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 Today, more than 80 percent of the structures in her Vista Park
neighborhood have been renovated or rebuilt, and work is underway on
others.But the area may never have staged its comeback without a
rebuilding of confidence in local flood protection, said Givens,
president of her neighborhood's improvement association.
“I never worried about flooding before Katrina, but after the storm,
we had to ask whether it made sense, financially, to come back," she
said.Billions of dollars of work carried out by the U.S. Army Corps
of Engineers, including the construction of a massive surge barrier
just east of the city, helped answer that question, Givens said.
"They have done a lot of work on the levees and the canals," she
said. "I think our odds against floods are significantly improved."
The 2005 flood that inundated 80 percent of New Orleans and killed
1,572 people began hours after Katrina had blown through the city.
Water forced by the storm into inland canals overwhelmed levees and
broke through floodwalls.
 After Katrina, Congress authorized spending more than $14 billion to
beef up the city's existing flood protection infrastructure and to
build a series of new barriers.
Despite the enormous outlay, there are no guarantees. Plans to
bolster flood protection, drawn up years ago, never addressed the
wild card of climate change, which most experts now acknowledge will
lift sea levels and trigger more intense storms.
Protecting against the potential devastation of those changes will
require the building of more artificial barrier islands and wetlands
south of New Orleans, experts say, a work in progress that will take
years to complete.
Still, in the past 10 years, the Corps has bolstered 350 miles of
levees and upgraded 70 pumping stations.
The Army's public engineering arm also built the largest flood
barrier it has ever attempted, a nearly two-mile-long concrete wall
that stretches across the convergence of three major waterways that
connect to the Gulf of Mexico.
"These waterways form a funnel that directed the water into the
Industrial Canal," said John Lopez, coastal sustainability
coordinator for the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, which
helped plan the barrier system.
The funneling effect was the main cause of levee failures to the
east of New Orleans. It also led to an explosive break on a
floodwall along the Industrial Canal that devastated every home in
the city's Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood, he said.
When its gates are closed, the new barrier is designed to completely
block storm surge at a critical point where it entered New Orleans
after Katrina.
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During a recent boat tour, Lopez pointed out some of the special
features of the massive surge barrier. Nicknamed "The Great Wall,"
it is buttressed by scores of 100-foot pilings and has two
150-foot-wide sector gates that give boats and barges access to the
channels.
BARRIER ISLANDS
Even so, Lopez said, levees and surge barriers alone are not enough
to secure the area against large storms. "We need multiple lines of
defense," he said.
Chip Kline, who chairs the Louisiana Coastal Protection and
Restoration Authority, says New Orleans and the surrounding
metropolitan area “are better protected than they ever have been” as
a result of recent work.
But he said initial flood protection plans did not adequately
address the effect of climate change. The only way to protect inland
residents is to build up the barrier islands and coastal wetlands
using sediment pumped from the Mississippi River and the Outer
Continental Shelf, he said.
Kline said work directed by his agency has so far created 30,000 new
acres of wetlands where marshes had eroded and 45 miles of new
barrier islands.
“The most important lesson we learned from Katrina was that
hurricane protection and coastal restoration must be at the
forefront of federal and state government for years to come,” he
said.
The recent settlement of litigation with BP Plc over the 2010 oil
spill off Louisiana's coast will bolster the program, providing at
least $6.8 billion to jump-start next-generation projects, Kline
said.
(Editing by Frank McGurty and Dan GRebler)
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