HURRICANE KATRINA: 20 YEARS ON20 Years After Katrina, New Orleans’ Levees Are Sinking and Short on Money
The city’s $14 billion flood system faces new threats from climate change, land subsidence, and Trump budget cuts.
It has been 20 years since New Orleans’ faulty levee system failed during Hurricane Katrina, causing a flood that claimed almost 2,000 lives and inflicted more than $150 billion in economic damage. The catastrophe was so bad that some doubted the city could continue to exist at all — the U.S. House speaker at the time declared that rebuilding New Orleans “doesn’t make sense” and that much of it “could be bulldozed.”
Rather than just patch up the damage, which would have left one of the country’s most iconic cities exposed to every future storm, the federal government doubled down on flood protection, building a new $14.4 billion levee system that ranks as one of the most sophisticated anywhere in the world.
Over the course of a decade, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rebuilt and expanded almost 200 miles of levees across three parishes. It outfitted every major channel and canal with a gate that could swing shut during surge events. On the east side of the city, where storm surge had overtopped its old levees, it built the Lake Borgne Surge Barrier, a 2-mile wall that could stop as much as 26 feet of surge. On the three canals where it had built shoddy flood walls, it built new ones and massive pump stations that can remove an Olympics-sized swimming pool of water from the city every 3.5 seconds. It also decommissioned the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet, or “Mr. Go,” a large shipping channel that had destroyed protective marshland around New Orleans and funneled Katrina’s storm surge into the city.
But for all the success of the new levee system, the future of New Orleans remains uncertain.
The sea levels around the city are rising by about half an inch every year as climate change warms the oceans and melts glaciers. The city itself is sinking even faster than that, with some sections of the levee system settling by almost 2 inches each year — faster than the rate of change that the Corps projected when it built the system. This elevation change makes the new levee system less effective with each year, requiring constant repairs and expansions.
