The Super Bowl

Veni, Vedi, Vici. . .

Hurricane Katrina brought her fury to the Gulf Coast, and although New Orleans was spared a "direct" hit, every horror story regarding New Orleans and its vulnerability to hurricanes has come to pass. The hurricane came, the levees failed, and the soup bowl which is the city filled up.

What disturbs me perhaps most of all is the fact that everyone knew that this was coming sooner or later. Everyone was aware of the limitations of the city's flood defenses and that, given a sufficiently large event, this would in fact be the outcome. Yet the city's entire hurricane response plan was based upon a hurricane no bigger than a category 3. There was apparently no contigency plan for the failure of the levees, despite the fact that they weren't designed to withstand major hurricanes. The Superdome, the standard hurricane shelter, works OK for relatively minor storms, but in a big hurricane, the structural integrity left something to be desired, and with the subsequent flooding, officials are now having to figure out how to evacuate 20,000 people from a shelter that was supposed to protect them.

Here's a great opportunity for adaptive management. New Orleans' experiment with risk management just failed horribly. They have an opportunity to learn and improve. The question is will they?