population growth and migration to risky areas, natural disasters worldwide are rising rapidly. More striking, the economic losses from natural disasters have risen three times as fast as the number of disasters, worldwide. In the United States, between 1950 and 1959, there were twenty major disasters costing $38 billion in 1998 dollars. But between 1990 and 1999, there were 82 major disasters, costing $535 billion. While the number of disasters multiplied by four, the costs multiplied by fourteen. The concentration of vulnerabilities has increased in the United States.
Worldwide, the total number of people affected by disasters— through loss of homes, crops, animals, livelihood, or health—almost doubled between 1990 and 1999, affecting in some serious way an alarming 188 million people every year. Even wars do not take such a high toll. The figure of 188 million “is six times more than the average of 31 million people affected annually by conflict.” (ISDR 2002, 49) Deaths, however, have been declining, with the advent of better warning systems and improved disaster relief services and trauma facilities. Deaths from natural disasters remains a developing-country phenomenon, a staggering 90 percent of the 880,000 estimated deaths in the 1990s occurred in developing countries—139,000 in one event alone, a cyclone in Bangladesh in 1991. There were more than 100,000 in the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. But even those do not match the estimate of 400,000 deaths in the 2004 Far East tsunami.
The most persistent devastation has been from meteorological disasters associated with water: floods, hurricanes (called typhoons or cyclones in other parts of the world), rain, and wind. The association with water is understandable. Great rivers and coasts have the most temperate climates, the fisheries, and the transportation. It is futile to intone, as one scientist does, “do not keep the water from the people, but the people from the water.” (Tollan 2002) We keep the water away with human constructions, such as dams and dikes and levees, and when these fail there is disaster. But it is unrealistic to expect to keep the people from the water; salt or fresh, it is lifeblood for most of the peoples of the earth. But we can limit the concentrations and thus defend them better. Building is prevented in some areas of obvious risk; we can increase those restrictions.
Two of our major disaster areas in the United States are associated with water. One is coastal—the delta of the Mississippi River in Louisiana. The other is mostly inland—the great Central Valley Project of California, the nutrient of the state’s major industry, agriculture, and the state’s largest human settlement, Los Angeles. Shortly we will explore these two to examine the connection between human decisions and natural disasters and explore what might be done, but probably won’t be done, about the concentrations that underlie their peril.
The natural hazards we face are many and extensive. Earthquakes and volcanoes are ever-present threats, and though a few earthquakes have been provoked by human activity (filling dams, or discharging military waste deep into the earth) (Perrow 1999), these earthquakes have been minor compared with the shifting of tectonic plates. We are unlikely to evacuate much of California, but we could disperse the concentrations of hazardous materials such as propane storage tanks and toxic chemical stocks in highly populated areas. We could also insist on better building codes and do a better job of enforcing them. San Francisco Bay is still being filled in, with large buildings resting on unstable mud that will envelope them in an earthquake, just as happened in its 1906 earthquake. Settlements on the slopes of volcanoes may be limited, but when Mount Rainer erupts as it is expected to, it is likely to devastate Seattle, despite its distance from the city. In developing countries, moreover, the poor are forced to live on the slopes of active volcanoes because the fertile land below them is reserved for agriculture by the wealthy.
Gigantic forest and brush fires have been very damaging in recent years in the United States, and these are clearly related to human activity: the suppression of natural burns that would reduce the accumulation of fuels, and allowing settlements in fire-prone areas, creating new population concentrations that are vulnerable.
We will not deal with epidemics in this book because they spread so rapidly that even deconcentrated populations are at risk. But the source of some our most fearsome epidemic threats are clearly related to economic concentrations. For example, as cattle raising became industrialized, agricultural corporations herded the animals together for intensive feeding, rather than letting them graze. They raised the level of proteins in the cattle by feeding them the waste products of sheep and other animals, making mad cow disease a threat. The concentration of cattle in massive feeding pens without sanitary drainage also encouraged foot-and-mouth disease to spread easily. (Kosal and Anderson 2004) Huge poultry farms in Asia suffer from similar livestock concentrations and poor sanitary conditions and can contribute to the generation and the spread of such diseases as avian flu. (Lean 2006)
Damaging floods are perversely encouraged by our attempts to control rivers to protect settlements. Landslides in the United States continue to be hazards because we build on unstable slopes, and heavy rains increase the risks. In general, such vulnerabilities can be reduced in the United States through regulating structures and land-use restrictions. But there are strong pressures not to do so, and they are not easily dismissed, as we shall see.
THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER FLOOD OF 1993
The American poet T. S. Eliot lived much of his life in England, and probably had the Thames in mind in his poem “The Dry Salvages,” where he wrote of that “strong brown god” the river, but it applies to the Mississippi River as well.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshipers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
Worshipers of the machine have cause to honor and propitiate the mighty Mississippi. It drains most of the United States—all or parts of thirty-two states and two Canadian provinces, or 41 percent of the contiguous land area in the United States, and nearly 32 percent of U.S. farm acreage. Since the 1940s, 80 percent of the wetlands, which absorb a good part of the rainfall and release it slowly into the rivers and streams that feed the Mississippi, have been converted to settlements and farmland. (Josephson 1994) The rain runs unimpeded off the streets and buildings of the settlements without being absorbed by the land, and is channeled into creeks and rivers. Modern farming leaves the residue of crops on the ground, restricting the absorption of the rain. Though the rains were just as heavy in the late 1800s and early 1900s as they were in the 1970s and 1980s, the rain has been falling more heavily in recent decades, either as a part of a long natural cycle, or because of increased “anthropogenic forcing” (global warming from our pollution). (Kunkel 2003) Heavy spring rains in a good part of this huge area will cause occasional flooding of the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Ohio, and all their tributaries. The Mississippi flood of 1927 was worse than the one we will consider, and something of that magnitude will happen again. The flood of 1993 was bad enough, and worth reviewing since it shows how little was learned from previous floods.
