Competitive Enterprise Institute
by Henry I. Miller

10/31/05

Hurricane Katrina's devastation of the Gulf Coast will raise the price of commodities from cosmetics to crude oil, gasoline to grain. How could one storm score a hit on every wallet in the country? And what connection is there between Katrina and a possible avian flu pandemic? The answer is that as a society we lack sufficient resilience, the ability to prevent, recover from or adapt to adversity. In the gulf states, we permitted a situation to arise in which a huge proportion of the nation's energy-production infrastructure became concentrated in one region -- a region prone to hurricane-related catastrophes, no less. (The impacts would have been even worse, had Rita hit closer to Houston and its oil refineries.)...

http://www.cei.org/gencon/019,04935.cfm


Informant: Thomas L. Knapp