New Orleans and the Rubber Ducky Dilemma

Meanwhile, Washington is waiting for "the big one"

by Doug Collins

Why was New Orleans so unprotected, especially after public safety experts had for years been warning of its vulnerability? Why have the rescue and relief efforts often been clumsy and ineffective?

In this newspaper, for the past couple years I've been writing about the "Rubber Ducky Dilemma", the fact that things in America don't work as they should, like rubber ducks that look cute, but don't float right when you put them in the bath. It seems to me that the New Orleans disaster is another instance of the Rubber Ducky Dilemma, writ very large.

Let's think about Washington state. Are we any better prepared for a large earthquake than New Orleans was prepared for a large tidal swell? Probably not. An earthquake of, say, magnitude 8--which is geologically speaking not uncommon in this area--would likely kill scores of thousands and wipe out the state's economy. Instead of a Rubber Ducky Dilemma, it would be more like a Rubble Ducky Dilemma.

Of course, "the big one" is in the back of everyone's mind here, but who is doing anything about it? If we would spend only a fraction of the amount that we've recently spent on "Homeland Security" and the Iraq War, we could probably retrofit every last shaky domicile and overpass in the state.

Politicians seem paralyzed when faced with such obvious practicality. After all, most of them don't know how to do anything if there is no moneyed interest to grease their wheels. Too bad there's no Earthquake Preparedness Mega-Corporation to provide the necessary campaign donations!

We in Washington state are really potentially no better off than the people of New Orleans, because we live in the same sort of culture, which is focused on short-term financial gain, which suffers from a lack of care, and which is quick to see fault in others, but not in itself. We spend hundreds of billions on targeting elusive "foreign terrorists" and yet the biggest danger to ourselves lies in ourselves.

How to move toward sanity and sustainability? The next time someone talks to you about "the big one" ask him or her, "How should we start preparing for it?"