Times-picayune Washing Away

Hope for time: A monologue by Manuel Torres

That's a welcome improvement, and long overdue.

Yet I'm still uneasy.

We're safer than we were before the storm, no doubt. But experts say the 100-year standard -- a storm with a 1 percent chance of hitting in any given year -- is shockingly insufficient . Katrina's surge was much more formidable than that. We will one day face such a threat again; it's a question of when, not if.

I can only hope that's decades away, for we need time.

It'll take time to convince Washington that it's in the nation's best interest to provide our region with a much higher level of protection. We need time as well to rebuild our first line of defense, our coast.

Geologists last week said a football field an hour of Louisiana's coast has been washing away for 25 years , in part because of large losses after the 2005 and 2008 hurricanes. But there was good news: it seems the rate of erosion in the last two years has slowed down -- quite a lot. Natural wetland healing could be partly responsible. But coastal restoration efforts, as modest as they currently are, also appear to be paying off.

We're quite a number of years and billions of dollars away from restoring enough wetlands to truly enhance the artificial protection the corps has completed. But that man-made system buys us time.

Now we need nature to give us a break and keep the bad, mean storms away for a while.

Manuel Torres is an editorial writer. He can be reached at mtorres@timespicayune.

"It'll take time to convince Washington that it's in the nation's best interest to provide our region with a much higher level of protection. We need time as well to rebuild our first line of defense, our coast. "

The very first piece of legislation passed by Congress after Hurrrican Katrina stated , "That the Secretary shall consider providing protection for a storm surge equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane The only solution to keep the workers is to start immediately on the wetland restoration. It actually should have been done concurrently with the rebuilding of the levees.

Jeff Kenner asked,

"...why can't they divert sediment laden water to where it used to go?"

Because the shipping industry doesn't want it to happen. They control many Congressmen and hire many retired military officers to insure they keep things the way they are.

Wetlands Loss – Washing Away, Part III « Bayou Child – One Cajun's ...

Louisiana tops the nation in the number of repeat claims for flooding, one of the reasons cited for the ever-rising cost of insurance. For areas that regularly flood, such as Irish Bayou in eastern New Orleans, seen here after Tropical Storm Frances in 1998, some residents have developed something of a post-flooding cleanup routine: clean out muck and debris, shoo out vermin, scoop up snakes and take down furniture and possessions that have been stacked up, elevated away from floodwaters.

In Jefferson Parish, most of the buildings and other property owned by the government are not currently insured at all. The parish could not find an insurance company to cover more than a third of the value of the $300 million worth of property, and the cost of doing that was a budget-busting $6 million in a total budget of $318.5 million. Officials are trying to find a cheaper alternative. But if a hurricane strikes first, taxpayers could have to foot the bill.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, insurance companies took a second look at the risks they were willing to shoulder and how much they charged for taking them on. Because of the annual hurricane threat — and the possibility of a storm that tops levees and inundates New Orleans and surrounding suburbs — south Louisiana is one of the riskiest places in the United States.

“A lot of it has to do with insurance companies realizing the potential liability that they have, that one incident could wipe out a company’s reserves,” said St. Charles school district Comptroller Jim Malone. “If they insure in St. Charles, Jefferson and Orleans, then one hurricane large enough to have a significant amount of destruction could devastate their company.”

The Sept. 11 effect accentuated a trend already under way among insurance companies: to make people, businesses and governments shoulder a bigger burden in risky areas, especially coastal zones prone to hurricanes.

“If folks choose to live along the coast, there is a need to have them bear some of the responsibility and risk of living in an area that is vulnerable to such an obvious peril,” said Gary Stephenson, a spokesman for State Farm Insurance Co., which writes close to a third of Louisiana private property insurance business, and which for a time stopped writing policies in the hurricane-prone area south of Interstate 10.

CNN reports Katrina, state of emergency

Managing Crises, Responses to Large-Scale Emergencies

Pulitzer's gold, behind the prize for public service journalism

Come Hell or high water, Hurricane Katrina and the color of disaster

Covering the environment, how journalists work the green beat