The winter of 1992–93 was particularly cold, with less evaporation, so the ground was saturated. Not only was the ground saturated but a stalled high pressure system meant that the moist air from the Gulf of Mexico dropped its moisture as rain when it hit a cold front from the north. Some flooding had started in May, but the high pressure system lasted for nearly two months, in June and July. Large parts of North Dakota, Kansas, and Iowa received more than double their typical rainfall. This was the Great Mississippi Flood of 1993. Through September, nine states that fed the Mississippi had record flooding: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, and Illinois. About fifty people died and damages approached $15– $18 billion. (Hurricane Katrina’s damages were estimated at $125 billion at the end of 2005.)
Nearly 150 major rivers and tributaries were affected, more than 70,000 people were evacuated, at least 10,000 homes totally destroyed, and 75 towns were completely under floodwaters, some for days. Barge traffic, carrying one-fifth of the nation’s coal, one-third of its petroleum, and one-half of its exported grain, was stopped for nearly two months; ten commercial airports were flooded; and all road traffic in the Midwest was halted. In Des Moines, Iowa, nearly a quarter of a million people were without safe drinking water for nineteen hot summer days. The river widens below St. Louis, fortunately, so the run to New Orleans did little damage. (Josephson 1994; Pinter 2005; Larson 1993; Changnon 1998; Larson 1996)
An important aspect of our focus on concentrations of hazardous material in risky, populated areas is that more than fifty propane tanks containing more than a million gallons of gas in South St. Louis presented the threat of a massive explosion that could have killed thousands. Propane tanks rarely explode, and the floodwaters would cool them, but the risk was not negligible. Fortunately, a levee break south of the city allowed the river level to drop around St. Louis and reduce pressure on the propane tanks. (McConnell n.d.)
We had a vulnerability of $15–$18 billion with the 1993 flood, and current weather trends that suggests it could happen again in the next few decades. Given this, it is depressing that extensive rebuilding is going forth that generally only meets the hundred-yearflood standard at best (some rebuilding is at the 500-year level) and at worst is far less, since lax local ordinances govern private and municipal levee standards. (A hundred-year record from, say, 1860 to 1960, approximately when the standards were set, picks a relatively quiescent period. Our warming climate will bring more precipitation, so that what was once a hundred-year flood may soon be a fifty-year flood.) Virtually every expert agrees that the best strategy is to limit or reduce infrastructure on floodplains. One of FEMA’s singular accomplishments, in a program that President George W. Bush discontinued, was to acquire 7,700 properties at a cost of $56.3 million, including the relocation of a whole town, and turn them into water-absorbing wetlands. As geologist Nicholas Pinter sadly observes, “these buyouts are now being massively counterbalanced by new construction on the floodplains.” (Pinter 2005)
Writing in 2005, Pinter says that since the 1993 flood, 28,000 new homes were built (only 10,000 had been destroyed), the population increased 23 percent, and 6,630 acres of commercial and industrial development were added on land that was inundated by the flood. In all, $2.2 billion in new development has occurred in the St. Louis area alone on land that had been underwater. To protect all this, new levees and enlarged levees are being built and the floodplain land is being raised. There is a long history of research that documents the adverse effects of levees, since they contribute to increased flood levels. There is evidence that river channeling has increased the levels to which floods can reach by as much as eighteen to twenty-four feet during the past century in the St. Louis area. Yet they continue to be built. The floodplain laws for Missouri are among the weakest in the United States, and Missouri has passed legislation that prohibits any county in the state from setting higher ones. This has encouraged the extensive development in floodplain areas, which was its purpose.
Lake Okeechobee in Florida also illustrates the role of shortsighted development. The second-largest natural lake in the United States feeds the Everglades, but its water has been diverted to agricultural areas. These areas send harmful chemicals into the lake and the Everglades, destroying the ecology by encouraging algal blooms, exotic vegetation, and sawgrass. Flood-prevention actions depleted the nutrient-rich sediment that supported benign vegetation and aquatic life. The Army Corps of Engineers built a high dike around the lake after a hurricane in 1928 drowned more than 2,500 people, but now, as a result of raising the lake’s level and poor maintenance, it leaks in many places and has a 50 percent chance of a major failure in the next four years. In addition to loss of lives and tens of billions of dollars in damages, it could irreversibly damage the Everglades and contaminate South Florida’s water supply. (King 2006)
Some areas of the United States have imposed strict standards, but like Missouri, California has not. It has extensive risks in the Sacramento, San Francisco Bay, and Los Angeles areas. Sacramento has, according to the governor in 2005, “woefully inadequate flood prevention,” and he requested $90 million in federal assistance (the Senate approved less than half of that). The aging levee system of more than a thousand miles of levees in the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers covers 738,000 acres of land that is mostly below sea level. The delta handles drinking water for about twenty-two million people, protects a million acres of farmland, and even housing developments on distant San Francisco Bay. Without improvements there is a two in three chance in the next fifty years that a major earthquake or even a major storm will cause widespread failures of levees, according to scientists. (Murphy 2005) Similar development has occurred around Dallas, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and Omaha, says Gerald Galloway, a professor of engineering at the University of Maryland. (Bridges 2006)
Geologist Jeffrey Mount notes an irony: the farmer who makes a modest investment in shoring up the levee protecting his farmland will see the property value rise, increasing the likelihood that the farmer will sell to developers, putting more people and more property at risk when the levee breaks. (There are two kinds of levees, another expert notes: those that will fail and those that have failed.) (Bridges 2006)
Congress, the Bush administration, and the U.S. Supreme Court have all weakened wetlands preservation since 2001. In January of that year the Supreme Court ruled that wetlands not directly connected to other water bodies are not protected by the Clean Water Act regulations that restrict their development. Cooperation between states linked by rivers has been difficult. In marked contrast, Europe has much more far-reaching projects and standards. The Dutch government, which had a 1953 flood comparable to the one caused by Katrina, has a policy of “more room for the rivers,” which means creating new storage and conveyance space rather than a new round of levee-raising. Villages have been relocated. Cooperation between nations in Europe has been better than cooperation between states in the United States. There, France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands—all affected by the Meuse River—have a plan for longer storage and slower release and more space for the river.
