Sorry to hear about you guys suffering over there.
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I suppose it might be easier for me to say this since I live in a place which hasn't experienced serious natural disasters lately (though technically, I hear that our city is not immune from catastrophic flooding; if it does happen, the situation would be worse than the the NOE and St. Bernard Parish).
Forget picking on the environmentalists that refused to let people cut off the bushes. The bigger issue is, in my opinion, that people have been building houses in areas that they shouldn't have been building to begin with.
As much as it saddens me to hear that Southern California is on fire again, some of those areas were (historically) places known to have frequent natural wildfires. You build houses on that area, then well... there you go.
Same story in New Orleans. Some of the heaviest flooded neighborhoods were swampland (below sea level) that nobody was able to inhabit when the city had its auspicious start (in fact, a good bulk of the city were still uninhabitable by the turn of the 20th century). When the water overflows the levees and follow the contour of the land... well, there you go.
I really think that it's only a matter of time before we start hearing about this kind of stuff in New York too.
