Ex-New Orleans mayor touts flood mitigation investment

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This article was published 30/11/2011 (5040 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin has one message about flood issues after dealing with the hurricane Katrina disaster in 2005: Flood mitigation investments pay off.

“You need to have the resources open on the front end (of a flood),” Nagin told delegates at the Keystone Centre on Tuesday during the National Emergency Management Meeting: Planning for 2012 and Beyond. “The big problem for us was we knew what we had to do because 40 years before hurricane Katrina, we had hurricane Betsy. We had the plans, but we didn’t have the political will to invest in those plans. You seem to be doing that much better here.”

Nagin’s appearance at the conference, set up at the request of Canada’s provincial premiers by the Council of the Federation, emphasized work done before high water events pays off over the long term.

“We should have invested $80 million after hurricane Betsy,” Nagin said. “Over 13 years, that would have grown to $253 million. That work was still going on when Katrina hit. Now we are spending $15 billion for the same system. It makes way more sense to invest before a flood happens to avoid cost and loss of human life.

“In today’s dollars, those (post-hurricane Betsy) investments are worth $1.5 billion, and we ended up spending $15 billion. … When you add up all the other costs, we spent 3,000 per cent more than we should have.”

Premier Greg Selinger, who pushed for the two-day emergency management meeting, said he wants the provinces and Ottawa to work together to develop a new joint disaster mitigation program. In Manitoba, that would involve projects like raising dikes and moving houses in flood-prone areas before flooding occurs.

“Mitigation will save the country billions of dollars where we know disasters have occurred and have a likelihood of occurring again,” Selinger said on Tuesday. “Some of them are more expensive than others, but a long-term pan-Canadian strategy on mitigation I think would not only help us rebuild our infrastructure, but I think it would save billions of dollars of recovery costs in the future.”

Some of that federal-provincial co-operation has started, with the federal government offering $50 million for disaster financial assistance on Nov. 21, and promising more money is headed Manitoba’s way.

“When it comes to flood mitigation, all of the provinces and territories are looking for a national mitigation plan with some real funding for the types of things that were done in the Red River Valley,” said Chuck Sanderson, executive director of Manitoba Emergency Measures Organization.

“Too many people say it can’t happen here and in the southwest, a lot of times it hasn’t happened here. But guess what? It just did. We have to look at the whole province.”

Nagin said the construction of flood protection measures around New Orleans is now 98 per cent complete, “but it’s 40 years late.”

“I think what you are doing in Manitoba, that’s very impressive if you are stockpiling equipment and are making major purchases of equipment,” Nagin said. “If a road does go, you can build the dikes up very quickly and then clear out the roads so traffic can flow. Those 12-foot sandbags you were using? That kept the road open, and thank God you had the foresight to build that kind of system. It’s just being prepared.”

Once a flood fight turns into a disaster recovery mission, other levels of emergency measures need to kick in, such as disaster financial assistance.

“This year alone, we are looking at $500 million in DFA claims,” said Chuck Sanderson, executive director of Manitoba Emergency Measures Organization. “The other assistance programs are another half-billion. That’s huge. The last 10-11 years, the total DFA paid out in Manitoba is around the $300-million mark.”

Sanderson said events like the 2011 flood are “wake-up calls.”

“(Governments) need to put emergency planning on the agenda of just about everything,” Sanderson said. “It has a piece of just about everything. The economic piece involves emergency management. Education involves emergency management. It’s often something where a lot of people generally don’t want to talk about it, but it needs to be and is like business continuity planning …

“Let’s do the planning now so you don’t have events you want to forget later.”

» Brandon Sun, Winnipeg Free Press