The United States is making some progress. Pinter observes: “Thanks to federal guidelines, buyouts, and enlightened management in many localities, successes in managing U.S. floodplains outnumber the failures. The problem is that when these measures succumb to local economic self-interest and political pressure, small local failures—like cracks in levees themselves—allow massive increases in floodplain infrastructure that can rob the nation of all of the net improvements painstakingly won elsewhere.” When the floodplains disappear behind new and larger levees that allow development, the more farsighted communities downstream will be overwhelmed. Citizens of Arizona and Colorado, who pay for better flood management, will pay again when the federal government bails out Missouri, where legislatures choose development over safety.
KATRINA AND NEW ORLEANS
New Orleans is built on ground that is slowly sinking into the Mississippi delta. Much of the city is inside a ring of concrete and earthen sides, rather like a bowl, fourteen feet below the surrounding waters at its deepest, and the bowl is attached to a long string of highways wandering through the sinking Mississippi delta. The bowl is surrounded by water, and the water is higher than many parts of the city that sit on the floor of the bowl. Adjacent to the city is a very large basin, Lake Pontchartrain, which is itself only a foot above sea level. Tourists climb the many steps up from a street to look at the top of the lake. Cutting through the town is the Mississippi River, itself higher by two to five feet than the historic French Quarter. Tourists regularly wonder at the superstructure of giant ships moving slowly above them as they strolled the streets.
The Louisiana delta is the city’s protection, and it is disappearing, no longer fed by the farmlands of nine states. The dams and levees concentrate the force of the river’s flow, a form of economic concentration we ordinarily do not consider. Channels below New Orleans carry the silt far out into the Gulf of Mexico in a concentrated stream. The rest of the delta, starved for replacement soil, subsides. “Since the 1930s, an area the size of Rhode Island has sunk beneath to waters of the Gulf of Mexico.” (Scully 2002) Every hour a parcel of wetlands the size of two football fields converts to open water, with incursions from the Gulf. Every 2.7 miles of marshland that a hurricane has to travel over reduces the surge tide by a foot, dispersing the storm’s power. Simply put, had Katrina struck in 1945 instead of 2005, the surge that reached New Orleans would have been as much as five to ten feet shallower than it was. (Tidwell 2005)
What was lost no longer provides a break to the wind in storms, or to the surge of seawater the wind produces. So New Orleans gets more wind and more water, and builds higher levees (and taller high-rise buildings).
A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes that extreme droughts can cause saltwater “wedges” to move upriver (such as occurred in 1988), threatening drinking water supplies. Even heavy rain events are consequential; they can increase the flow volume in the Mississippi and Atchafalaya Rivers, threatening navigation and flood-protection structures. (IPCC 2002, 24) When we channel the silt-laden water of the brown god to the Gulf to prevent seasonal flooding and build ports and cities on its porous shores, we find the cities sinking as they are starved of the silt. Such is the case with New Orleans; it steadily sinks.
All this has not gone unnoticed but has been carefully studied and publicized for at least four decades. National Geographic ran a handsome, scary spread in 2004, “Gone with the Water.” (Bourne 2004) In 2002, a special two-part series in the New Orleans Times-Picayune foresaw much of the destruction of Hurricane Katrina. (McQuaid and Schleifstein 2002) It noted that if a storm surge topped the lake’s levee system along its south shore, the death toll could be between 25,000 and 100,000, leaving thirty feet of standing water (two and a half stories). Katrina’s damage, as awful as it was, was paltry compared to what could have happened. It breached levees and leaked water that slowly rose, rather than overtopping them in a sudden surge that would leave no time for people trapped in their houses to go up to the attic.
As it was, the Times-Picayune story foresaw many aspects of the destruction Katrina caused. One particularly interests us, because it concerns the concentrations not just of populations but of hazmats. It quotes an expert: “We don’t know where the pipelines are, and you have the landfills, oil and gas facilities, abandoned brine pits, hardware stores, gas stations, the chemicals in our houses,” said Ivor van Heerden, assistant director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center. “We have no idea what people will be exposed to. You’re looking at the proverbial witch’s brew of chemicals.”
Southern Louisiana is a major shipping center and industrial area (for mostly toxic and explosive industries such as chemicals, oil and gas). Southern Louisiana produces one-quarter to one-third of the country’s seafood, one-fifth of its oil, and one-quarter of its natural gas, so the potential economic loss from a more serious blow will be enormous. The chemical and energy companies, of course, has known all along of how their steady expansion endangers their economic well-being, but expansion drives market capitalism. The obvious precautions they take are for their individual installations, not to protect the wetlands that would reduce overall risk. Most of the region’s chemical plants and other large industrial facilities are relatively safe from flooding, the Times-Picayune account asserts, without convincing evidence. The evidence is now coming in that the destruction of pipelines and other infrastructure from Katrina was far more severe than expected. It will be some time before we know the full extent of this kind of damage from Katrina, but we do know about the oil spills, and the case of Murphy Oil is sobering.
