In , the Army Corps warned of the need to reinforce the earthen levees, which have been losing height due to settling in the soft soils of the region and as sea levels rise, highlighting the effects of climate change. Subscribe for our daily curated newsletter to receive the latest exclusive Reuters coverage delivered to your inbox. More from Reuters. Sign up for our newsletter Subscribe for our daily curated newsletter to receive the latest exclusive Reuters coverage delivered to your inbox.
Both residents and visitors to New Orleans still have the desire to see where the levees failed during Katrina in August This tour allows one to virtually "visit" three major breach sites and their associated neighborhoods. For full functionality please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Need Help? No matter how tall you build a wall, nature can always overtop it.
As sea levels rise and the ocean warm, and as hurricanes get more intense with each passing year, it is almost inevitable that, at some point, water will overtop the earthen walls in such places. For a town like Lafitte, whose seven-foot levee proved no match for Ida, it might seem like the best response is just to build a taller levee: Revise the storm projections upward, figure out the new height, and pile on more dirt. This has been the standard response at most levels of government for much of the past century and a half.
As a result, there are now more than 3, miles of levees in Louisiana, and around 3 percent of all people in the United States live in an area protected by an Army Corps flood control structure.
The highest of these walls will be around 13 feet — tall enough to withstand most floods, yes, but not all of them.
The Corps and other agencies have proposed similar storm-surge barriers in several other major cities, including New York, Charleston, Miami, and Houston. Securing the funds required for adequate protection, though, is easier said than done: In order for the Corps to justify a new project to Congress, it must prove that the total financial benefits outweigh the costs — in other words, that the structures inside the levee are worth more than the dirt used to build it.
For the small and shrinking towns along the Gulf Coast, this calculus is not getting any easier, and indeed there are a few places along the coast, including the Indigenous community of Ile de Jean Charles , that the Corps did not see fit to include inside the Morganza to the Gulf.
After the storm passed and once the city began to rebuild, Link and the Army Corps of Engineers worked to find the faults in the system. None of the structures before Katrina had been designed to withstand water overtopping the levee.
The rebuild began in Richard Campanella, a geographer with the Tulane University School of Architecture who has written extensively about New Orleans and examined the new levee and pump system closely, said a substantial part of his decision to stay in the city through the storm was his knowledge of the risk reduction system and the city's new pumping station, which he said was "awesome.
Campanella said the levees were built to withstand a year storm, which would be weaker than Katrina but is the standard set by Congress and the National Flood Insurance Program, the federally backed program that allows property owners to buy insurance in flood-prone areas and requires them to adopt land use and flood control measures.
Some, like Link, say New Orleans requires a higher threshold, as the standard could be affected by climate change and sea level rise. But multiple experts said the levee system is limited by the country's priorities and values. But experts also noted that Hurricane Ida did not test one of the city's major weaknesses: its drains. Ida, which did push some storm surge against the levee walls, did not provide the same damaging amount of water as Katrina or stall out over New Orleans and dump huge amounts of rain on the city.
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