A Fine Line

I feel sorry for the thousands of residents of the Gulf Coast region who now have to deal with the aftermath of a second major hurricane in as many weeks. I'm not sure that living on the water is worth what it costs to have that prime real estate. Because it is an individual's decision to live in a location in spite of the risks, such as those of us who live in earthquake country, there is a part of me humming with resentment that my tax dollars are going to pay to rebuild not just their homes, but the businesses and the infrastructure of an area that is destroyed time after time by a combination of geography and weather patterns.

What happened during Katrina, damage spread far and wide, was devastating, but anyone who knows basic geography knew that it was inevitable! When the coastline is filled with debris to create landfill so man can have a seaport, and then man builds a seawall around the landfill and builds a city on top of it, it is inevitable that nature will reclaim it. Construction of seawalls cannot prevent the eventual collapse of a region below sea level, but may slow down when it happens. A bowl is going to fill with water during bad weather, whether it is a birdbath in the backyard or a city constructed on top of a bowl filled with debris and covered with sand. Anyone who thinks the structural engineering of more than a century ago that created this condition is sound today is naive. Rebuilding the same area in the same way at the taxpayer's expense is redundant folly!

And now the storms have hit the coastline Texas claims and the damage is again beyond what man's preventive measures could contain. Clean up and rebuilding will take years, the same as it did after the last major hurricane that devastated the coastline of Texas and commemorated with a shoreline statue destroyed in this season's hurricane. It's not just vacation homes, but major industry and infrastructure that follow the shore line, bad planning on anyone's part when it's well-known and documented in historical records how far inland the tides come and how much damage even a Force 1 hurricane can do when it makes landfall.

What is different for me this time is that the residents were not just warned to evacuate, but mandated to leave the region -- and far too many chose to "ride it out." I'm straddling the fine line between feeling glad they survived, but angry that they did so at the expense of the rest of the citizens of the United States who now have to pay for the search and rescue, as well as the recovery of victims. As if it's not bad enough that homes, businesses, and infrastructure are lost, we now have to deal with the people who should not have been there during this weather event, but who are injured or dead as a result of their decision.

This time, provisions were made for safe transport, for safe haven, for food during the hurricanes' landfall, but many of the residents are either too stupid or too selfish to realize that this decision was not theirs to make! When an individual or a family flauts the evacuation mandate and puts themselves in harm's way, I feel that the consequences of their actions are now theirs, too. Rescuers put themselves into harm's way to rescue those who chose not to move to safety as they were directed to do by the local authorities. The collective we learning the lessons of Katrina is of limited value when the individual I refuses to cooperate with what is provided to keep people safe during the seasonal storms.

Rather than rebuilding what has again been destroyed, man needs to relocate the cities away from the fragile coastline; reconfigure the geography to work with, rather than against, the normal patterns of tides and seasonal weather patterns. Create a better relationship with nature, one that does not demand months--and now years--of clean-up and rebuilding after the hurricanes that are destined to destroy the coastline. Create seawalls farther inland that can actually work with the high tides to contain the inevitable influx of water during hurricane season: the loss of homes on the shoreline is certainly better than the loss of life throughout the region.

The Earth is not a static ball of rock, dirt, and water rotating its merry way to infinity. It is a dynamic life force that is constantly changing on its own. Mankind interjected itself into the process of change by trying to stop what nature intends. We cannot change the weather patterns; we cannot dam up the water; we cannot stop the earth from quaking. If we are going to live with nature, we have to accept what has existed since before we were here and work with what nature intended, rather than forcing what man wants upon nature. Our refusal to accept what we cannot change ultimately results in changes we cannot refuse because Nature always wins.

Always.