Hurricane Ida exposes the dire state of American infrastructure

Watching coverage of Hurricane Ida on both sides of the Atlantic, it was hard to escape the impression that politicians and reporters were almost hoping that the worst would happen: that New Orleans would be drowned in a new Katrina. The ‘fifth largest hurricane on record’ and a protracted power outage affecting one million people were bad, but hardly the human catastrophe some had anticipated. In the event, the doom mongers had to be satisfied with the heaviest ever rainfall in New York and New Jersey, some crippling flood damage and as many as 50 deaths.

This did not, of course, prevent commentators up to and including the US President seizing on climate change as the arch-culprit. What had happened, said Joe Biden from the White House, was ‘yet another reminder that… the climate crisis is here’. ‘This isn’t about politics,’ he went on. ‘Hurricane Ida didn’t care if you were a Democrat or Republican, rural or urban.