Maybe the problem is “good news is no news”? Though if I remember right, the afterword to Rising Tide talks about lessons learned and the success in keeping the lower Mississippi River valley from flooding catastrophically since 1927.

Can’t find the reference right now, but was reading today that the measures the US most needs to take to prepare for a flu pandemic are not things like quarantines, command-and-control, and martial law, but rather rapid recognition of a problem, distributed resources, speedy distribution of vaccines and so on. All of which would also be helpful in dealing with a biological attack and/or numerous other potential disasters. This administration being what it is, I wouldn’t look for any federal improvement before 2009, but states and localities may prove better.

As you stated that is not possible. But having preparations and plans and executing them when needed is a necessity. Failing in that is stupid.
Several levels of US administration are stupid by this criteria. Even Bangladesh has a working system of storm shelters. They are surely not as a pretty as a superdome, but they work.

I am guessing, Europe will cope with the coming flu better than the US.

I am afraid Europe has some disadvantages here, such as a higher population density and more reliance on public transport.

I’ve just finished John McPhee’s _The Control of Nature_ which, while full of some very interesting details, is just dripping with this sort of immensely irritating “everyone is doomed, doomed I tell you” attitude. I’d love to read something rather more balanced which discussed such as is known about ways in which disaster planning works well. In spite of McPhee’s doom and gloom regarding Los Angeles, the basic issue there, the attempt to deal with aggressive rock slides from the San Gabriel mountains, seems to have been mostly under control in the recent past (though, as with all such things, who knows how much skrimping and lack of maintenance there’s been in the last few years, just building up to disaster). More generally US attempts to control nature have, IMHO, been pretty damn successful in spite of the naysayers. Sure, perfection is not achieved, but that was not what was attempted. On the other hand, the US attempts to prepare for disaster that involve dealing with humans, whether it’s health matters, preparations for evacuation, or preparations for nuclear war, have been pretty damn pathetic, and, as far as I can tell, that’s a constant throughout the 20th century. Meanwhile the USSR apparently had a pretty serious, well-thought-out and well-budgeted nuclear war mitigation plan, both China and Cuba seem to be able to move their citizens out of the way of hurricanes, and, I am guessing, Europe will cope with the coming flu better than the US.

But even when I did hurricane training before I could work at a refinery back in the mid-80s, they told us there were two places in the world whose geography set them up in a particular way for a catastrophic hit by hurricane-driven flooding: Bangladesh and New Orleans.

The Big One will come to San Francisco; another Big One will shake the San Andreas near Los Angeles. These are as near to certain as anything on this earth. Likewise, another hurricane will pass close enough to New Orleans to drive the waters of Lake Ponchartrain toward the city. In fact, in sufficient time, every spot on the Gulf Coast will get whacked by a jolly big hurricane. I can’t rattle the names off from the last 10 years of storms because I’ve been living further away, but saying that low-lying areas near the shore will face occasional destruction from hurricanes is like observing that Minnesota gets cold in winter.

The conclusions to be drawn from these facts are, as you say, not immediately obvious. San Francisco is one of the great drivers of the world economy, to say nothing of Tokyo, and the threat of massive earthquake destruction is not about to dislodge either. To my mind, the response is in the planning for the inevitable natural catastrophe. Human nature being what it is, this is hard to sustain over the long term.

And I find that the biggest mistakes responding to Katrina were at the federal level. I’ve refrained from writing a prolonged piece about it because AFOE is not really the place, but one of the most obvious aspects of a real catastrophe is that local authorities are by definition overwhelmed if not obliterated. Many of the specific problems in New Orleans also happened in Miami in 1992 in the wake of hurricane Andrew. The Clinton administration learned from that experience; the Bush administration chose to forget those lessons. Getting 80 percent of the city’s population to evacuate — particularly after three evacuations and near-misses within two years — was an extremely high level of response. (Less than a month later, and with the damage of Katrina in plain view, Key West had a mandatory evacuation for hurricane Rita, yet only half of the people left.) Not having the federal response pre-positioned and ready to move in as soon as the storm had passed was inexcusable.

I see I have made a short story long. I will close by adding that the “Delta” is a bit of a term of art, which I did not use entirely felicitously. The Delta can be anywhere downriver from Memphis (hence Delta blues), while in more common geographic usage the delta is downriver from New Orleans, where the river actually empties into the Gulf. Flooding in the lower Mississippi valley after 1927 has been remarkably limited, not least because the Army Corps of Engineers abandoned its “levees only” policy and took a much more flexible approach to flood management. But New Orleans getting flooded by the lake or the Gulf is a different matter.

My point is that, as in so much of life, where you live is a tradeoff. The appropriate response to something like the location of New Orleans is surely not to say “how stupid” but an accurate quantification of the pros and cons. It may well be that, after the sums are done, the conclusion remains “how stupid”, but it’s not a priori obvious.