City's bulwark against Katrina is battered, not broken

As hurricane Katrina bore down on the French Quarter on Monday, engineers and a special force called the Levee Police kept a windy vigil on the ramparts that were supposed to keep New Orleans from sinking.

Most of those defenses worked - barely. Despite catastrophic predictions and with a few notable exceptions, levees held, pumps sputtered, stopped, and started again. As the storm suddenly veered to the east then moved northward, people began venturing out, finding a city swamped and battered but not defeated - a miracle of hydraulic intervention.

Katrina was a long-awaited test for one of the world's unique, though unfinished, public works. While it showed that the city could survive a major hurricane, it also exposed its vulnerability to flooding and the weaknesses of its pumping system. Those problems are renewing a debate over whether officials need a new strategy to beat back future storms and if it should require even stronger barricades of cement and steel or restoring wetlands to absorb water.

"The question over the next months will be: How did our efforts to mitigate this measure up?" says environmental sciences professor John Pine, who heads the Disaster Science and Management program at LSU. "It's quite a test, and building bigger seawalls may not be the only answer."

An American Venice, New Orleans first began fighting water with earth in 1807, under the French. Now 125 miles of levees and 126 storm gates ring the city, a project that from the start has been a dance with destruction and which gave the city part of its spooky charm.

Flanked to the south by the Mississippi River and to the north by Lake Ponchartrain, New Orleans is a major US port and oil refinery, a crucial national asset beyond po' boy sandwiches and smoky jazz. After each flood, and near-catastrophe, from the 1927 floods to hurricane Betsy in 1965, Category 3, the government has authorized more money to bolster the city's defenses. But through attempts to contain the mighty Mississippi, engineers also raised the stakes when they, in essence, "fixed" the Mississippi in place to keep it from meandering across the Delta. But now, when floods wrack the Midwest or hurricanes tear up through the Gulf, the city of New Orleans is faced with holding an angry snake by its tail.

"New Orleans is so physically vulnerable, and there have been attempts to mitigate that, but the vulnerability persists," says Jeanne Hurlbert, a Louisiana State University sociologist who has studied the effects of storms on the local populace.

Katrina has been the toughest test yet. At press time, Mayor C. Ray Nagin had issued a statement reporting 80 percent of the city was under water. The death toll in a neighboring Mississippi county could be as high as 80, according to Gov. Haley Barbour.

"They're getting hit with the storm that the Corps of Engineers designed the system for," says Rick Van Bruggen, a hydrology expert in Los Gatos, Calif., on the Russian River. "At the time you need it, you don't know where the weak points are, and you'll find out where some of these failures are."

Page: 1 | 2