It's an entire science, really, devoted to guessing how much risk you and I will accept compared with the cost of reducing or eliminating that risk.
In this effort, the corps is working in collaboration with a Dutch entity called the Rijkswaterstaat, probably the world's most experienced agency in matters of levee safety and risk assessment. It's really fairly fascinating stuff for a flood wonk.
Jen Sorensen
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For example, the Europeans commonly compute one very important element in flood risk — human life — by assigning a monetary value to it. The corps doesn't do that, but it could.
Other federal agencies do it. Did you know that? I did not. Some of them use a parameter they call "value of a statistical life" or VSL. Others use something called a "willingness to pay to prevent a statistical fatality" or WTP. Depending on the agency, we're worth between $5 million and $10 million apiece drowned dead on a stainless steel slab.
Man. I hope my wife never finds out. I'll never go out in the canoe with her again.
Eric Halpin is the Corps of Engineers official in the Pentagon in charge of dam and levee safety. I sent him an email in which I asked, "Are you getting ready to tell people that you cannot protect them absolutely and forever and that they must share significantly in the responsibility for their own safety?"
He wrote back: "statement is very close to our position in the Corps regarding flood risk."
So where does that leave us? To what level of risk are we willing to expose ourselves? How much will we pay to reduce the risk? How smart are we?
Not everybody can be equally smart, after all. Some people will make better decisions, some worse. At a certain point, this entire process gets back to something I wrote about for our news blog, Unfair Park, on September 5. My piece was based on a September 1 article in Businessweek by Brendan Greeley, "The God Clause and the Reinsurance Industry."
Greeley wrote about people in the Swiss reinsurance industry who are formulating something they have been informally calling "Faktor K," where K stands for Kultur in German. At the risk of oversimplifying, we could call it stupidity insurance.
The Swiss reinsurers, whom we might think of as supreme bookies of destiny, began wondering after Katrina if there may be some parts of the world where people are just too dumb to take care of themselves. With wonderful Swiss sangfroid, they wondered if there was a way to charge for that.
There is, of course. Charge more.
So this is where we wind up. We can sit around the campfire with Rick Perry at the hunting camp with the unfortunate name humming the theme song from Bonanza and not believing in climate change all we want, but we can't pay for the damages. Can't afford it.
The feds want out of the business of protecting us from ourselves. They're tired of getting blamed every time we get washed down the creek, and it's getting worse, not better.
Here is where I think we finally get back to the Alice-in-Wonderland code-talking affair at City Hall last week. Theoretically, this whole business of tolerable risk can be reduced to an algorithm.
For example, the briefing to the council included evacuation policies as one of the factors that will be weighed in the corps' new risk assessment program. So what does having a set of government-issue water wings under your desk have to do with fixing the levee properly?
Aha! I actually found a Dutch bar graph that shows exactly what the relationship is. It's in Dutch, so I can't read some of the fine points, but it shows that people will accept a higher level of risk of levee failure — a cheaper fix, in other words — with an evacuation policy in place than they would accept without an evacuation policy.
You can put it in dollars and cents. Cost of water wings and loud oogah horn: $55,125.32. Cost of half-inch more thickness in levee: $55,125.33. Conclusion: Go with water wings.
Hey. This is healthy. This is good for us to know. It's a sound exercise. It's much saner than believing the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is God.
But gone are the days when local government would simply plunge ahead, hand in hand with the feds, and build something to protect us forever. They're going to tell us more about cost, more about risk, more about cheaper repairs providing lower levels of protection and knowing how to swim.
They're going to get honest with us, in other words. Let's see if we can take it.
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