William Marvel [10/04/2005]

By William Marvel

Until the end of August, the hurricane season of 2004 was the worst in most peoples memory. That makes it all the more difficult to understand how the Bush administration dared to continue reallocating the last $250 million of the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project to the war in Iraq. Despite presidential denials that "no one saw this coming," scientific models of a category 4 or 5 hurricane predicted precisely what happened in New Orleans, and the weak link lay in the failure to invest that final quarter-billion dollars in the dike system. That failure, so typical of the penny-wise and pound-foolish Bush domestic attitude, will now cost the American people even more than the entire war in Iraq.In the quest for fundamental cause, though, the Katrina disaster did not originate with the mechanical contrivances meant to divert flooding. It began with the first fool who rebuilt a house on a site where one had already been washed away. One of the foremost purposes of land-use regulations is to prevent reckless construction on fragile, risky terrain, both to avoid loss of life and to relieve the community at large from bearing the burden of rescue and recovery from a cataclysm the victims should have been able to foresee.People who build in floodplains take an enormous risk, and to an unreasonable extent they expect their fellow taxpayers to share that risk. The federal government now supplies a measure of that profligate protection, and in return the Federal Emergency Management Administration is supposed to insist that local communities adhere to certain common-sense restrictions against construction in the most flood-prone areas. Back in the Clinton administration, before the directorship of FEMA was handed to an incompetent presidential crony, that agency cited the town of Bartlett for ignoring those restrictions. Bartlett residents faced ineligibility for federal flood insurance until Selectman Gene Chandlerpleading ignorance of his official responsibilities, as usualwas led by the hand to the sites of several flagrant violations and reprimanded for his negligence.My years on the Conway Planning Board were sometimes punctuated by unpleasant exchanges with developers or landowners who scoffed at floodplain boundaries, but floodplain development that preceded or ignored the federal guidelines has seldom failed to prove the wisdom of those restrictions. Conways notorious Transvale Acres, which squats injudiciously in the Saco River floodplain, has been the site of numerous evacuations over the decades, and the septic systems of those chalets and camps have frequently contaminated the rising river.Traditionally it has been the lower strata of society that have had to manage with such marginal land, but that has changed as the wealthy seek ownership of anything beautiful. With all the influence and power of its privileged membership, our local golf course easily won permission to preserve its profitable floodplain greens by ambitious riprapping, only to have the diverted river current eat away the bank beneath the property of residents on higher ground downstream. Developers on Cape Cod have gouged deeply into that delicate landscape, building trophy homes for affluent status-seekers. Once they discovered how perilously their investments were exposed to violent weather, those homeowners took advantage of a federal insurance program that was meant to protect the poorest and most disadvantaged citizens, rather than the richest and most foolhardy.Civil War maps describe most of Louisiana below New Orleans as "trembling prairie," or what we would call marsh. Those marshes protected the interior from the intimidating hazards of Gulf Coast weather, but in recent years ravenous developers dredged, filled, and destroyed much of that natural terrain in the perpetual search for more waterfront land on which to raise profitable habitations. They pursued their devastating enterprises in a state that has always been hostile to environmental regulation, and for the past five years that sort of development has exploded under a federal administration that shares the same hostility. Without the protection of the marshes, Katrina simply eliminated that portion of Louisiana.Most common folk resent the monopolization of our coast by the wealthiest two percent of the population, who stud it with pretentious, precarious monuments to avarice and then post it against trespass by the hoi polloi. Enough of us have wished the residents of those oceanside mansions and condominiums washed out to sea that their destruction by Katrina might be suspected as an instance of telekinesis. Now if only we could all think really hard again, and guide a similar hurricane into Kennebunkport during one of George Bushs interminable vacations. William Marvel lives in South Conway.