The Big One [II]
Sep. 6th, 2005 08:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xthreadIts hard to talk about the Southeast right now. The tragedy is so big that when you think about it, you think 'those numbers can't be that big,' but when you start to look closely at them, you start to realize that they can't be that small.
Its hard to look at the human cost and not see some of the 30,000 ft level, at least for me, because I spend a lot of my personal and professional life thinking about the 30,000 foot level.
Its hard to think clearly about the 30,000 ft level without simultaneously being tripped by the sheer terror at the human level and feeling that I must sound like a ghoul.
And its all Just Bad.
So please bear with me if this is less well organized than it could be.
I'd thought that I'd be writing two posts about the Hurricane, but as I think about it, I realize that there will be more - this post is going to be about where things are now, and the next post will talk about what this means for the future.
I keep hearing reports that the dead 'may be in the thousands' - its hard to imagine that it could be that low. This morning, a week after the levees broke, the effective population of the city may now be under 10,000; rescue crews are still paying almost all of their attention to the living, and the attempts to collect the dead are only just beginning. If I listen to myself say 'tens of thousands of people will be found dead,' I can't quite believe it. But if I do some back of the napkin math, I can't believe anything less. We won't know for weeks.
New Orleans had a population of about half a million; the total population of the metropolitan area was 1.4 million. Biloxi and Gulfport were home to an another 150,000. Somewhere between 3 million and 5 million people lived in the disaster zone. Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama were hardest hit, although that unduly minimizes the impact on the other 9 states that have been affected as well. The reports from southern Mississippi are that much of the coastal areas have simply been swept away; almost half of the population of the state lives in the area affected by the hurricane. If New Orleans had escaped unscathed, we would now be watching the same national emergency, focused instead on the rest of the gulf coast.
Most of the single family dwellings in the city will need to be razed. Many of those had Federal flood insurance. I promise you that in the best cases (of which there will be few), families will find themselves with several tens of thousands of dollars of shiny new debt if they choose to abandon the area or to rebuild their homes. Right now, the focus of the nation is on the terrible plight of the poor who could not get out. But over the next few months, that focus is going to shift, when the financial impact to the middle class starts to sink in.
A lot of people who were middle class until a week ago aren't any more, because their house was destroyed and they've just lost tens of thousands of dollars in one swoop. For middle class americans, their home is their largest financial asset. This last week has not been kind to millions of homes in the Southeast. I know that sentence must sound like hyperbole. Its not - in New Orleans, homes were flooded, but not washed away. Across southern Mississippi, miles of shorefront development were washed away, leaving nothing but concrete slab foundations where multi-story buildings stood just a week ago.
And while those houses were being washed away, so were at least hundreds of thousands of jobs. New Orleans was perhaps the fourth largest port in the world. The entire middle of the country depends on that port to ship their goods. The US petroleum industry depended heavily not only on New Orleans, but also on Gulfport and the eastern portions of the gulf coast. The US Oil and Gas industry has seen between 11% and 16% of US Gasoline production shut down in the last week. Parts of that infrastructure is coming back on-line now, but we're about to get a crash course in enforced conservation. And if we want to fantasize about not rebuilding the city, let me remind you that choosing not rebuild the city won't change where the Mississippi empties into the Atlantic ocean, and won't change where its easy for a deep water port to be put. If we choose not to rebuild New Orleans in its current location, two decades from now the city that is rebuilt will have drifted to incorporate the current site of New Orleans, because the geography of the region is what dictates where it makes sense for a city to be.
And now we find ourselves with hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of displaced persons. We haven't had this many people displaced since the Great Depression, when the collapse of agriculture led to the massive migration away from Oklahoma and other Dust Bowl states. Most of these people have, until now, fled to other parts of the Southeast. As a result, Houston is trying to figure out how to deal with having had their population expand by two hundred thousand people over the course of a week. In fact, its possible that this is the most severe population displacement that has ever been seen in the US, exceeding even the Civil War.
Rebuilding is going to happen quickly - but only in relative terms. We're going to see the bulk of the rebuilding happen over the course of the next year; that means that there's going to be a construction boom in the area, but at the same time, most of the existing employment in the region is toast. Let me say that again - across four states in the southeastern US, roughly forty percent of their population are affected, and hundreds of thousands of jobs have just disappeared. At the most optimistic numbers one could choose to use, we've seen four months of american job growth disappear overnight. Some of those people will leave the gulf coast area, others will choose to stay and join the rebuilding effort, but no matter what, there are an awful lot of people who need to be absorbed back into the economy awfully quickly.
Its going to be a very interesting several years.
