New Orleans As the final countdown begins on the 10th anniversary of the August 29, 2005 landfall of Hurricane Katrina, the devastation it wrought, and the recovery still in progress, A Community Voice, formerly Louisiana ACORN, and an affiliate of ACORN International, held a “Katrina Heroes” event that was quite moving. Members, leaders, friends, and allies were often hardly able to restrain tears as they got up to speak, received recognition, or helped themselves to a plate of food. They have built a great community through their struggle.
Katrina was a 400-year flood event. The protection at considerable expense in the new levee system for New Orleans is a long way from that level. An op-ed in the New York Times laid out the price for a 500-year protection system. One-hundred billion or so, if done now, with about a quarter of it protecting New Orleans. It almost seems cheap at the price, but do we ever learn?
That question has been plaguing me especially since reading “The Really Big One” in The New Yorker about the impact of the disaster on the Pacific Northwest coast and its population when the Cascadia subduction zone erupts over a 700 mile expanse with impacts from roughly Vancouver down to northern California around Mendocino. The North American tectonic plate is inexorably moving to confront the 90000 square mile oceanic plate called Juan de Fuca, which is building up heat and pressure to slip underneath. The earthquake that will follow will be between 8.0 and 8.6 on the Richter scale on the low end to 8.7 to 9.2 on the scale on the high end, and because the scale is logarithmic the magnitude is almost incomprehensible. As reporter Kathryn Schultz writes, “…the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west – losing, within minutes, all the elevation and compression it has gained over centuries.” Holy-moly!
FEMA estimates that “everything west of Interstate 5 will be toast” on the west side of the volcanic range of the Cascade Mountain range. They estimate that 13,000 people will die, dwarfing Katrina and every other US-disaster. Another 27,000 will be hurt. One-million will be displaced and FEMA will have to provide food and water for another two-and-a-half million. Been there, done that, and we all know they are unable to handle anything near that. Seattle’s emergency office estimates that there will be 30,000 landslides in that city alone. If you didn’t drop down a hole to middle earth, the tsunami will be the most frightening catastrophe to hit next, and it will move within four minutes of the earthquake and the height could range between 50 and 100 feet. There are 70000 people estimated to live in the inundation zone and they will have between 10 and 30 minutes, depending on where they are, literally in the words of one Oregon official to “run for your life.”
There is a one in three chance that this earthquake will occur within the next 50 years. Those are bad odds. That is like, tomorrow! I can remember reading articles in the years before Katrina about what might happen to New Orleans in a worst case scenario. We did little to nothing to prepare for it. It was every man for themselves. I lived on higher ground. That was not enough for a community or all of the people lost forever or with their lives and families irreparably damaged.
What are we doing to prepare in the Northwest or nationally for a catastrophe that will absolutely happen and won’t be a matter of bad construction by the Corps of Engineers, but part of natural earth movements verified by meticulous science? Very, very little it seems, other than talk about it, and the not even that much talk really.
This is the fire and flood next time. It would seem to me that we would learn some of the lessons of Katrina not only by protecting New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, but preparing the Pacific Northwest to survive the Cascadia subduction when it erupts.
This can’t just be me saying this.
