>>Dr. Jeff Masters reports estimated damage in Mexico beyond $1 billion dollars. And that estimate may increase with time.
Maybe. Now factor in 80 billion and you get the idea that maybe Dean caused 1/80th of the damage Katrina did.
>>I understand! I went through three myself in 2004. I now you guys got messed up pretty bad. I just don't understand why the rebuilding is taking so long...
Unless you lost everything you owned, the 3 that you went through might have knocked some tree limbs down and lost power. Did you lose your house? Did you lose all your stuff? Did it sit in water for weeks? Did you have to scramble your life for a while and couch surf at someone's house for months/years waiting to deal with it.
A) Inept Federal Government (regardless of inept state and local governments).
B) So you wanna rebuild, but they won't tell you if you can or if you whether you will be eligible for the NFIP. In fact, the Army Corps was releasing the new 100 year flood maps TODAY for the Southshore of Lake Pontchartrain (Orleans, Plaquemines, St. Bernard, Jefferson Parishes).
C) They wouldn't define exactly who had to raise and to what level in order to be covered (last fall, they did further surveying).
D) When my city lost more than 100,000 dwellings, what do you do?
E) You probably got temporarily relocated for work. In my case, I was in South Alabama (in another devastated area) and working in Mobile until November 2005. I would come home on the weekends to empy the contents of my 2,300sf house. And maybe you've tried to lift a load of wet towels before, but when everything is soaked, completely, it easily weighs 5 times more than it does dry.
F) Building permitting got bogged down again based on elevation problems.
G) Insurance companies deciding they simply weren't going to pay. And that's after you wait 3-4 months for an inspector to even come out and assess your damage.
I could go through the alphabet 3 or 4 times with this, but I'm not going to. The only people who were back up in their homes in 3-5 months were those who didn't have flood damage or those who had enough money on the side to do the work themselves and deal with insurance later.
>>Okay, since this is people talking to people and not politicians talking to voters I'd like to hear from those of you that survived Katrina what you think needs to be done now to get back to normalcy. Where do you start, what would you do?
I have no idea. It's a big catch 22. Many people can't afford insurance anymore. So I guess a start is that the government decide to either back catastrophies so that insurers will write policies or put wind and hail in the flood policies. Our city requires substantial cheap labor because of it being based on tourism. Without affordable rental units, you're not going to have those workers. Without competiton, the rental prices make you think you're living on Manhattan Island without the quality of life. Without guaranteed levee protection at least to Cat 3 or 4, smart people aren't going to come back because they can't guaranty that they won't lose all of their possessions and their home for a second time.
>>For some of you coast dwellers who are rebuilding, what do YOU think the answer is. Do you expect to be hit by a hurricane again? Was the flooding really unprecedented? If no one lived there before then how can you define unprecedented if there weren't any observers?
I'm not rebuilding, but my ex-wife is. FWIW, she got her federal money 3 weeks ago, and her contractor is expected to start work on the house sometime next week. Yes, we expect to get hit by a hurricane again. Yes, the flooding was unprecedented both for the area and for the entire United State of America. There weren't levees before, and the water would roll out just as fast as it rolled in (similar to storm tides and surges).
I'll say this - New Orleans cannot be replaced. You can't just move all the port tonnage because most of that comes from the heartland. You can't just eliminate the oil and gas industry because we provide a large chunk of America's energy sources (oil, natural gas). You can't just nuke the seafood industry because people eat seafood. So for all those who say we shouldn't rebuild or whatever, that's not really an option. This isn't some retreat community that could be redone elsewhere for the same affect. This is a working coast that provides much more for the world than it takes back.
Steve
