After Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, causing levee breaks that flooded 80 percent of the city, much of the finger-pointing was aimed at the federal government for failing to strengthen the levees. If the government had just spent $5 billion or $10 billion more, critics said, much of the $250 billion damage tab from Katrina might have been prevented.

A fierce debate has ensued over just how much government can or should do to minimize the damage from major disasters, whether it’s hurricanes along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, earthquakes in L.A., San Francisco or Seattle, tornadoes in the Midwest or a major terrorist attack in any urban area.

Just how much protection is enough? To protect every major American city from catastrophic disasters would easily cost hundreds of billions of dollars. How much of that bill would the federal government bear? How much should the private sector be responsible for?

Background: California’s Preparedness


While California is synonymous with earthquake country, the state is vulnerable to many natural disasters, including floods, firestorms and tsunamis. Also, L.A. is considered a major terrorist target.

California is generally regarded as one of the best-prepared states in the nation. The state Department of Transportation has spent billions of dollars retrofitting 2,100 freeway overpasses since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake collapsed the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Less than 100 are left. Strict building codes have forced the owners of virtually all of L.A.’s 8,700 old masonry buildings to reinforce them to withstand earthquakes at least as strong as the 1994 Northridge temblor.

But state and local governments have not spent the billions necessary to fully protect the state’s water supply, which is threatened with major levee breaks in the Central Valley and potential ruptures of major pipelines that cross fault zones. That’s just for an earthquake. The ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are considered vulnerable to a terrorist attack, such as a “dirty” radioactive bomb. The federal government has only made a small down payment of $25 million towards securing the ports.

Supporting More Government Spending


A catastrophe in Los Angeles, with such a huge economy and its role as a receiving point for much of the nation’s imported goods, would place strains on the rest of the country.

“We are now looking at scenarios where the damage to a region like Los Angeles would be catastrophic, rivaling what we’ve seen in Sumatra or New Orleans,” said Tom Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at the University of Southern California.

Food, water supplies and fuel must be stored at key locations, first responders must be better trained and emergency communications equipment upgraded. Just making sure different first-responding agencies can talk to each other will cost more than $1 billion nationwide, but this is money that disaster experts say must be spent to prevent more significant loss of life.

Opposing More Government Spending


Advocates of limited government say that while some money must be spent on disaster preparedness, there simply isn’t enough to protect against every contingency, especially in the wake of Katrina.

“The big concern here is that this truly critical emergency will attract billions in spending on ‘me-too’ opportunistic emergencies that will overwhelm federal spending,” said William Ahern, spokesman for the Tax Foundation. “The key is to prioritize the areas of greatest risk for critical emergencies and fund only those.”

Anti-tax and limited government advocates say another focus must be to have state and local governments and the private sector share some of the costs. “The federal government and maybe some state governments are probably bearing too much of the burden,” said Stephen Slivinski, director of budget studies for the Cato Institute.

Outlook: More Funds


Such a sentiment is not politically popular, especially after the botched government response to Katrina. It’s likely that billions of dollars will be spent in coming years to gird against major disasters.

President Bush has ordered a review of disaster plans for all major American cities, presumably setting in motion more federal funding. But will those funds be effective?

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, funds were rushed to the states to beef up defenses and responses to terrorist attacks. But each state was guaranteed a minimum level of funding, meaning that Wyoming received many times more funding per capita than California. A more risk-based approach was not taken until early this year.