Helene is more deadly than Katrina if you don’t count the deaths after the boat broke the levee that was well beyond its lifespan in New Orleans, which you shouldn’t since that was a 100% fixable issue that was not taken care of.
We always say Katrina was a man-made disaster. I worry with climate change, that other places will be testing their infrastructure. Katrina should have been the canary in the coal mine and a lot of people just said, “Don’t live below sea level.” Old river damns can break just as easily as neglected levees.
The real problem with “never live on a floodplain” is that you can’t know where the floodplains are. The flood maps are all based on historical rainfall data, and that data is now obsolete. Even worse, it won’t stabilize in our lifetimes. So we can’t just observe the next ten years of rainfall and plan around that. No, things are changing, and they will continue to change. You might think you don’t live on a 500 year floodplain. But the cold truth of it is, we no longer have any idea where the 500 year flood plains are anymore. You need decades of weather observations of a stable climate to come up with accurate flood maps. And we just don’t have that kind of reliable data anymore. Unless you happen to live on the top of a very tall hill, you really can’t be sure you don’t live in a flood zone of some sort or another.
It was definitely a man-made disaster when it came to New Orleans. I made this analogy to someone else: if lightning strikes a skyscraper and the skyscraper burns down and kills everyone inside due to a lack of a sprinkler system, is that really death by a natural cause? I would say it’s death by gross incompetence.
