Letters to the Editor
catling
Published Letters: 30 Editor's Choice: 6
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It's happened in many other storms
[Read the article: Homeless again in New Orleans]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's just that it's never really made the national news before, so unless you live near an area that's been hit, you wouldn't have heard what's going on. I live about forty miles east of Pensacola. I read their newspapers, and watch their local tv news. After Hurricane Ivan slammed that city hard, rents for undamaged housing went up 30-100%, FEMA was slow to get trailers to many areas, and other assistance was also slow to come. And then the Florida Panhandle got an influx of Katrina evacuees, which made housing even harder to find for lower income locals because the Katrina evacuees got bumped to the top of the housing assistance lists.
I think a lot of people underestimate how long and hard the hurricane recovery process can be. There were still blue-tarped roofs and totaled but still standing homes here a year after Ivan went through. Estimates say that it will take Pensacola another five to ten years to recover from Ivan, and in that case, we're talking damage that was severe but not catastrophic. If there was a perfect recovery plan for New Orleans and the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coasts, and that plan went into action today, it would still take a generation for the area to recover to what it was in 2004. There's a private boys' school from the Desire Street projects that relocated for the school year to a 4-H camp down the road from my house, and everyone involved talks about starting the next school year back in New Orleans, but sadly, I can't see that happening.
What needed to happen some time back in about November was for FEMA to tell people from the worst hit areas that a lot of them were going to be lucky if it only took 2-3 years before the cities and towns where they once lived could support them going home again, and then had local groups really work to transition them into full time jobs and somewhat permanent housing situations in a place that hopefully wasn't too far away from where they used to live. It sounds harsh, but in some ways is fairer to people than string them along and telling them it will be okay in a little bit would be.
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Not just the condos in Florida
[Read the article: More power to you]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There are also national security concerns over drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico. The area between the Florida Panhandle and Key West is designated as part of the Eglin AFB overwater test range. Parts of that area get very heavy use during training missions by the multiple military bases in the region. The overwater range is also critical for weapons development programs in the region.
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There are far more hazardous places to live in America than safe ones
[Read the article: Once more unto the breach]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hurricane threat goes far beyond New Orleans, Florida or the Carolina Outer banks. If you live within 15 miles of the shore between Brownsville, Texas and the Canada/Maine border, then you live in a hurricane hazard zone. New York City is very vulnerable to storm threat. Take a storm with the intensity of the 1938 Long Island Express storm, and move it 30 miles west of where that one made landfall, and you have a scenario where the Rockaway peninsula is completely overwashed, Kennedy airport is totally underwater, and most of Manhattan is severely flooded.
Most other parts of the country have their hazards. The Pacific Northwest has volcanoes. Middle America has river flooding and earthquakes. When we lived in Tennessee, we had earthquake insurance because we were uncomfortably close to the New Madrid fault.
And there are reasons why it makes sense to rebuild coastal cities in a lot of cases. New Orleans and Houston play big roles in the oil and natural gas industry. Miami is a crucial transaction point for trade between the U.S. and the rest of the Americas.
So how do you mitigate the damage when it comes? Building smart helps. It should be far, far tougher to build on barrier islands than it currently is. Those islands are nothing more than easily eroded giant sand bars. Strengthen the building codes, and enforce them. The new Florida building codes are a good start, and homes built properly under those rules generally come through storms well. But we could go further and use rules like what you see in the Bahamas or Cayman Islands. We also need to rewrite flood zone maps and require higher elevations for homes in high surge and flood threat areas.
Create ongoing programs that would help low income Americans upgrade housing to better standards. There is a lot of mobile and manufactured housing stock close to the coasts. Give low income families and seniors a low cost way to trade their 1970s and 1980s homes for new ones that are built to much tougher hurricane codes than what their old homes were. A properly anchored mobile home built to 1999 wind codes will stay intact when older homes around it are kindling.
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I'm not feeling much sympathy for Atlanta here
[Read the article: When the rivers run dry]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is an agreement in place for management of the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint Rivers watershed and basin that took many years of painstaking debate and compromise to construct. For all that the state of Georgia was never happy with the agreement, it was as fair as it was going to get for everyone who was a stakeholder in the region.
And now, such a short time later, Georgia wants to throw that carefully-crafted agreement out of the window. First, bad planning on Georgia's part does not justify an emergency on the part of Alabama or Florida. And second, who's to say that Georgia might use the temporary emergency as an excuse to do away with the agreement for good, and not return to previous water discharge levels once the current drought has passed?