"damned" if you do; "dammed" if you don't
JOHN MAGINNIS: When priorities become impossibilities
November 2, 2005
"We'd say our No. 1 priority is housing; our No. 2 priority is housing, and after that, at No. 3, we'd put housing," Vice Adm. Thad Allen, the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Gulf Coast director, said recently.
On the same day, state Sen. Walter Boasso, R-Arabi, said, "The top priorities are levees, levees and levees."
They are both right, for housing in the short run and flood protection in both runs are the keys to the recovery of the New Orleans area and, to a lesser degree but no less importantly, Lake Charles and the southwestern coast.
Yet, despite a FEMA rush order, the travel trailer industry lacks the manufacturing capacity to meet the demand within any time frame that reasonably can be called temporary.
Prospects are better for repairing New Orleans' breached levees by next hurricane season, but the state's long-term goal of improving them to withstand a Category 5 hurricane is not supported by the Bush administration.
As a result, beneath the bravura of quickly rebuilding New Orleans and southwestern coastal areas creeps the frustrating realization that these top priorities are very nearly impossibilities.
The humble travel trailer, often banned from street view by subdivision restrictions, is the new status symbol of reconstruction. FEMA has ordered 120,000 of them, but only 86,000 of that size and type were built in this country last year. By the time supply begins to meet demand, many discouraged homeowners will have permanently settled somewhere else.
In New Orleans, even with enough trailers, there are not the spaces -- with available electricity, water and sewer -- to put more than a handful here or there.
There is more room in south Louisiana parishes but not the public will to allow large trailer communities. In small cities and towns overflow crowds at parish council meetings have protested zoning changes to accommodate FEMA trailer parks.
Securing top-level levee protection poses frustrations of a different kind. Last week, a delegation of the Louisiana Recovery Authority presented the state's priorities to senior White House officials. According to member Sean Reilly, the president's advisers agreed to support more money for business bridge loans, Medicaid reimbursements and tax incentives for businesses and individuals.
But the Louisiana team hit a wall on its top priority of rebuilding the levee system to withstand a Category 5 storm. The Bush team would not commit beyond the Category 3 level.
New Orleans residents near the 17th Street Canal would have been happy with Category 3 floodwalls had they been properly built, as evidence strongly indicates they were not. Southwestern coastal parishes would have taken any kind of levee instead of what they had, nothing, to hold back the storm surge of Rita. A top tier levee system from New Orleans to Morgan City would take years and $20 billion to build, far more than the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress are prepared to go. But to tell homeowners and business investors pondering their future in New Orleans that the levees will protect them from almost all storms might not inspire the confidence it takes to bring the area all the way back.
Reilly says the recovery authority will "keep pounding" on the Category 5 issue, but that might start to feel like one's head against the wall of Washington's intransigence.
From unavailable trailers to unaffordable levees, the storms' wake left challenges Louisiana might not be able to meet.
well that's depressing...so here's something to cheer everyone up:
a friend sent me this link to really funny video...definetly a must see for those of you with a cynical side...
posted by blazer @ 7:45 PM
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