Billions and billions

Wow.

Texas will need $20 billion to $40 billion in federal relief assistance to overcome uninsured damage inflicted by Hurricane Ike, Houston Mayor Bill White said today.

The mayor, speaking to the Houston Chronicle before his congressional testimony, said Houston needs $2.5 billion in immediate assistance to reconstruct housing, reimburse debris removal costs and rebuild damaged fire stations and police stations.

Additional money will be needed to repair or rebuild the estimated 100,000 homes statewide that are uninhabitable, White said.

That's a lot of money, quite a bit more than the $2.3 billion Galveston is requesting. Of course, the city of Houston has 40 times the population of Galveston, so relatively speaking, it's a bargain. However you want to look at it, it gives some perspective on the size of the task the city has in front of it.

And I like the way the Mayor framed the discussion:

He acknowledged that it will be harder to persuade Congress to provide the hurricane relief assistance amid the proposed $700 billion federal bailout for the financial markets.

White said that lawmakers ''shouldn't forget the size of the storm and the damage in an area where 10 million people reside,'' and that they shouldn't withhold assistance ''simply because we handled the evacuation and the relief efficiently.''

White added that some of the Wall Street firms now seeking the federal bailout ''didn't take care of business'' as efficiently as Houston and Texas handled the hurricane evacuation.

Yeah, $40 billion's a lot of money until you compare it to $700 billion. And I think we all know where we'll get the better bang for the buck. Nicely done, Mister Mayor.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on September 23, 2008 to Hurricane Katrina