We all know the tale of the three little piggies. The question is, why don't American houses in the path of hurricanes get built with bricks and mortar to wisthstand them? Or at the very least with concrete or reinforce steel? Okay, so it costs more to build, but it seems if you live anywhere on the Gulf coast or south east Atlantic seaboard your house is probably going to get whacked in its lifetime, no more so than ever.

You know what - insurance companies pay out for hurricane damage - why is that? They don't pay out for floods, or earthquakes. If they insisted buildings were built to withstand hurricane force winds, with storm shutters and the like, maybe they wouldn't have to pay out so much, and maybe the country could stop pissing money away on annual reconstruction projects and start using it for building proper flood protection as they have in the Netherlands (which incidentally I heard today, are built to survive the 1 in 10,000 year storm). On the Gulf coast it looks like a category 5 hurricane is at least a 1 in 100 years event, if not more now frequent, and category 3 storms are basically once a year or so now.

So why the heck was New Orleans only protected by a measly category 3 hurricane levee system? It just doesn't make any sense. Early on I heard someone say it was X billion dollars to build up the levees for protection against a category 5 hurricane storm surge, where X was less than 10. The decision, they said, was made not to build it up "based on a cost benefit analysis". Big mistake.

The problem is, as I've said before, the cost benefit analysis wouldn't have fully considered the cost of destruction of thousands of home, it would be based largely on loss of life. That's because our economy doesn't count property destruction as a negative, on the contrary its a positive because it causes economic activity rebuilding - jobs for reconstruction, raw materials to rebuild, factories to build new cars - wooohooo, bring on those hurricanes, they're good for the economy just like wars, so long as they are not in your backyard.

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