Katrina, Oil Spills, and Murphy Oil
Hurricane Katrina demonstrated quite clearly the danger of locating hazardous materials near urban populations. Katrina’s strong winds and crashing waves dislocated oil storage tanks at numerous New Orleans oil facilities from their foundations, causing millions of gallons of crude oil and other chemicals to leak into the surrounding areas. The Natural Resources Defense Council tracked 575 petroleum and hazardous chemicals spills. Ten of the biggest spills in Louisiana add up to about eight million gallons; by comparison, the Exxon Valdez accident released about eleven million gallons into a remote area in 1989. (McKay 2005) In the case of the Murphy Oil Corporation headquartered in El Dorado, Arkansas, the surrounding area was the St. Bernard Parish of New Orleans, a town of 70,000 residents. Roughly 1.1 million gallons of oil spilled from Murphy’s tanks into St. Bernard Parish, coating 1,800 homes with a thick layer of black crude oil, making them worthless, and causing high levels of property damage in a wider area. Residents of St. Bernard returning to their homes were exposed to benzene and other harmful chemicals contained in crude oil, and many suffered short-term health effects including nausea, dizziness, and skin irritation.
After the spill, Murphy Oil hired a private contractor to begin cleaning up the spilled oil. However, because the law requires that Murphy obtain permission from individuals before cleaning their property, many homes went untouched for weeks because their owners were dispersed and could not be contacted, allowing crude oil to soak into the residents’ yards. Oil that is saturated into buildings or soil is very difficult to clean, and, according to the EPA, could be carcinogenic in the long run. Because of this spill, the 1,800 households covered by Murphy’s oil face daunting cleanup tasks and health risks in both the near and distant future. (McKay 2005)
Did Murphy properly prepare for Katrina’s onslaught? A common, but not legally mandated, procedure for oil companies prior to hurricanes is to fill their tanks with either more crude oil or water, thus weighing them down so that flood waters do not rip them from their foundations. Murphy, however, filled its 250,000barrel storage tank with only 65,000 barrels of crude before Katrina struck. Predictably, the tank was dislodged by floodwaters and over 25,000 barrels of crude leaked out of the tank. Murphy has been vague about its internal hurricane guidelines and whether they were met before Katrina, and has simply blamed the spill on “an act of god.” (Burdeau 2005) While no preparation can guarantee resistance to a hurricane, Murphy’s proximity to a residential area, combined with relatively empty storage tanks, certainly contributed not only to a massive loss of oil, but to a nightmare for homeowners who found their homes awash in filthy black crude.
Although Murphy’s failure to fill its tanks to capacity reduced the chance that they would survive Hurricane Katrina, even vigilant application of this tactic cannot definitively protect against massive spills. The Cox Bay facility of Bass Enterprises filled its two tanks half-full with 45,000 barrels of oil before Katrina struck. This level is 15,000 more barrels than company standards call for and a standard that had succeeded for fifty years. (Cappiello 2005) Yet the Cox Bay facility suffered an even greater spill than Murphy Oil’s St. Bernard facility: 3.78 million gallons of oil poured from its tanks when Katrina dislodged them from their foundations. (U.S. Congress 2005) Clearly, the industry standard is too low.
Fortunately for Bass Enterprises, much of the oil was contained in dirt berms around the site, although one containment reservoir designed to hold spilled oil was already full of water by the time oil began to leak. (Cappiello 2005) Perhaps more important, the Cox Bay facility is in the St. Plaquemines Parish, a town of only about 20,000 residents, compared with the 70,000 of St. Bernard Parish. The tanks themselves are located right on the Mississippi River, not directly next to a residential area. Because of this positioning, Bass Enterprises was able to spill even more oil than Murphy without covering thousands of homes in oil. In fact, Bass was able to contain or recover roughly three million gallons of the spilled oil, while most of the remaining oil simply evaporated. (U.S. Congress 2005) Although lamentable, the harmful effects of this spill paled in comparison with the much smaller spill at Murphy.
Reclaim the Delta?
Reclaiming the land would cost many billions in a state that is desperately poor with regressive taxation that favors business and industry. According to the Houston Chronicle, a consortium of local, state, and federal agencies in 2001 were studying a $2–$3 billion plan to divert sediment from the Mississippi River back into the delta. This would replace only 2 percent of the loss, however. Other possible projects include restoration of barrier reefs and perhaps a large gate to prevent Lake Pontchartrain from overflowing and drowning the city. There is little state money for these multibillion-dollar projects, so it was doubtful that much would be done, and it wasn’t. In 2001, according to the Chronicle, “a plan to restore the Florida Everglades attracted $4 billion in federal funding, but the state had to match it dollar for dollar. In Louisiana, so far, there’s only been a willingness to match 15 or 25 cents.” (Berger 2001)
More alarming still is the decision of President Bush to effectively dismiss a proposed $14 billion delta rescue plan; he was willing to authorize only less than 2 percent of that: $250 million. (The early estimates of the cost of Katrina are $125 billion.) The proposed plan was widely viewed as technically sound and supported by environmentalists, oil companies, and fishermen alike, and had been on the table for years and was pushed forward with greater urgency after Katrina hit. According to one source, it “would use massive pipelines and pumps and surgically designed canals to guide a portion of the river’s sediment-thick water back toward the coastal buffer zone without destroying existing infrastructure or communities. This would rebuild hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands over time and reconstruct entire barrier islands in as little as twelve months. (It is estimated that the government’s plan to rebuild the levees could take decades.) Everyone agrees the plan will work. The National Academy of Sciences confirmed the soundness of the approach just last week and urged quick action.” It is the equivalent of six weeks’ spending in Iraq, or the cost of the “Big Dig” in Boston. (Tidwell 2005) Spending 10 percent of the estimated cost of the hurricane on reclamation would have made the city safe and the delta once again a rich food source.
