"In most hurricanes, you're talking about wind damage, lost roofs -- that kind of thing," said Michael Carliner, an economist with the National Association of Homebuilders. "Flooding is much more insidious. Structures are still standing, but there are devastating effects. With the dirty water, it may never be possible to repair it. You'll have to rebuild, or at least gut it."
If you care. Carliner said experience shows that contractors will spend the first year after the water recedes in "patching up" damaged houses. There will be a run on plywood, roofing and other nonstructural materials.
Only after that will contractors turn to rebuilding, and "that takes a long time," Carliner said. "A lot of people who get insurance money for rebuilding don't do so -- they just move someplace else."
And they don't come back. After Hurricane Andrew in 1992, South Florida needed 50,000 new units of housing, Carliner said, but there was no construction boom. "Rebuilding occurred over years, just in the normal course of events -- I don't think we'll have a building surge here."
Or anywhere nearby, perhaps. The EPA's Kaufman, a designer of the Superfund legislation to clean up toxic waste, said New Orleans and the Gulf Coast face "an absolute catastrophic situation" that will take years to abate.
Louisiana, a center of the oil, gas and chemical industries, "was known for its very weak enforcement regulations," Kaufman said, and there are a number of landfills and storage areas containing "thousands of tons" of hazardous material to be leaked and spread.
"On top of that, you have dead bodies that are going to start to decompose, along with the material that was in industrial and household discharge, sewage, gasoline and waste oil from gas stations," he added. "You've got a witches' brew of contaminated water."
Given New Orleans's desperate straits, recovery teams will not be able to do anything with the toxic mess except pump it into the Gulf of Mexico, ensuring that the contamination will spread to a larger area, he said. "There's just no other place for it."
Once the water is gone, environmental officials will likely undertake a "grid survey," sampling the formerly flooded areas to get soil profiles and determine how safe it is for residents to move back or rebuild.
The survey is likely to take six months. "If it were me, I wouldn't go back until there was a solid assessment of contamination of the land," Kaufman said. And even then, he added, authorities will be monitoring levels of water toxicity along the coastline for years: "There is no magic chemical that you can put in the Gulf to make heavy metals or benzene go away. You're stuck with it."
Whoriskey reported from Baton Rouge.
Floods Ravage New Orleans