Hurricane Ophelia on September 10, 2005, captured by the Expedition 11 crew aboard the International Space Station. Courtesy of NASA
From the DEC/JAN 2006 issue of Seed:
Scientists spend their entire careers investigating natural processes, uncovering causes, predicting effects and unraveling the complexities of systems that insurers might call Acts of God. It’s about time our political leaders started listening.
"I don’t like being right about this.”
So came the email from Al Naomi, explaining why he was too damn busy to talk to me for this column. I forgive him entirely, of course: Not only does Naomi work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans, and therefore has his hands full at the moment, but pre-Katrina, he was pushing for a study of how to bring the city’s hurricane protections up to Category 5 levels. That’s what Naomi doesn’t like being right about: the imminence of disaster. That’s why, now, he’s “up to his eyeballs” in work. (Better than in water, but still.)
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Naomi wasn’t quite as busy a year ago, when he and another engineer, Joseph Suhayda (formerly of Louisiana State University), took turns driving me around the city to point out its various vulnerabilities. We even drove by the infamous 17th Street Canal, where a levee would break and flood the city. I jotted down their ideas for ways to save my hometown—some of which, like Suhayda’s “community haven” plan, sound brilliant in retrospect: He’d wanted to quickly install massive concrete walls through the center of New Orleans—like the bulkhead on a ship—so that if a levee failed, at least part of the city would remain dry. At the time, people were very critical of the idea; they’re not so critical any more.
Doomed to know the future, unable to do anything about it, tortured by being right—Naomi and Suhayda are modern-day Cassandras. A bit of their complex even rubbed off on me as I spoke with them. Galvanized by the nightmares they predicted, last year I started pitching a major feature article about their big ideas for saving New Orleans—a proposal that I couldn’t get any magazines to take seriously.
I don’t like being right about that story.
Post-Katrina, our 21st-century Cassandras are bearing their fair share of mythic misery. And we, the public, though we bore the brunt of a catastrophe we could have done much more to protect against, have an obligation to the scientists who got something very essentially right when it mattered, yet were ignored. It is up to us to prevent other foreseeable catastrophes in the future by holding those responsible accountable for their ignorance. This is not a time to disregard science; we have to slash the ranks of Cassandras before their identities are forged in tragedy.
Journalists are taking another look at disaster preparedness across the county (and around the world), consulting scientists and helping to give us a clear picture of the risks that we may be facing. It’s a necessary endeavor, and yet also a paradoxical one: It’s possible these prognosticators will help prevent disaster; but they, too, may be doomed to become Cassandras—of a journalistic, rather than scientific, breed—thanks to Hurricane Katrina.
And despite Katrina, many warnings are still going unheeded. Consider that in the wake of the disaster in New Orleans, certain political leaders and heads of agencies have tried to keep an entirely legitimate—if also controversial—subject off the table. I am referring, of course, to the question of whether ongoing global warming might already be fueling more intense hurricanes, and much more importantly, whether it will do so in the future.