For those of us who make a living studying environmental issues, the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina is quite sobering. I learned about the vulnerability of the New Orleans levee system during my graduate studies in the 1970’s from presentations being made back then by Louisiana scientists. In 1989 I stood on the shores of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico in Biloxi, Mississippi looking over the still clearly visible damage wreaked by Hurricane Camille 20 years earlier. In 2000, I returned to Biloxi amazed to see the former (and now current) area of devastation turned into a booming mini-Las Vegas, teeming with new hotels and casinos.
In the 1980’s and 1990’s having, first-hand, seen the devastation wrought by hurricanes Hugo, Andrew, and others I cringed every time another hurricane came close to the city of New Orleans. Mark Fischetti, a contributing editor to Scientific American magazine, reminds us in Friday’s New York Times that he wrote an extensive article in 2001 in Scientific American magazine called Drowning New Orleans which described then in amazing detail the hurricane disaster projections made years ago by scientists at Louisiana State University which have now come true.
Scientists are not always right. But when carefully researched scientific data and ideas are trumped by government ideology, expediency, and shortsightedness, the consequences may eventually be felt by many.
Published September 6, 2005 in the Nashua Telegraph as:
Political expediency trumped science on Gulf Coast.
