All highways going north from Houston as Hurricane Rita approaches currently look more like parking lots than highways, in Houston traffic cameras.
Would it be a good idea to include in an evacuation plan that inbound sides of highways will be converted to outbound during the evacuation?
At least everyone does seem to be evacuating a day in advance.
-jsq
Immediately after Hurricane Katrina, reports were that catastrophe bonds for hurricanes probably would not be triggered.
Continue readingStandard & Poor’s has ratings outstanding on $4.25 billion of natural peril catastrophe bonds. Of this, $1.61 billion carries an exposure to North Atlantic hurricanes, generally covering the Gulf and Eastern Seaboard states from Texas to Maine.
— Catastrophe bonds not likely to attach, S&P’s reports 8/30/2005
According to a
U.S. Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimate of 6 Sept,
the insured cost of Hurricane Katrina could exceed $30 billion.
According to
Swiss Re on 12 Sept.,
the insured cost is probably actually $40 billion. That makes Katrina the most costly disaster ever for insurers, higher than the $35 billion for Hurricane Andrew in 1992,
$32.5 billion for 9/11, or $15-$20 billion for the 1994 Northridge Earthquake in Los Angeles.
Lately I’ve seen a lot of ink and bits spilled about whether to move New Orleans. NOLA is unique, because it is mostly below sea level. It is also part of an industrial corridor sometimes called the American Ruhr. And it is the port for a third of the U.S. And the whole levee system is an artificial attempt to contain a river that naturally changes course every so often. All those points are worth separate discussion.
But here I’d like to address the underlying assumption of many people who suggest moving New Orleans: that it can’t happen here, here being wherever the writer is.
Let me pick on Boston. Everyone knows that Boston never gets serious hurricanes, right? Yet downtown Boston is surrounded on three sides by water and has a typical elevation of about 20 feet. Boston’s Back Bay is built on landfill about that high above the Charles River, and might subside if flooded. Then there’s the Big Dig, which undermines numerous buildings; what would it do if completely flooded? Plus Bostonians aren’t used to preparing for hurricanes.
Yet it can happen here. It has, in August 1636, with with 20 foot ocean surge.
Continue readingAccording to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on 6 Sept., the current estimate for private insurance payouts due to Hurricane Katrina is more than $30 billion dollars. This is not counting federal flood insurance and federal crop insurance, both of which will probably exceed currently allocated funding. Private insurance paid $32.5 billion after 9/11. Hurricane Andrew of 1992 cost about $35 billion in insurance. The Northridge earthquake of Los Angeles in 1994 that prompted catastrophe bonds cost somewhere between $15 and $20 billion.
Continue reading“None of the airlines involved required a contract or any written guarantee of payment before sending their planes and volunteer crews,” Simon wrote of the American Airlines flights. “One official said if Gore promised to pay, that was good enough for them.”Continue reading
— Gore airlifts victims from New Orleans Former vice president chartered two private aircraft Saturday, September 10, 2005; Posted: 7:22 a.m. EDT (11:22 GMT) CNN.com
KNOXVILLE, Tennessee (AP) — Al Gore helped airlift some 270 Katrina evacuees on two private charters from New Orleans, acting at the urging of a doctor who saved the life of the former vice president’s son.
It’s good to see some alacrity in North America:
Continue readingBATON ROUGE, La., Sept 7 (Reuters) – A Canadian search-and-rescue team reached a flooded New Orleans suburb to help save trapped residents five days before the U.S. military, a Louisiana state senator said on Wednesday.
Stratfor has posted this analysis: New Orleans: A Geopolitical Prize, By George Friedman. Excepts:
All of the rivers flowed into one — the Mississippi — and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.
For a port to operate, there must be places for river ships to unload, warehouses for intermediate storage, and places for ocean ships to load, and the reverse. That’s why New Orleans is where it is.
Continue readingFor the first time in 136 years, the Mexican Army entered Texas today. Once again they headed for San Antonio, but this time they did not attack the Alamo. Instead, they carried two mobile kitchens that can feed seven thousand people a day, and provisions to do so for three weeks. Mexico also sent a relief ship to Mississippi.
Continue readingFor a year or more now, there have been some attempts to insure risks of open source, mostly attempts to protect against lawsuits claiming intellectual property infringement, such as the SCO lawsuits. Most of this protection has been organized by indivdual open source vendors, such as Red Hat, HP, or Novell.
Now Lloyds is announcing plans to offer wider coverage that is not tied to any particular vendor, in conjunction with an organization called Open Source Risk Management (OSRM). According to an article by Gavin Clarke in the Channel Register:
OSRM will assess both the risk of the software in use and the individual company, before passing on the risk to the appropriate insurance company on the Lloyds market.According to OSRM’s web pages, such coverage will go beyond the specific code sold by open source vendors, to also cover code modified by users. That is, it will cover open source as open source, not just as a specific vendor’s product. Continue reading