Rebuilding New Orleans
Louisiana is at or near the bottom of most indices of social welfare, social well-being, and education and ranks high in political and police corruption. Can we expect it to rise to the challenge of its mounting vulnerability to meteorological disasters without drastic downsizing? Probably not. True, the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. But we need a city of perhaps one-quarter its pre-Katrina size to support about 10,000 people in the two critical industries: the port, and oil and gas. The city has been losing population slowly since 1960, in part because of mechanization of the gas and oil industry and the port. There were fewer than 7,500 people working in the port, fewer than 2,000 working in oil and gas extraction, and fewer than 100 working on pipeline transportation before the tragedy. (Glaeser 2005) Protecting a small city from hurricanes would be easier.
But the problem is the unprotected infrastructure, estimated at $100 billion. This includes important ship channels such as the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, major ports such as Lake Charles and New Orleans, roads, and oil and gas pipelines and facilities. (IPCC 2002, pp. 19–20) Most of this infrastructure was designed to function behind a buffer of protective wetlands, not for full exposure to the Gulf. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its section dealing with Southern Louisiana, was far from optimistic in its 2002 pre-Katrina report. It saw an inevitable retreat, involving the relocation of inhabitants. The costs of retreat would include lost incomes, relocation and adjustment expenses, and losses in quality of life. Along with financial costs would come social and cultural costs. It quoted one of its studies: “It is almost impossible to quantify the value of a loss of lifestyle, and loss of family and social ties which will inevitably come as wetlands disappear and prompt people to relocate.” (IPCC 2002, 22) With Katrina, the relocation is under way and the social impact is devastating.
It’s Not the Weather; It’s Affluence and Opportunities
Louisiana is only a particularly dramatic example of coastal erosion in the United States. Worldwide it hardly compares with the erosion and risks of the other major rivers on the earth. In the United States, as in the rest of the world, the problem is exceedingly simple: rather than keeping people away from the water, people are trying to keep the water away from them. Water, as noted, is the prime location factor for human populations, and humans interfere with nature’s regenerative cycle. With the population scale and technological power we have achieved, we invite disasters. In an article titled “Why the United States Is Becoming More Vulnerable to Natural Disasters” the authors demonstrate that “more people and more societal infrastructure have become concentrated in disaster-prone areas.” (van der Vink et al. 1998) The costs of natural disasters in the United States were estimated to be $1 billion per week, or $54 billion per year, before Katrina’s $125 billion, so the cost is of some concern. Mitigation efforts have reduced the loss of life, but the economic losses have been soaring since the mid-1980s. This was not because of any marked increase in the severity or frequency of natural events; hurricanes had not increased in the 1990s (though they have since then), nor have earthquakes in the last century, and the slight increase in tornado sightings was probably due to better reporting. What does correlate highly with disaster costs, however, are population changes—the movement of people to disaster-prone areas and the growth in revenue of such areas, measured as the total common tax revenue of the state, an indicator of the wealth that is put at risk. The study uses crude measures—all of California is lumped together, for example—but the correspondence of disaster costs on the one hand, and population growth and wealth growth on the other, is striking and increases over the measured period, 1970 to 1995.
“States most affected by the costs of hurricanes (Florida, Maryland, North Carolina, and Texas) and earthquakes (California and Washington) show the largest increase in both population and revenue,” research has found. Why have the increased costs of natural disasters not created pressures to encourage proper land use in vulnerable areas? Because “[e]conomic incentives for responsible land use have been stifled by legislated insurance rates and federal aid programs that effectively subsidize development in hazard-prone areas.” Though they do not go further than this, the authors might have added that since, as they say, the people moving into the risky areas “represent the higher wealth segments of our society,” they are likely to have the most political power, and favor subsidized development in risky, though beautiful and profitable, areas. (van der Vink et al. 1998)
Climatologists Stanley Changnon and David Changnon, funded by the Electric Power Research Institute, have more specific data. (Changnon and Changnon 1999) They examined the insured losses (a lower figure than total losses) of more than $100 million per incident from 1950 to 1996. The last six years of this period, 1990–96, showed average losses much higher than did the 1950– 89 period. Was it weather or social processes? The more recent period did not have more intense damaging events (mostly hurricanes), or larger ones, or even greater losses per event. Only coastal storms in the East and hailstorms in the West have increased in recent years, but not enough to explain the sharp increase in losses in the 1990–96 period. Two demographic shifts have put people in harm’s way. First, people have moved to the coastal areas of the South and the East; the southeastern coastal areas had a 75 percent increase in population density from just 1970 to 1990, while the national increase was only 20%. Population also increased in California and Washington, both vulnerable states. Second, people have also moved into cities. In 1960, 58 percent of the population lived in metropolitan areas, but by 1993 it was 79 percent. This has meant higher density of structures and vehicles, which produces large losses even with small-scale, but intense, storms. (Shoddy practices played a role. They quote a study revealing that improper construction practices accounted for $4 billion of the insured losses of $15 billion from Hurricane Andrew in 1992.) They conclude: “Assessment of the effects of growing population, demographic shifts, increasing property values, and poorer construction practices suggests that these ‘societal factors’ have collectively acted to make the U.S. ever more vulnerable to damaging storms and are the principal reasons behind the record high number of catastrophes and associated losses of the 1990’s.” (Changnon and Changnon 1999, 299)
Can Anything Be Done?
