Sunday, January 23, 2011

To rebuild a city the size of Brisbane, Australia

Takes a whole lot of building materials. If this report from Bloomberg is accurate it will take the following:
To build an average house, you need 6,200 bricks, 2,950 roof tiles, 785 floor tiles and 15 cans of paint -- multiply that 28,000 times and you get a picture of the task to rebuild Brisbane after Australia’s worst flood.

It gets worse: the state of Queensland will need to rebuild 90,000 kilometers (56,000 miles) of roads, enough to circle the globe twice, thousands of kilometers of rail line, almost 100 schools, an unknown number of bridges, several regional airports, power lines, sewers and water treatment -- the list goes on...

“The state’s a disaster zone,” said Greg Hoffman, general manager at the Queensland Local Government Association, which estimates up to 90,000 kilometers of road and “tens of thousands of drains” will need to be replaced or repaired across Queensland. “Roads have been torn away, airport terminals have been uprooted and you can’t believe your eyes when you see the wasteland left behind,” he said in a telephone interview.
And this is just Brisbane, the full damage extends over three states in Australia. To add to the troubles, there may well be a shortage of tradesmen to to do the work. Nevertheless:
The flooding across three states represents Australia’s biggest natural disaster in economic terms, said Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who has pledged the federal government will cover 75 percent of the reconstruction cost. ANZ Bank said the bill to rebuild just Queensland could be as much as A$20 billion, or 1.5 percent of the national economy.

The sugar- and coal-producing state accounts for about 20 percent of the A$1.3 trillion economy. The national and state governments have not yet said how much the flooding will cost.

“This effort is bigger than Cyclone Tracy in 1974, which destroyed Darwin, it’s bigger than the 1989 Newcastle earthquake, the 1999 Sydney hail storm and any other flood or bushfire we have seen,” said Professor Peter Grace, from the Queensland University of Technology. “It will take at least two years.
New Orleans, you are attached to the wrong country.

Comments:
Indeed. And for those entertaining the notion that it's just because New Orleans was primarily poor, black, and Democrat before the Federal Flood -- southern Mississippi was predominantly white, middle class, and Republican before the storm surge destroyed it. Southern Mississippi hasn't fared any better than New Orleans when it comes to rebuilding help.

-- Badtux the imperial-decline Penguin
 

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