New Orleans facing castrophic flooding - again.

The Army Corps of Engineers is putting out some pretty strong statements about the levees. My experience with these folks in recent flooding in Houston due to Harvey is that they take their jobs quite seriously and would never disseminate information like this if they didn't believe it to be true. It would be beyond irresponsible. So I take some comfort in this. Now, tropical storms are always unpredictable so you never know, but based on what we know at this time it doesn't look like the levees are going to be an issue.

www.nola.com/news/hurricane/article_874b557e-a3e3-11e9-915d-b7288a72cc5b.html

Maybe everything is better in Texas, then - even the ACoE.

I think there's a pretty big difference between after-the-fact CYA which certainly went on after Katrina and these before-the-storm strong statements. Maybe I'm just overly optimistic, but I really can't imagine taking the stance they're taking today without carefully weighing both past performance and future outcomes. Now, whether we trust their competence and therefore their confidence or not is another matter.

The Katrina thing is somewhat interesting to me, because even now it isn't really clear whether the blame really fell on the ACoE directly (federal judge's opinion notwithstanding). That there were engineering flaws is a given, in hindsight. But whether these are due to engineering failures directly, policy decisions, budget constraints, or just human omission is a much harder question to answer, you know? Even if those root causes ultimately run through the common source of the ACoE's obviously wanting flood control system. And it gets a little more difficult because too often people don't always want the real answer, just the most politically / financially / publicly expedient one.

If you're interested in the history behind those levees and how sketchy New Orleans politics can be, there's a great book called Rising Tide about the 1927 floods. It is kind of a curious thing to me that so much federal money goes into trying to make sure New Orleans doesn't flood, but at the same time voters in local parishes vote down local tax increases for maintaining levees. Frankly, I don't really see why folks from Georgia, California, or Texas should be on the hook for people in Louisiana to live below sea level. I mean, I am kind of griped out that I have to buy windstorm insurance in Texas from the state windstorm insurance association based on the county I live in, not the distance from the shore or whatever the true actuarial rate for my property would be...and if I lived in Dallas I'd be even more griped that my tax dollars go to subsidize insurance rates for people who choose to live on the coast. Some people in Houston are rebuilding flooded properties for the third or fourth time in the last twenty years with state and federal dollars! That's just asinine.

I'd argue that the "risk" isn't being spread, it's still centralized around the potential cause of catastrophe.  It's the "cost" that's spread around, which is what Dogears is saying..  The folks on the coast still have the same risk probability to their property, but the overall costs to insure them increases premiums to folks far from those same risks who's probability of the same catastrophe happening is effectively zero.

Which boils down to poor choice on someone else's part shouldn't affect the costs on my part, is what I take from it, and agree with that to some degree.  

On the other hand, there is actual significant risk in "trusting" the government.  History is filled with governments failing the people time and time again.  So when the ACoE says "trust us" I'm going to have to go with "no".

Yawn.

Human nature is laziness and denial. The ACoE was certainly adamant that they were up to par beforehand, and there was certainly money to fix them after. Hindsight and all that.

And with the year-over-year decrease in ACE (accumulated cyclone energy) which shows that storms are getting weaker and fewer, how can one possibly accurately attribute something like a single hurricane to a theory such as AGW?

Well I don't live in texas.

I never said not to help either.  I just don't believe in using government to push pet belief systems on others.  I believe that giving directly through donations of time and money are worth more than voting in politicians who promise to put money into programs yet end up squandering it.

That's part of what makes the 1927 flood so interesting. It was really the first time in this history of the US that the federal government stepped in for a local problem. It was actually widely opposed at the time as out of scope for the Feds. A seminal moment in how Americans view the role of the state / local government versus that of the federal government.

