MG ----------------------------- Nation faces unprecedented choices: How far should U.S. go in making New Orleans whole?
By Rex Nutting & William L. Watts MarketWatch September 9 2005
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New Orleans won't die completely; it's too valuable for that.
The port facilities in the city and along the Mississippi River are vital to U.S. economic interests. The ports will survive, regardless of the cost. Much of the nation's trade in bulky goods like grain, steel, rubber and petroleum are handled by the river ports in New Orleans and its environs. Inexpensive alternatives to the Mississippi don't exist.
There's a strong economic incentive for the private sector and the government to plow money back into the ports, refineries, pipelines, chemical plants and fisheries that must, for geographic reasons, be located in the river delta.
The oldest parts of the city, such as the French Quarter, were spared the worst of the damage, giving some hope that tourists may once again return to the Big Easy.
Of 620,000 jobs that existed in New Orleans before the storm, about 30,000 were in transportation and utilities, and 86,000 were in hospitality and leisure occupations.
Those jobs and many more in areas of the city that were not destroyed could come back within months.
Many of the other half-million jobs in New Orleans may never come back. Much of the city has been lost to human inhabitation for years, perhaps decades, by the polluted floodwaters. The population has fled, some of it forever.
The most economically valuable parts of the city were spared. The rest has been steeped in a toxic soup. An estimated 150,000 homes were lost in the flood, most of them housing renters who had little insurance coverage. Most of the property owners in the city did not have any flood insurance.
"It's a Superfund site," said Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency who's worked on toxic cleanups for 30 years. He estimates it would cost $80 billion to $100 billion to clean up the damage caused by the floods. If the area were declared a Superfund site, the companies and public agencies responsible for the pollution would have to pay for the cleanup.
Kaufman's estimate is his own; the EPA has not completed its assessment of the extent of the pollution or the possible costs.
Polls in the aftermath of Katrina show Americans are very sympathetic with the plight of the hurricane victims, according to Scott Keeter, director of survey research at the Pew Center for Politics and the Press. That's likely to translate into an ongoing willingness to settle the displaced and help them find jobs and housing, he said.
An AP-Ipsos poll conducted this week found 54% of Americans favored relocating parts of the city on higher ground. Fifty-six percent of those surveyed in a CNN/Gallup/USA Today poll said they believed the city would never be the same, but 63% maintained that the city should be rebuilt.
"But the question of whether the public will be willing to provide full support to very big-ticket items for the rebuilding of New Orleans in its present location and its present form, I think, is a more unknowable question at this point," Keeter said.