He recalled that when he left his home in St. Bernard Parish before Hurricane Katrina, he patted a column and said, “See you later.” He knew it was possible to lose his home — as he did — but “I couldn’t wrap my mind around it till it happened.” Today, he said, “imagination is no longer necessary.”
Polly Campbell, recently toured the 35-foot-high flood wall that will protect her St Bernard Parish neighborhood. “It’s absolutely phenomenal,” she said.
Early in the morning and late at night, Ms. Campbell said, she hears the pile drivers pounding— “the greatest sound in the world,” she said.
Still, many experts say that the level of risk reduction will be inadequate for a city that has been devastated by storms twice in living memory, Betsy in 1965 and Katrina.
Robert G. Bea, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of a damning report on the levee failures, said that he has seen “lots of positive changes” in the corps but said 100-year protection “is not even close to what is needed.” The system needs a greater margin of safety, he said.
Corps officials argue that Congress paid for the planned level of protection, and note that a study is under way to design even more. But, they say, no matter how high the walls, the city will always be at risk, and residents will need to evacuate before storms.
Another difference between the old system and the new one is resiliency, said Ms. Durham-Aguilera of the corps’ building team. If a storm were to send waves over the new walls, she said, the streets could flood and the strengthened pump stations would remove the water. She said the system was designed to stand up to the kind of storm that might come once every 500 years.
“Being overtopped and getting a little bit wet is a lot different from having a breach,” Ms. Durham-Aguilera said.
The bigger problem lies beyond the walls, said Ivor van Heerden, an author of the State of Louisiana’s report on the levee failures. The nation needs to rebuild fragile wetlands, which are disappearing at a rate of about 24,000 acres a year and reduce the force of storms. “We’re never going to succeed if we rely on concrete alone,” Dr. van Heerden said.
Many residents say they just want to get on with their lives. Artie Folse lives three blocks from the section of the 17th Street canal that failed in Katrina. He rebuilt his home by hand during the year after the storm.
The flood walls have been repaired, and the canal now has a gate to close in a hurricane. With nearly five years since Katrina, he said, “honestly, I don’t usually even think about it.” As for the corps, he said, “I may be naïve, but hopefully they’re doing everything they can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
He added, “If it happens to me again, I’ll be living on a mountain somewhere.”
Look for CNBC's special coverage of the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on-air and online this week. Senior Correspondent Scott Cohn reports from New Orleans Thursday and Friday, August 26 and 27.