Three Threats

[da]

According to an article in Der Spiegel, in early 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely serious threats to the U.S. The article lists one of the other two disasters as a terrorist attack on New York City.

Maddeningly, the article doesn't say what the third serious threat is. Wikipedia comes up with the somewhat obvious third choice, a large earthquake hitting San Francisco.

Looking for more information about these predictions, I came across this article which suggests that while Salon and other sources have been saying this disaster isn't as much a natural disaster as one caused by human error, the US Army Corps of Engineers also claims that even a completed levee project wasn't designed for the storm that actually occurred, rather only a category-three storm.

What can we learn from this? Should we vacate coastal cities? Spend a larger fraction of GDP on disaster prevention?

I'm in the middle of reading "Earth" by David Brin, suggested to me by dpolicar some time ago. It's got some spooky parallels to reality concerning disaster prediction, people disreguarding the predictions, and trying to head off various natural disasters with varying degrees of success. There are lots of philosophical questions about whether, as a species, we'd be better off just disappearing and letting the Earth try again (and indeed, whether She is trying to make that happen...)

Comments

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

I probably should finish reading a book before I write anything about it. I'm amused that just a few pages further after writing this post, I got to where the lead scientist decides the black hole is of extra-terrestrial origin. So the story's making a major veer away from the interesting Gaia bits, at least for a while.

I will keep reading, although for my money so far, "Earth" << "Forge of God" by Greg Bear, which has its own set of Deep Thoughts, but it's more tightly written.