Green Leaf Report

Another Atlantic hurricane season starts today, but the fearful headlines started weeks ago.  Will this year bring another Hurricane Katrina…? I won’t belittle the effects of Katrina.  It was a nasty storm that brought a lot of damage into my home town, we lost family members also.  But I don’t believe the storm alone caused the damage; years of levees guiding silt off the continental shelf prevented the wetlands from renewing, and cause the loss of 50 to 60 square miles of land per year.  As the hurricanes are able to come further and further inland due to the loss of the wetlands, less powerful storms are able to cause greater amounts of damage than ever before.

New Orleans was a city at risk, dependent on man-made systems.  When the levees broke, though they shouldn’t have from a category 3 storm, the lake’s flooding into the city overwhelmed the flood pumps.  Even on back-up generators, the pumps wouldn’t be able to continue with the city’s power knocked out for a continuous and extended period.  New Orleans has an unsustainable design.

But the local topography is only part of the problem.  The big gorilla that Katrina uncovered is the total dependency on the grid network and the utter chaos that results when the grid was unavailable for an extended period.  Where do you get fresh water when the power isn’t available from the water utilities?  How do you keep your food when you’re used to a refrigerator and it turns off, how do you even boil water with no power, week after week…? The total dependency on an electric grid that fails for an extended period causes more people to evacuate and stay away than one vicious storm that blows across the city in a day or two.

A diversified network of power is one solution.  Certainly some solar panels could have been ripped off in the storm, but some would have made it, and those homes would have been able to keep some power and provide basic food storage and water purification functions, perhaps for an entire neighborhood.  

New Orleans isn’t the only city with this risk of natural disasters wiping out the existing grid.  An earthquake, a tornado, any storm that wipes out a major transmission component can throw a major city into chaos.  Backup systems are smart design; backups using sustainable, distributed sources are even smarter.  We can keep generators in every third home, but how many people can keep weeks worth of fuel in a suburban or inner city home without risking a house fire or explosion well before the next natural disaster?  Sustainable energy sources built on air and wind.  What a great idea!