The catastrophe visited on the U.S. Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina should make it clear that homeland security is about more than terrorism. As a nation, we face a broad array of hazards that can bring tragedy to anyone—anywhere—at any time. In the case of New Orleans, an extreme natural event was compounded by the failure of a critical infrastructure element—the levee system designed to keep the waters of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River out of the city. The events unfolding in New Orleans make it abundantly clear just how important infrastructure is to modern society. For the first time in history, our citizens are experiencing life without the safe drinking water and reliable electricity, communications, and mobility that modern infrastructure provides. Although we can’t prevent the occurrence of natural hazards, we possess, and can employ, appropriate techniques, technologies, and institutions to implement a sensible and effective program for protecting critical infrastructure. Why we haven’t is worthy of some public discussion.
In many ways, physical infrastructure is much like a living thing which goes through a process of creation, growth, maturation, decline, and death. Unlike natural systems, though, physical systems cannot sustain themselves; they must be renewed from without in the form of maintenance, repair, renewal, and replacement on a more or less continuous basis. These sustaining actions require us to invest capital, materials, labor and other resources. Depriving a physical system of funding for maintenance and repair, for example, will have a similar effect to depriving a living organism of food or water—it will decline and ultimately, die.
Despite our obvious dependence on infrastructure and the services it provides, we are skeptical of calls for increased investment to maintain existing systems and build new ones to replace the old. We balk at providing the funding for this or that agency and don’t seem to find it illogical to argue against paying for infrastructure while still demanding its services. Unfortunately, the warning signs of infrastructure in distress are subtle. They are often missed because of cutbacks in funds for routine inspection, maintenance, and repair. This fosters a “tipping point” situation for failure where once it begins, it proceeds rapidly and irreversibly. In other words, once the levee breaks, it is too late to consider repairs.
This is not new information. Those forced to operate systems on shoestring budgets have known for decades just how vulnerable infrastructure is to chronic disinvestment. The National Academy of Sciences and others have published numerous reports calling for more enlightened investment policies for infrastructure, a truly national asset. At the same time, the current Administration’s own science advisor, John Marburger has warned about the interdependencies among infrastructure and their potential for the sort of cascading failure we’ve witnessed in New Orleans. None of these many warnings have been heeded.
Just over a year ago, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish noted for the New Orleans Times-Picayune that, “It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.” We all know that life is about trade-offs and some are very hard. However, shortchanging the New Orleans levees in the hope that nothing bad will happen looks more like “depraved indifference” than “benign neglect.”
Now that something very bad has happened, we will be awash in recrimination and finger pointing. The simple truth is that our basic systems are at risk from many threats; some of which we may not yet foresee. We need to anticipate these threats to our physical infrastructures, design systems that are inherently safer and more robust, invest aggressively in their maintenance, and be prepared to restore them rapidly when they fail. The task of ensuring the sustainability of our critical systems will be long, arduous, and costly. However, as we have just seen, failing to do so will ultimately prove to be far more detrimental to the nation’s long term economic and physical security and overall quality of life. As Paul Krugman wrote in the NY Times regarding airport security shortly after the 9/11 attacks, ‘‘If we continue to nickel-and dime crucial public services, we may find—as we did last week—that we have nickel-and-dimed ourselves to death.”
Richard G. Little is Director of the Keston Institute for Infrastructure, a policy research center at the University of Southern California.