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Tom Emerson, who like myself, grew up in Huey Long’s home town, has seen the results of welfare politics on serious matters. When thousands of lives and billions of dollars of property are at stake, welfare benefits and sugar price supports don’t count for much. But that’s the orientation of politicians like Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu, whose only suggestion on the future of New Orleans has been the threat to punch President Bush.
Tom’s constructive ideas are:
1. The defenses of the City of New Orleans are irrational. They essentially have a levee system around the entire city, so one serious breech at any point floods 80% of the city. A rational defense system would compartmentalize the city into at least 20 sections with separate levees around each section. That way a single breech would flood at most 5% of the city. The “all or nothing” defense system is asking for disaster. Rebuilding provides the opportunity to re-design the defenses. I have not heard anyone else make this point.
2. There needs to be a system of doors or locks to shut Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Borgne off from the sea during storms, to prevent future storm surges from raising the lake levels and stressing the levee system.
3. The only good news in all of this is that the French Quarter did not flood. It is the oldest and highest part of the city, and its greatest treasure.
4. Louisiana has a history of political corruption on a scale shared by no other state. The thought of handing out billions of dollars to Louisiana politicians to spend is asking for big trouble and a repeat of the disaster. The federal government needs to maintain financial control over the rebuilding effort. Of course, local interests should be considered in the design of the new system, but federal control of the contracts and funds is vital.
5. An example of the above is the race for governor in the early 90s when the state’s voters were given a choice between electing Edwin Edwards (a known crook) and David Duke (the former head of the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan). Bumper stickers around the state read: “Vote for the crook. It’s important.”
People who glibly opine that the city should be abandoned and moved elsewhere, because it’s below sea level, simply do not understand the geography and the enormous economic ramifications.
As George Friedman of StratFor.com sums it up:
“The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products—corn, soybeans and so on. A large proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 17 million tons, comes in through the port—including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.
A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn’t come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don’t get to the markets.
The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren’t enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities—assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can’t be.
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