- WASHINGTON - One storm could
end up costing almost as much as two wars. Although estimates of Hurricane
Katrina's staggering toll on the treasury are highly imprecise, costs are
certain to climb to $200 billion in the coming weeks. The final accounting
could approach the more than $300 billion spent in four years to fight
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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- Analysts inside and outside government agree that the
$62 billion that Washington has spent so far was merely the first installment
of perhaps an unparalleled sum.
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- "I cannot put a cost figure on it," Vice President
Dick Cheney said Thursday in a visit to the hard-hit states.
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- The government never has dealt with a disaster of this
scale: 90,000 square miles of the Gulf Coast affected, with hundreds of
thousands of people displaced and an entire metropolitan area under water.
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- In 1992, the devastation of Hurricane Andrew in Florida
and Louisiana cost $35 billion. The price for the 6.7-magnitude temblor
in the Northridge area of Los Angeles in 1994 was $15 billion to $20 billion.
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- Members of the Louisiana congressional delegation say
it could cost $100 billion just in New Orleans.
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- As for the overall toll, G. William Hoagland, the top
budget adviser to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said: "We're
obviously over $100 billion. I just don't know how much over."
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- As the House approved President Bush's second spending
request Thursday, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee predicted
that lawmakers would repeat the effort in a few weeks. "It will be
the greatest appropriations outlay for a disaster in the history of doing
this," said Rep. Jerry Lewis (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif.
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- The imprecision in calculating the costs reflects a Washington
process of handling a crisis and the uncertainty of when the furious spending
in the immediate aftermath will slow significantly.
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- Sounding like engineers, number crunchers talked of the
"burn rate" - how much and how fast money was being spent.
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- The weekend after the hurricane hit Florida, Alabama,
Mississippi and Louisiana, the government still was writing checks for
close to $2 billion per day on items such as the 17 million meals ready
to eat, tens of thousands of trailers to house refugees, and contracts
to rebuild highways and bridges.
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- That amount slowed to about $1 billion per day last week
and was expected to drop off in the weeks ahead.
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- At first, Congress decided to give the Bush administration
the money it requested, comparing the situation to that in days after the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
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- Now, the Office of Management and Budget and the appropriations
committees in the House and Senate are contacting government agencies to
find out what they need for relief, recovery and rebuilding.
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- They may get mind-boggling answers because Katrina has
shattered all the models on picking up the pieces.
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- Insurers and actuaries have dealt with the wind damage
from hurricanes, but not the impact on buildings and roads of an entire
city engulfed in bacteria-laced, sewage-tainted water, possibly for weeks.
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- "An entire metropolitan area flooded is something
we don't have a lot of experience with," said Rade Musulin, an actuary
with the Florida Farm Bureau.
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- Among the lingering questions are what will be rebuilt
and who does the work; in writing the insurance checks, is it the government
or private companies; how long do food stamps and other assistance last;
and how much do federal officials provide.
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- Homes, levees and even the two new light-rail systems
in New Orleans have to be repaired or razed.
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- "It depends on how this proceeds," said Dan
Crippen, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. "The
compensation costs for refugees, you can't keep them in sports stadiums
forever. It depends on how quickly they're employed, have homes, how much
public assistance. There are so many unknowns here."
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- The various states and the District of Columbia that
have provided a safe haven for evacuees will be sending their bills to
Washington. Texas' two senators, in a letter to Bush, asked about reimbursement
for enrolling refugees in Medicaid. The city of New Haven, Conn., has estimated
that caring for 100 families that is has offered to house would cost $80,000
each, a bill of $8 million.
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- Mississippi signed a contract for $5.1 million to repair
the Interstate Highway 10 bridge in Columbia. If the contractor can finish
the work ahead of schedule, a $100,000-a-day bonus is promised.
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- The images from New Orleans underscore another question.
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- "Who would pay to replace the Superdome?" asked
Scott Lilly, a former appropriations staffer, now a senior consultant with
the Center for American Progress.
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- Robert Lichter, a statistician who studies the use and
misuse of numbers in public policy, cautioned against reading too much
into the early figures.
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- "Assume that all estimates are self-interested and
all estimates are too low," Lichter said, especially those coming
out of Washington. "The government is like a contractor - whatever
it says, triple."
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- ___
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- Associated Press writers Mary Dalrymple, Andrew Taylor
and David Pace contributed to this report.
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