Its hard to look at the human cost and not see some of the 30,000 ft level, at least for me, because I spend a lot of my personal and professional life thinking about the 30,000 foot level.
Its hard to think clearly about the 30,000 ft level without simultaneously being tripped by the sheer terror at the human level and feeling that I must sound like a ghoul.
And its all Just Bad.
So please bear with me if this is less well organized than it could be.
I'd thought that I'd be writing two posts about the Hurricane, but as I think about it, I realize that there will be more - this post is going to be about where things are now, and the next post will talk about what this means for the future.
I keep hearing reports that the dead 'may be in the thousands' - its hard to imagine that it could be that low. This morning, a week after the levees broke, the effective population of the city may now be under 10,000; rescue crews are still paying almost all of their attention to the living, and the attempts to collect the dead are only just beginning. If I listen to myself say 'tens of thousands of people will be found dead,' I can't quite believe it. But if I do some back of the napkin math, I can't believe anything less. We won't know for weeks.
New Orleans had a population of about half a million; the total population of the metropolitan area was 1.4 million. Biloxi and Gulfport were home to an another 150,000. Somewhere between 3 million and 5 million people lived in the disaster zone. Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama were hardest hit, although that unduly minimizes the impact on the other 9 states that have been affected as well. The reports from southern Mississippi are that much of the coastal areas have simply been swept away; almost half of the population of the state lives in the area affected by the hurricane. If New Orleans had escaped unscathed, we would now be watching the same national emergency, focused instead on the rest of the gulf coast.
Most of the single family dwellings in the city will need to be razed. Many of those had Federal flood insurance. I promise you that in the best cases (of which there will be few), families will find themselves with several tens of thousands of dollars of shiny new debt if they choose to abandon the area or to rebuild their homes. Right now, the focus of the nation is on the terrible plight of the poor who could not get out. But over the next few months, that focus is going to shift, when the financial impact to the middle class starts to sink in.
A lot of people who were middle class until a week ago aren't any more, because their house was destroyed and they've just lost tens of thousands of dollars in one swoop. For middle class americans, their home is their largest financial asset. This last week has not been kind to millions of homes in the Southeast. I know that sentence must sound like hyperbole. Its not - in New Orleans, homes were flooded, but not washed away. Across southern Mississippi, miles of shorefront development were washed away, leaving nothing but concrete slab foundations where multi-story buildings stood just a week ago.
And while those houses were being washed away, so were at least hundreds of thousands of jobs. New Orleans was perhaps the fourth largest port in the world. The entire middle of the country depends on that port to ship their goods. The US petroleum industry depended heavily not only on New Orleans, but also on Gulfport and the eastern portions of the gulf coast. The US Oil and Gas industry has seen between 11% and 16% of US Gasoline production shut down in the last week. Parts of that infrastructure is coming back on-line now, but we're about to get a crash course in enforced conservation. And if we want to fantasize about not rebuilding the city, let me remind you that choosing not rebuild the city won't change where the Mississippi empties into the Atlantic ocean, and won't change where its easy for a deep water port to be put. If we choose not to rebuild New Orleans in its current location, two decades from now the city that is rebuilt will have drifted to incorporate the current site of New Orleans, because the geography of the region is what dictates where it makes sense for a city to be.
And now we find ourselves with hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of displaced persons. We haven't had this many people displaced since the Great Depression, when the collapse of agriculture led to the massive migration away from Oklahoma and other Dust Bowl states. Most of these people have, until now, fled to other parts of the Southeast. As a result, Houston is trying to figure out how to deal with having had their population expand by two hundred thousand people over the course of a week. In fact, its possible that this is the most severe population displacement that has ever been seen in the US, exceeding even the Civil War.
Rebuilding is going to happen quickly - but only in relative terms. We're going to see the bulk of the rebuilding happen over the course of the next year; that means that there's going to be a construction boom in the area, but at the same time, most of the existing employment in the region is toast. Let me say that again - across four states in the southeastern US, roughly forty percent of their population are affected, and hundreds of thousands of jobs have just disappeared. At the most optimistic numbers one could choose to use, we've seen four months of american job growth disappear overnight. Some of those people will leave the gulf coast area, others will choose to stay and join the rebuilding effort, but no matter what, there are an awful lot of people who need to be absorbed back into the economy awfully quickly.
Its going to be a very interesting several years.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-09-06 05:17 pm (UTC)I've also read that gulf oil production is at 30% of normal, though that number has increased by 5% in just a few short days, so recovery there might be quick.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-07 02:54 am (UTC)The big question is "cost of energy" - if oil sustains the current high price through the end of the year, I bet you're going to see investment in alternatives increase.