What is to be done? The vulnerable areas are filling up with poisons and people because of countless personal choices, it is customary to say. But we can usefully sort out the forces behind these choices. Some of the vulnerability is due to changes in income distribution; with more of the rich able to get good views in warm climates, places such as the Florida Keys and San Diego expand. The rich who live there at the time of a disaster are at risk, of course, but the poor who service their lifestyle are at even greater risk, in fragile homes and unable to fly out. In New Orleans the poor could not even drive out; the best the city could do was to prepare a DVD warning them that they would be on their own, and that was not distributed in time. It was left to the churches to try to arrange carpools, but this effort, long planned, had not gotten off the ground before Katrina struck. (Noland 2005)
The Florida Keys are an example of perverse cross subsidization: the poorer parts of the state and the nation are taxed to support government programs to develop the area’s essential infrastructure and subsidize the insurance payments. Only a political change (unlikely) could redistribute wealth and charge residents and their merchants the true cost of maintaining them there. Absent that, government would have to impose stricter standards on design and construction, which is hardly controversial and could do some good.
Industry is another matter. It is legitimately drawn to coast lines because of the oil, gas, fish, and favorable agricultural conditions. The major problem here is capitalism’s dynamics, which favor short-over long-run investments. Even an oligopoly or a monopoly is restrained from taking a long-run view if it is publicly traded. Investment funds are not likely to take a long-run view by holding on to a stock that is low performing in the short run, in the expectation that this will pay off in the long run of ten or twenty years. Though ideally performance is understood in terms of long-run expectations—just look at Internet firms, which have high stock values even though they have little revenue, and conservative retirement funds—the market does a poor job of anticipating possible disasters. It is difficult for the large investment funds to tell their investors that this low-performing asset is still valuable because it is protected from risks that just might materialize in ten to twenty years, whereas investments in hot stocks are not. The fund would not perform at its maximum. So the investment firms withdraw funds from the lower-performing companies and put them into the higher-performing companies. The higher-performing companies in any particular industry are likely to be focused on the short run. In the long run they will suffer from not investing in safety, but a few miles away there will be another short-run company that was missed by the storm, and it will see its stock rise. If investing in safety would improve its quarterly or yearly rate of return, the company will do so; if the investment (say rebuilding pipelines that are becoming hazardous because the sinking land has exposed them to wind blown water) might pay off only if a storm hits that particular area in the next twenty years, it will be reluctant to do so, especially if the executive making the decision is to retire in five years. Industry and agriculture will have to remain in vulnerable areas, but we should not rely on a short-run market mentality to police it.
CALIFORNIA’S CENTRAL VALLEY
Compared with the disaster potential of Los Angeles, California, the actual disaster in New Orleans is small. Los Angeles is a mega city, with half the population of California within a sixty-mile radius of its politically dysfunctional center, the product of massive continental and intercontinental migration typical of globalization processes. (Mexico City understandably has the highest concentration of Mexicans in the world, but Los Angeles has the second.) And it is the product of the massive relocation of the main natural resource for humans: water. With a wretched system of governance—including a lack of intermediary levels of governance to encourage citizen participation—its impoverished millions are harassed by its economic elite. The list of economic and social problems of Greater Los Angeles (about sixteen million inhabitants) tops that of any U.S. city. But that is not our concern here. Rather, we want to know about its vulnerability to natural disasters and how its process of growth has contributed to the vulnerability. Truly significant reductions in vulnerability would require the deconcentration of organizations and populations, and that is not likely to happen; only minor deconcentrations may be beginning. Our initial guide will be a chapter by Ben Wisner from the book Crucibles of Hazard: Megacities and Disasters in Transition (1999). But the classic litanies go back to Carey McWilliams (1949) and Mike Davis, especially his City of Quartz (1990).
The earthquake hazard is the most obvious. Los Angeles lies on or near two major fault lines, and “the big one” is expected within decades. (Predictions are obviously very difficult. In 1985 a large earthquake was predicted to occur in the Parkfield area before 1992, with a 95 percent probability, and it has yet to arrive.) Building codes and site restrictions are improving only slowly and would make little difference if the quake is massive and breaks any of the numerous dams aimed at the city on a desert.
Los Angeles would be a small agricultural service center if it were not for massive state and federal investments in the twentieth century; it has no intrinsic value other than its weather, which it shares with much of the coast in the area. But water was brought in from hundreds of miles away, and state and especially federal aid have provided sewage treatment plants, a deepwater port dredged at nearby San Pedro, the Boulder Dam for water and power, the San Onofre nuclear power station, and the massive freeway system.
California’s Central Valley Project, without which Los Angeles would be a smaller city, has been called the largest public works project in the world. There are a series of more than twenty dams and their reservoirs, five hundred miles of canals stretching much of the length of the state, and, as noted, miles of aging levees protecting dense populations. The dams started out as a flood-control project, but were expanded by those interested in hydroelectric power, recreation, farming, and a water supply. The huge dams prevented flooding and irrigated the desert, which bloomed with produce and made agriculture the leading economic activity of the state. Fully 85 percent of the heavily subsidized water is used for agriculture.
