New Orleans to lose half its people and become almost uninsurable.
New Orleans is set to lose up to half of its population, who may never return after they fled the devastation wreaked by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita a few weeks ago.
Many evacuees will be able to return to places near their former homes. But thousands will not be able to return for years, both because the damage is so catastrophic and because so many were already living in poverty. Many experts are telling churches and other groups to focus on helping people relocate permanently.
Technorati Tags: climate change, eco, environment, evacuation, hurricane, politics, diaspora
This map shows the dramatic scale of the diaspora.
The impact of great wars, floods, and fires reverberates for decades. New Orleans was already seeing a long-term population decline before Katrina, and the rebuilt city is likely to be even smaller. Biloxi’s casinos will probably be rebuilt, but it is unlikely that the new ones will float in the bay as the old ones did. There are calls to restore the bayous of southern Louisiana as flood barriers, and steep increases in insurance rates could cause the owners of beachfront property to scale back on their rebuilding plans.
Over at New Orleans’ own Times-Picayune they are reporting that:
Mayor Ray Nagin predicted a month ago that New Orleans would be reborn as a city of 250,000 people, about half its pre-Hurricane Katrina population, and interviews with a dozen scholars last week also paint a picture of a city considerably less populous than in its antediluvian days.
The U.S. Postal Service said Thursday that 138,026 households from the 701 ZIP codes, which include the city of New Orleans and a small part of East Jefferson, are still forwarding their mail to a new address. Based on the 2000 census, that represents about two-thirds of the population.
The Postal Service, however, says many more customers have not completed forms for address changes even though they remain away from their homes.
And to cap it off, who would move back to a place that’s pretty much uninsurable?
Allstate Corp. will scale back its homeowners coverage in the Gulf Coast region after Hurricane Katrina caused it to take an “unacceptable” loss of $1.55 billion in the third quarter, [Edward Liddy] the insurer’s chief executive said Thursday.
Allstate, the nation’s second-largest personal lines insurer after State Farm, similarly did not renew coverage for 95,000 homeowners in hurricane-battered Florida last year and also moved quickly to raise rates there.
Allstate executives called it a once-in-500-years event and said there is no way to predict such rare catastrophes by actuarial methods.
[T]he financial hit from the catastrophes eliminated the equivalent of one and a half quarters of earnings for the year.
“This size loss as a level of exposure is simply unacceptable to us,” [Liddy] said.
So there’s a feedback loop here. Global Warming is casued by human activity. Global Warming increases the severity of storms. Severe storms make coastal cities uninhabitable and unisurable, hence no-one will live or invest there, hence the city dies. The maps are already changing and still our representatives stick their collective heads in the sand.
Your activity caused the devastation in New Orleans. I say your and not our because I buy carbin credits and offset my CO2 emissions - so at least I am not so directly making things worse. But what about you? A monthly subscription to a supply of enough carbon credits to offset your ongoing emissions does not cost that much. As we say at Carbon Planet, “You can be the change”.
-DS
