As cities New Orleans and Cancun are drastically different. The former is a historically-quaint, centuries-old settlement that has grown large in a sinking land bowl flanked by the mighty Mississippi river to the south and Lake Pontchartrain to the north; the latter, a merely thirty to forty-year old, newly developed world-class vacation destination built primarily on a narrow eight mile strip of land bordered by a natural lagoon to the west and Caribbean Sea to the east. What they have in common other than their low elevation (each is at sea level or below) is that they’re both hemmed in by water. Furthermore, both cities have a history of hurricanes, know they are situated in hurricane zones, and know the risks. But only one of the two has chosen to consciously act on that knowledge, both preventatively and retroactively: Cancun.
One could argue Cancun has had a decided advantage over a place like New Orleans all along—its development is recent enough to have benefited from hurricane-resistant technology and forethought, and clearly it has done so. Yet since before Cancun was officially established as a city in 1972, the pummeling New Orleans received by Hurricane Betsy in 1965 served as an alarming wake-up call. Arguably, New Orleans had forty years to fortify itself against a repeat performance, and countless government mandates and funds with which to work, yet the system of dikes and levees surrounding the city—its primary defense against flooding during a major storm—failed miserably.
With two years of Hurricane Katrina post-mortem under our belts, most Americans now understand the resulting devastation of New Orleans was a man-made rather than natural disaster. After 1965, the US Congress assigned the Army Corps of Engineers to protect the city from a “100-year storm.” The resulting planning and work done by the Corps was riddled with engineering errors and utterly sub-standard for protection from anything more than a moderate-strength hurricane. The Corps’ estimation of a 100-year event fell short of a category four hurricane, even though Betsy had been exactly that and was originally predicted to arrive even stronger.
PREVIOUS PAGE
