Anyone who saw the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina as it hit the Louisiana coast could not help but feel awe in the face of the power of nature. The raging waves, the whipping winds -- this was nature at its most fearsome, a phenomenon in which human beings play no role except as bystanders fearing for their lives. This, it would seem, was truly a natural disaster.

When we look more closely, however, we see that much of the loss of life and devastation from Katrina was as much the result of human decisions as it was of raging winds. The first of those decisions was that of Jean Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville to place his settlement in such a precarious location -- but if it was precious in 1718, it is all the more so almost 300 years later, with the increasingly rapid erosion of the barrier islands and the marshlands that had together sheltered New Orleans from the worse ravages of storms. (The beaches of Phuket in Thailand were similarly more vulnerable to last year's tsunami because of the destruction of their barrier reefs.) Whatever else we might want to say about Katrina, clearly it was not simply a natural disaster -- human choices helped make it what it was.

And it is becoming abundantly clear that political decisions contributed significantly to this "natural" disaster as well. Mark Fischetti's 2001 article in Scientific American on the probable impact of a hurricane on New Orleans, "Drowning New Orleans," is but the most dramatic example of the warnings that public officials received and ignored. Repeated federal budget cuts for disaster preparedness played a major role in increasing the vulnerability of the population of New Orleans to a Category 4 hurricane. There was a surprisingly strong consensus in the scientific community that New Orleans would be devastated by flooding if hit by such a big storm, and most realized that it was simply a matter of time before it happened.

Humans contributed in yet another way to this "natural" disaster. The suffering and loss of life we have seen in New Orleans tap clearly into the fault lines of race and class in our society. The suffering and death have fallen disproportionately on the shoulders of those who are poor and black. This is one more way in which this disaster was man-made: it singled out blacks and poor people for special devastation. There is nothing natural about that aspect of the disaster.

We have much to learn in San Diego from Katrina. Disasters are as much human as natural. That is both the bad news and the good news. In the case of Katrina, it was bad news, for we realize in retrospect how much more effectively our tax dollars could have been spent to prevent or minimize disaster instead of mopping up after it.

But for San Diego, this is good news, for it provides a much- needed wake-up call. San Diego stands on the brink of several disasters. Fires and mudslides are not just events of the past, but an inevitable part of our future.

It seems that the initial resolve after the fires of 2003 has largely gone up in smoke. But if we recognize how much of these "natural" disasters are in fact the result of human decisions, we realize that we can influence the course of such disasters significantly through enlightened preventive measures. Similarly, we face dangers from earthquakes and from ocean storms -- we know these things will happen, we just don't know when.

This presents a challenge to both the leaders and the voters of San Diego. With City Hall in disarray, with a fiscal crisis hanging over every possible expenditure, both leaders and voters may be tempted to put disaster preparedness on the back burner, to postpone it until another day when it is more convenient, when the city is more solvent. Yet we have seen in New Orleans, and in many other places before this most recent storm, that the cost of inaction is often far, far higher than the cost of smart and effective preparedness.

We need leaders who are willing to guide San Diego through the preparedness process, and we need an electorate that is willing to support such enlightened planning. It would have cost millions of dollars to reinforce the levees in New Orleans, but the expenditure would have been a fraction of the many billions in damage that followed their failure.

When fire or earthquakes come -- and they inevitably will -- to San Diego, let's not wake up to find that we are another New Orleans.

Hinman, director of the Values Institute and professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego, writes widely in the area of applied ethics. He is the founder of Ethics Updates (http:// ethics.sandiego.edu) and Ethics Videos (http://ethics.sandiego.edu/ video/).

San Diego Union-Tribune Sep 8, 2005