There is no silver lining to hurricane Katrina. The storm has laid waste to a huge area, killed thousands and left many thousands more with no homes or income. The nation’s infrastructure has been greatly harmed. There’s nothing good to be said about such a storm.
We can, and will, recover. The critical question is "how"? At the end of WWII Japan was left with thousands dead and homeless and it’s infrastructure destroyed. With the help of lots of U.S. aid Japan rebuilt. It did not just rebuild what it had, but went beyond. In several industries, let’s pick steel for example, Japan made investments to have the world’s leading technology and lowest cost production. Within 10 years of WWII Japan was becoming a player in the world steel market. By the 1970s Japan’s steel industry was "cleaning up" on U.S. integrated steel manufacturers. The actions Japan took to build a NEW infrastructure (not just rebuild) set the stage for Japan to be a world economic power twenty years later – a position it maintains to this day.
There are similar stories about the devastation in post WWII Germany, which is now a leader in many industries including chemicals and automobiles.
We must recover from Katrina. We will. The important thing for us to remember is that we should take this opportunity not to simply rush to rebuild what we had before – but rather to use this horrible challenge to lead us into White Space for determining how our Gulf Coast can be even more productive, more capable, a better economic leader than it was before. We can confront not only the immediate challenge, but challenges which have been building for years as we move forward — and in doing so make the Gulf Coast an even greater American jewel than before. We should not shortchange our investments in planning, resource utilization nor rebuilding as we return the Gulf Coast to a vital economic region. Now is the time to move forward and be even better than before!
