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Wed, 31 Aug 2005
I've avoided posting about the inundation of New Orleans, or Hurricane Katrina, until now -- I'm on the wrong side of the Atlantic and it wasn't obviously any business of mine (other than the odd anxious "are you alright?" email to friends and acquaintances who live a whole lot closer).
However: the devastation is now clearly so extensive that I expect it to have very personal consequences indeed.
Leaving aside any political partisan finger-pointing, it's worth noting that it's not just New Orleans that's underwater. As Stratfor pointed out in a recent bulletin, New Orleans is just one of the residential hubs of the Port of Southern Louisiana, the huge terminal complex that covers the bottom-most fifty miles of the Mississippi. "The Port of Southern Louisiana is the fifth-largest port in the world in terms of tonnage, and the largest port in the United States. The only global ports larger are Singapore, Rotterdam, Shanghai and Hong Kong. ... The Port of Southern Louisiana stretches up and down the Mississippi River for about 50 miles, running north and south of New Orleans from St. James to St. Charles Parish. It is the key port for the export of grains to the rest of the world -- corn, soybeans, wheat and animal feed. Midwestern farmers and global consumers depend on those exports. The United States imports crude oil, petrochemicals, steel, fertilizers and ores through the port. Fifteen percent of all U.S. exports by value go through the port. Nearly half of the exports go to Europe."
The actual estimates for insured structural damage caused by Hurricane Katrina are currently around US $25-30Bn. The current loss of life estimates are in the hundreds (although I'd be unsurprised if the eventual death toll does not eventually top 9/11 by quite a margin). But the economic damage from closing the Port of Southern Louisiana for up to three months is huge -- plausibly equal to 5% of the US balance of trade with the rest of the world. I can't put a figure on that total, but I'd be surprised if it isn't an order of magnitude more than the $25-30Bn insurance costs, and possibly even higher than the cost to date of the Iraq war and occupation ($200Bn). A couple of hundred billion here, a couple of hundred billion there -- pretty soon we're talking real money.
What are the likely consequences (locally and globally) of blowing a 5% of GDP sized hole under the waterline of the US economy?
(PS: for anyone who suspects this question is prompted by nascent anti-Americanism, rest assured: the real reason is that I earn about 70% of my income in dollars. If the US economy sneezes, I catch a cold ...)
posted at: 20:03 | path: /wartime | permanent link to this entryspecials:
Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone
Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction
Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab
"Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex
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