After Hurricane Gustav - should New Orleans be rebuilt again?
Hurricane Gustav 2008 - should New Orleans be rebuilt again?
With Hurricane season in full force again, residents of New Orleans are evacuating in quickly. It is estimated that over 1.9 million people have fled the coastal areas in preparation for this hurricane.
Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans has been trying to “rebuild” and has not recovered from that devastating Hurricane. Billions of dollars have poured in to help stabilize the oil rigs and coastal economy. (Although there were hundreds of reports of horrible FEMA and government interaction.)
What happens to all that rebuilt infrastructure if Hurricane Gustav pummels the coastline even harder than Katrina did? Should American taxpayers go back to the drawing board, again, and pour even more money into New Orleans?
Imagine a beaver building a dam every year. Each year, the dam goes up and the beaver is allowed to grow his family and then a crazy rainstorm drops millions of gallons of water into the river and the river washes away the beaver dam. This scenario plays out for 3 straight years. The beaver has lost his home and has seen tragic deaths.
Finally, the beaver gets upset with all of the destruction and tries to think of ways to rebuild his life. He chooses to move to another river without the same history of catastrophe and destruction. After the move, the beaver builds an amazing dam and lives happily ever after! Avoiding nature’s cycles of catastrophe was a wise investment.
Here’s the question: Should New Orleans be rebuilt again after Hurricane Gustav? How much money and how much time do we have to spend rebuilding - again and again? Would the country be better served to take all that time, effort, energy and money and put it into another local economy that won’t go crazy after another Hurricane?
Right now, there’s millions of American economies hurting. Does it make sense to pour all that time, effort and energy into “rebuilding” a community that’s just going to get slammed again and again?!
Maybe New Orleans would be better served to be rebuilt ……… somewhere else.
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