"Floods, Tornadoes, Hurricanes..."

As you may have noticed, I'm not one to blog much about politics and/or national and world issues...I leave that to Smithers (because he's way better at it than I could ever be).

Those of you who know me well know that my job revolves around water - mostly lake water quality, river and stream systems, storm sewer systems, and water quantity (i.e. flooding). One of my areas of specialty is Flood Insurance Studies - to simplify, I create computer models that predict flood levels for rivers, streams, and lakes. I deal with FEMA on a weekly basis since these studies are submitted to them.

Two of my co-workers are retired U.S. Army Corps of Engineers employees. After Katrina, the Corps asked if they could go to New Orleans to help manage the levee reconstruction projects. They both obliged and just recently returned to the Twin Cities. Last month they gave a fascinating presentation about the levee reconstruction project. The presentation included photos of the destruction and the reconstruction, maps of the of depth of flooding throughout the city, maps of the locations where the levees failed, and all sorts of other interesting data (interesting to us scientists and engineers anyway).

After the presentation, a co-worker in the audience asked what I think is the obvious question: why? The response was that the people of New Orleans don't even question reconstruction...it's a non-issue to them.

Anyway, the point of this post is that a friend forwarded me this interesting article from Time Magazine that I'd really like to share: Floods, Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Wildfires, Earthquakes...Why Don't We Prepare.