The key to Los Angeles’ vulnerability is the agency that determines what shall be developed. The Community Redevelopment Authority, appointed by the mayor, is largely composed of businessmen, and able to designate development areas, to commandeer land by means of compulsory purchase, and to raise money. It generates handsome revenues, only 20 percent of which are required to be spent on low-income housing; the rest goes to middle- and high-income housing and economic development projects—that is, private business. (Wisner 1999)
Economic development includes the chemical industry. The Los Angeles Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area (SMSA) has the second-highest number of chemical facilities in the United States; this is a spectacular concentration. Many of these, including the major oil refineries, are located near earthquake faults, particularly the Newport-Inglewood fault. Automated systems for shutting down risky facilities are required, but those familiar with accidents in risky systems are mostly bemused by these requirements—they are worth having, of course, but the possibility of interacting failures that can defeat safety systems is ever present. In 1987 an earthquake in the Whittier Narrows area displaced a one-ton chlorine tank that was being filled, releasing a half-ton toxic cloud. The power failure caused by the earthquake disabled the company’s siren, and malfunctioning telephones made it impossible to warn authorities. (Showalter and Myers 1992) It could have been a ninety-ton tank car. There are undoubtedly other such instances, but it is surprisingly difficult to document toxic releases associated with disasters, and it is quite unclear as to how much damage this toxic cloud caused. If it had been a ninety-ton railroad car, a few million people would have been at risk.
Much has been done to upgrade building standards and prepare for emergencies, since the risks of earthquakes are obvious. After the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, strict state building codes for new housing were established, and ambitious hazard abatement programs for bracing existing buildings were instituted. But relocating facilities with toxic and explosive substances, especially chemical plants, oil refineries, and natural gas facilities seems to be out of the question. Why they were built there in the first place and allowed to expand, since the hazards were known and risky areas identified many decades ago, is an important question. The answer appears to be economic pressures on the political representatives responsible for overseeing decisions about site selection, protection, and the enforcement of regulations. Market forces are allowed to control growth, but there seems to be a market failure for preventing or mitigating low-probability/high-consequence accidents. Santa Barbara and some communities in Northern California have enacted growth controls that reduce risk, but that has been comparatively easy in these wealthy communities where industry is absent. (When industry invaded Santa Barbara from the sea with oil spills in the Channel in the 1960s, we witnessed the spectacle of upper-class conservatives demonstrating in the same manner as the New Left hippies they despised.) (Molotch 1970)
DECENTRALIZATION AND REGULATION
I have argued for decentralization, but it has to be accompanied with a reduction in what economists call (unfortunately) “information asymmetry,” where one party knows more than the others. What we need are a representative governance mechanism that ensures full disclosure and standard-setting and coordinating mechanisms. Decentralized government without these has left local authorities—legislators, city officials, planning boards made up of prominent citizens—open to local property-development interests. These interests are able to get unpublicized waivers on building-code requirements even if, occasionally, stringent standards exist. If the planning boards and even the elected officials are unrepresentative, private interests will be served at the expense of community ones. If federal standards are weak and unenforced, private interests will prevail. Private interests appear to have prevailed in robbing New Orleans of its protective wetlands.
A dilemma that we will repeatedly encounter is that, in the interests of decentralization (e.g., giving states authority rather than the federal government), the federal government cannot set higher standards than the states. Occasionally the federal government sets standards that are lower than a state desires and these lower standards prevail; sometimes local standards may be allowed to prevail over higher state standards. Federal and state governments should establish minimum standards, which states or localities can exceed.
It has taken two centuries to establish effective minimal federal standards in health, human rights, financial, and electoral processes. Where they have succeeded there has been a recognition that an increasingly complex and tightly coupled society cannot survive when critical areas that invite self-interested behavior are radically decentralized. It is these areas this book is concerned with, and generally I argue for federal standards, but only if they are higher than state or local ones. But interests can legitimately argue that federal standards are inappropriate—they are too expensive, they involve unexpected impacts on legitimate interests, they maximize the wrong values, and so on. This is a political problem, and over the centuries the decisions as to what federal standards should be are more political than technical. But some proposed standards are so sensible they hardly seem to warrant contestation, and many of these will be advocated in this book. With regard to threats of natural disasters, they include higher building standards and greater restrictions on land use than the federal government has established. Where states and localities deem the federal standards to be too low, state and local authorities should be allowed to raise them for their jurisdictions, but the U.S. Supreme Court can hold otherwise, as it has more than once. This has allowed private power to resist higher standards and thus endanger buildings and settlements in risky areas.
“Few local governments are willing to reduce natural hazards by managing development,” observes disaster researcher Denis Mileti, whose work we will draw upon here. They have more pressing concerns than mitigation. “Also, the costs of mitigation are immediate while the benefits are uncertain, do not occur during the tenure of current elected officials, and are not visible (like roads or a new library). In addition, property rights lobbies are growing stronger.” (Mileti 1999, 160) (Since 1999, when he wrote this, court decisions have greatly strengthened property rights, to the dismay of not only environmentalists but disaster specialists.)
It was not until 1994 that a model building-code council was established for the United States, and even so, adopting the model code is voluntary. Local and state codes are weak; only half of the states have state codes that local authorities must use, exemptions are easy to obtain, and enforcement is often lax. South Florida was thought to have one of the strongest codes in the nation, but Hurricane Andrew showed it was not properly enforced, and a 1995 survey of building department administrators in the southeastern United States found that half did not have the staff to perform inspections. (Mileti 1999, 165)
We need a more centralized regulatory system. Local initiative is simply not reliable in the case of mitigation. Localities are reluctant to enforce state standards, national standards are few, and enforcement is lax. This is an area where centralized regulation—standards and enforcement—is needed; given the political influence of growth-oriented city officials and property and building interests, there is bound to be a “failure” of the private market.
