Moreover, protecting the city from a major storm was never anyone’s top priority. Tales of local government corruption, funds misappropriation, and even failed local ballot propositions are legendary. And with every passing decade, as the city was spared further hurricanes, the people became more complacent, and the sense of denial grew. Denial, as they now know, will no more fortify levees or prevent flooding than wishful thinking. Hurricane survival requires preparation, and preparation means intentional efforts are made in building construction, land use, water management, and population education.
More telling than the difference in the collective mindsets of Cancun and New Orleans is their respective recovery efforts. While most major hotel/resort structures in Cancun were already designed to withstand major hurricane damage (and those in New Orleans were not) the greater area of concern to Cancun was not loss or damage to structures, but to the beach, the primary tourist draw on which its economy depends. After Hurricane Wilma washed away eight miles of Cancun’s beautiful beach, the Mexican government paid $24 million to a Belgian firm to vacuum up offshore sand roughly 20 miles off the coast and pump it back to resort-front beaches. The result? Cancun’s beach front is now roughly twice as wide as it was before the storm. Imagine, then, if New Orleans had received the type of immediate, hands-on, no-holds-barred infusion of support that the Mexican government showered upon just Cancun’s beaches alone.
Roughly $2.3 billion in insurance claims in Cancun were filed in the aftermath of Wilma, but many hotel and resort owners took the opportunity to go beyond making maintenance-style repairs and upgraded the quality of their rebuilt properties by adding condos, thereby expanding the mix of accommodations and planning for future growth. Many single family homes in Mexico are also built quite differently than in the US—with metal-reinforced concrete rather than wood frames—and survived Wilma with minimal or no damage.
By contrast, stories of under-or inadequately insured homes and properties in New Orleans are legendary. Many homeowners did not carry flood insurance, necessary when water damage occurs from rising rather than falling water. (Hurricane insurance couldn’t help most whose homes were victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans because they were destroyed by the flood waters from breached levies rather than wind damage.) Adding insult to injury, many of the most seriously damaged neighborhoods in New Orleans were occupied by either the poorest or oldest of the city’s population. Both groups are notorious for having not been insured at all, and as a result have nothing to go back to. At last count, only about 52 percent of New Orleans’ pre-Katrina population of 450,000 has returned. Neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward and parts of New Orleans East are still nearly vacant.
