One thing that is very imprtant to note here is that the primary levee system for the region is the Mississippi River levee, and that system held up just fine. It was the hurricane leveee system that failed due to improper engineering in the first place. Plus the level of portection decided upon was based on a fairly poor risk assessment and was simply never updated.

The problem I have is that the region here is vital enough to the state of Louisiana and the United States (we ARE the largest US port by tonnage) that some kind of levee system is needed. And so far the RIVER version of that levee has worked great for… at least 4 decades, but I believe it’s actually been a good deal longer then that. However the local region is usually screwed out of a great deal of local resources by the Federal Government (oil and gas leases are a huge boost to the Federal pot, but they don’t share much at all with the State whose borders those leases are being given to) and that leave the local region ill equipped to build those levees on their own. Worse is that the levees need to be fairly contiguous and seamless with each other for a far greater distance than any local governmental entity could manage. In libertarian terms I can build the best damned levee in the world, but if my neighbor builds nothing it don’t do me much good. Whose getting screwed in the equation?

At any rate the whole damned mess is so convoluted that, effectively, we have no choice but to turn to the Feds to build the damned levees and we are at thier mercy for how they do it.

I agree about federal flood insurance. It probably should be privatized and as it is we pay out the ass for insurance around here anyway, both flood and standard homweowners (I pay more than 4 times as much on my little $150k home in Metairie as my Dad pays on wht is at least a $ .5Mil home in New Jersey and that’s just for homeowner’s.) So we HAVE and we DO pay for our insurance pretty extensively, we’re still gettting screwed by our insurance companies anyway and I’m not about to feel sorry for them because insurance is all about risk management. Besides most of the houses in this region have been paid for 3 times over in insurance by now.

Finally your final statement is a bit out of whack. New Orleans is a city over 300 years old and it has not had to be rebuilt every generation, let alone every few years, during htat time span. A few times, yes, notably twice to fire, not flood. We’ve also known about the Katrina scenario (and have been warning the US Corps of Engineers and the Feds about it!) for decades, but have never gotten the funding to build the non-river levees to proper specs. For us the Katrina scenario was a risk assessment factor known as a 500-year event. That’s not to say another storm like that won’t hit us in the same way this year, it’s always a possibility, but statistically speaking it should be a good long time before we get nailed like that again.

It’s all about the risk assessment. The region cannot viably be abandoned (and why should it when it normally never has these problems) and you can bet the locals won’t abandon it. We know too much what it means to be here. I would be happy to tell the Feds to shove it and do it all on our own, but frankly they just won’t let us do it anyway. Because the Feds know just how much we mean to them as well, when all is said and done.