Insurance, both from government and private sources, could be the most powerful tool to ensure responsible action by individuals, organizations, and governments. But it represents another failure. Even in areas known to be hazardous, only about 20 percent of homeowners purchase flood insurance, and less than 50 percent of businesses purchase flood and earthquake insurance in risky areas. (168) Those that do can benefit handsomely from federally subsidized insurance if there is a disaster. The tiny community of Dauphin Island at the entrance to Mobile Bay, Alabama, has been hit by six hurricanes in the past twenty-five years. The community has collected more than $21 million from the nation’s taxpayers. Katrina almost demolished the barrier island but the inhabitants were not denied coverage. A study by the National Wildlife Federation pointed to a homeowner who filed sixteen claims in eighteen years and received a total of $806,000 for a building valued at $114,000 from federal flood insurance. (Staff 2006b)
Federal assistance programs are not as generous as our National Flood Insurance Program. While the assistance programs are thought to be equivalent to hazard insurance, they are very small ($3,000 average in recent disasters in the case of FEMA’s Individual and Family Grant program) and intended only for immediate needs. Still, the existence of these federal assistance programs is cited as an important reason why people continue to settle in hazardous areas, making the programs perverse. (Mileti 1999, 169) It is hard to keep people from the water; federal assistance does not help.
Insurance companies are in a bind with regard to large-scale catastrophes: the number of catastrophes have increased, capital markets are more unstable, and the insurance regulatory system provides perverse incentives. Before 1988, for example, insurance companies had never experienced a loss from a hurricane that exceeded $1 billion; the risk was manageable and spread over wide areas. Since 1988, there have been sixteen disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion; Hurricane Andrew resulted in losses of $15.5 billion, even though it bypassed the most heavily developed parts of the Miami metropolitan area. (170) Losses from Katrina are estimated at $125 billion. With losses so high, and risks growing in Florida and California (following the Northridge earthquake), insurers have tried to withdraw from these policies in these states, but some are unable to do so. Perversely, some states that require them to insure do not establish or enforce standards.
State-mandated pools have been established to serve as a market of last resort for those unable to get insurance, but the premiums are low and thus these have the perverse effect of subsidizing those who choose to live in risky areas and imposing excess costs on people living elsewhere. In addition, the private insurers are liable for the net losses of these pools, on a market-share basis. The more insurance they sell, the larger their liability for the uninsured. Naturally, they are inclined to stop writing policies where there may be catastrophic losses (hurricanes in Florida and earthquakes in California). (171) The Florida and California coastlines are very desirable places to live and their populations have grown rapidly, but these handsome lifestyles are subsidized by residents living in the less desirable inland areas in the state and, to some limited extent, by everyone in the nation. Every area has its hazards, but the fastest-growing areas have greater ones. A national policy of vulnerability reduction would stem growth in these areas by making them pay their fair share of catastrophic loss insurance, fewer people would mean fewer unavoidable deaths, the economic incentives to build more safely would increase, and the result would be fewer avoidable deaths.
CONCLUSIONS
We are tempting nature by putting concentrations of hazardous materials, populations, and vital parts of our infrastructure in its way. (We are also increasing nature’s fury with our disproportionate contribution to global warming, but that is not the topic of this book.) The strong central government of Holland protects its citizens from thousand-year floods and creates wetlands for runoffs from the yearly surges of its rivers. In the United States, development in our midwestern river valleys and our Gulf Coast is removing the Gulf Coast wetlands at the rate of two football fields every hour, bringing storms and the ocean ever closer. In contrast to Holland, private and municipal levees in Missouri do not even have to cope with hundred-year floods. The levees controlled by the state of Missouri are thinking of five-hundred-year floods at best. Even our levees in New Orleans were unable to handle a category three hurricane, and a slight shift of Katrina could have suddenly inundated the city, producing perhaps ten times the number of deaths that it had from a few slow leaks.
A recent Supreme Court ruling exempted many low-lying areas in the nation from a designation of floodplains, allowing building to proceed. Private property-rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings have replaced the community as the referent with the individual business or landowner as the referent, so communities are less protected. Huge oil tanks are not filled to keep them stable when hurricanes are predicted, and a large farm of propane tanks barely escaped detonation in a Mississippi flood in crowded St. Louis. Not only weather can attack the concentration of hazmats and the surrounding populations; it could be an industrial accident, such as an explosion or train wreck; or it could be a team of terrorists. Building bigger levees increases the scope of the inevitable disaster, while it brings in the business and populations who are protected from minor storms but made more vulnerable to major floods and hurricanes. Our wealth pushes us up against hills that can produce mudslides or into beautiful canyons that can be swept by raging forest or brush fires.
And we subsidize these risky delights by taxing those in safer and less beautiful environments. As we shall soon see, in our politically fueled preoccupation with remote terrorist dangers, we cut the federal funds for prevention, response, and remediation from natural disasters.
All of this is avoidable; much of it can be mended. Some of our dangerous practices have been slowly accumulating over the new century, but they can be reversed with strong regulations and strong liability laws. However, some of the dangers are the result of public-policy shifts that appeared in the 1970s and 1980s. The regulations that once protected us have been weakened, and the warnings from experts about the inappropriate policies in our recent building binge have been ignored. In the next chapter we look at where government has been in all this. Borrowing a line that Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) applied to the response to the 2003 Northeast blackout, Katrina was not even a wake-up call; we have hit the snooze alarm instead.