I don't have any problem donating money and time to help others. I volunteered I don't know how many hours during tropical storm Allison running supplies up and down the stairs of the local hospital when the power was out -- the Houston Medical Center sent a call out to all boy scouts in the city, and so many of us showed up they had to turn the majority away. Cool moment. After that, I mucked out 10-15 flooded houses with my church youth group. When I was in college my ROTC outfit did a lot of work after Hurricane Rita and Katrina helping evacuees. Same story with Hurricane Ike in 2008. I probably did 10 houses with some buddies. And same after the Memorial day floods, and after the Tax day floods. And again after Hurricane Harvey - except this time one of the houses I was mucking out was my sister's, and I gave over the use of my studio to a family for over a year while their house was rebuilt. A bunch of good neighbors from Louisiana calling themselves the Cajun Navy rescued dozens and dozens of people in Houston during Harvey - God bless those crazy coonasses - we love 'em.

So no, I'm not worried about united we stand. I just don't believe in forcing folks from Oregon or Montana or wherever to get taxed so my parents can have cheap insurance on their beach house. And I don't believe it is right that the federal government should subsidize people who live in a place like the Meyerland neighborhood in Houston that has flooded in nearly every flood I mentioned above. If you want to live where it floods every 4-5 years, more power to you...but why should I pay for you to get new floors, cabinets, appliances, and furniture on the regular? It's just silly. That kind of unreasonable safety net decouples risk from cost, and causes people to make bad decisions.

Yeah I just meant insurance doesn't work, generally, if the customer gets to say, "Well, I only want to pay into the pool that encounters _______ risk because I only feel obligated to contribute to those funds."  We don't all have the same risk profiles and an insurance company has to be able to group things together in some way to make the math work.  We're all inherently going to share some of the cost and some of the benefit of the risk profiles of other people.  Sometimes we'll be paying for their bad moves and sometimes they'll be paying for ours.  

I agree that the sort of intuitive "well I don't wanna pay for those jackasses over there..." aesthetic is attractive but I don't think that's how the actuarial math works.  

Now, whether the whole gigantic insurance complex is the way we should be handling all this is an entirely different question and one I personally don't have a good answer to.  

That's kinda funny, I used to be a card-carrying believer and die hard advocate for saving the planet from climate change, until I started reading the real papers instead of the headlines.  20 years now I've studied climate change as an enthusiastic hobbyist, a member of a few different pro and skeptic groups over the years, and have my name attached to a group who aggregated data on thousands of NWS weather stations, which found siting/location inconsistencies on the order of 80% of NWS weather stations biased out of usable range due to human encroachment (UHI or urban heat island).  (BTW, the NWS/NOAA said "no thanks" to the results of the paper, especially when they found that the conclusion is that using rural sites that weren't biased by UHI showed no appreciable change in average temperature over the lifespan of the sensor network..)

I'm now what they call a luke-warmer.  I believe people can change the climate, but in much, much smaller amounts than are stated are possible.  We could debate the modelling algorithms and I could point out all the various reasons that climate scientists make horrible statisticians and why the models always produce a warming effect, even when pure white noise is introduced as the raw data..  But I don't think I will, in order to keep the peace around here.

But to tersely retort, glaciers are now growing again, greenland has put on 2 consecutive years of record ice growth, the arctic is still within 2 standard deviations of "median" values and is barely halfway through the multi-decadal cycle, the Antarctic has put on record amounts of ice up until a 2 years ago when the western ice shelf started melting faster due to increased volcanic activity below (which they aren't actually mentioning as the cause), and the photos are generally cherry picked, such as the most recent on with "open water" in greenland which is actually from snow melt and is completely normal.

I think it's like what happened when municipalities started putting in laws that kids had to wear helmets while riding bikes and skateboards and such..

Traumatic head injuries went waaaaay up, even with the vastly increased percentage of helmet wearing.

Why?

Studies after the fact showed that the helmets assuaged fears of pain and death in kids..  simply put they felt invincible while wearing them and went on to attempt much more dangerous things than they would normally feel comfortable doing.

The addition of the helmet, (here as an analogue to insurance) created a sense of safety that was not necessarily linked in reality.  Same with insurance, people will say "it's no big deal, I have insurance" and take risks that are probably more unreasonable than ones they would have taken had they been totally responsible for the outcome.

So in some degree, I think that spreading the risk also leads to watering down the feeling of responsibility of the outcome and they end up (re)building in locations like coastlines where they know the risks are high, but they also know the costs of a catastrophe are not theirs to shoulder alone due to insurance.