Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Friday 2/9/2005

It's been a bad week in the Big Easy, and the weekend 's not going to get much better. Katrina has underlined one of the basic limitations of IT — while communications have been maintained, albeit fitfully, with the citizens of New Orleans, it doesn't really matter if there's nobody around able to help at the other end. You can read a blog from an ISP in the middle of it all that's keeping going with its own generator, you can listen to the National Guard radio networks via streamed audio, you can watch before and after satellite pictures, you can even hear the radio hams on shortwave setting up their emergency nets. But you can't, and I can't, and most criminally it seems the US government can't, do anything with the information. We can watch and hope.

But we should take note. Us Londoners live in an alluvial bowl on an ancient river, with the sea on one side held back by artificial barriers and the countryside draining through a regulated and not entirely perfectly maintained set of water courses on the other. Sounds familiar? And ask Birmingham (that's England, not Alabama) about atypical weather conditions. Or look at New York, perched at sea level on islands and low-lying peninsulas on the edge of an ocean undergoing dramatic and subtle changes.

It's not as if we can pick up our laptops and telework from the safety of some distant hill; if the infrastructure of major cities is destroyed to the point that the economy of the nation is affected, you may not be hungry at the time but you won't be eating steak for a while afterwards.

Do we know the risks we face? If we do, are there plans in place — and will those plans work? The most incredible thing about New Orleans is that the US did know the risks and ostensibly had plans to cope — but in reality, those in charge had been eviscerating the support systems and cancelling even the bare minimums proposed to ensure safety. Yeah, it might happen… but it probably won't, not until I'm safely away, seems to have been the thinking.

The people of New Orleans, especially the poorest and least able, those who the state has special responsibility for, have paid the price for that. If we are sane, then we can learn at their expense and make sure it won't happen to us — at least, not in that way.

No diary next week: see you the week after that.