Rebuilt New Orleans couldn't handle a Katrina

NEW ORLEANS — An imposing concrete monolith now stands where the canal wall burst and doomed the Lower Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina.

The new flood barrier is taller, wider and, by its shape, harder to topple.

But could the rebuilt defenses handle another Katrina?

The answer is no. Even by Army Corps of Engineers estimates, another Katrina would send storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico cascading over the walls that protect the Lower Ninth Ward from inundation.

Standing this week in the front yard of his rebuilt shotgun-style home, carpenter Charles Brown, 48, cast an eye at the nearby wall.

"Everyone knows another big storm would tear that sucker up," he said.

Today, the first day of hurricane season, few dispute that the city is safer than it was before Katrina. But as time passes and rebuilding costs mount, the idea that the federal government will provide protection from the worst of hurricanes here seems ever more remote.

After Katrina's catastrophic inundation, many declared "Never again!" With that message, Congress ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to study how to protect the city from flooding in Category 5 storms, the most devastating on the Saffir-Simpson scale. The idea still has strong political appeal.

"I believe we should order the Corps to achieve Category 5 protection over time," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said during a presidential campaign stop recently.

But nearly two years after the storm, with the feasibility of protecting the city to that level still under study, a project to defend New Orleans from less-ferocious storms is proving far more expensive than anticipated. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has signaled that its commitment does not extend to Category 5 protection.

What the federal government has undertaken is a construction effort providing new floodwalls, gates, pumps and levees around the canals that permeate this city. Some of the flood works are vast: At the 17th Street Canal, for example, the new tangle of massive metal pipes and pumps occupies 11 acres in the midst of the Lakeview neighborhood.

When it is all done in 2011, these projects are supposed to give the city "100-year protection" — that is, protection against a storm so powerful it happens on average only once in 100 years.

For any given year, the roughly 1-in-100 chance of a storm overcoming the defenses might sound like attractive odds. But it is far below local expectations, for several reasons.

The 1-in-100 annual chance means that, over a lifetime, such an event is more likely to happen than not. Moreover, protection against the 100-year storm is far less than would be necessary for a Katrina, which is considered a 400-year event, and certainly less than what could withstand a direct hit by a Category 5 storm.

Other projects better off

Finally, the 100-year protection leaves the New Orleans area at far more risk than other well-known flood projects: The system in the Netherlands, for example, is designed to withstand a 1-in-10,000-year storm, the Herbert Hoover Dike around Lake Okeechobee in Florida is designed for a 1-in-935-year event, and the Mississippi River flood works are designed for a 1-in-800-year flood.

Not surprisingly, a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that 95 percent of New Orleans residents want to see Category 5 protection, even if it costs more.

"Well, for me, that's obvious," Brown said last week. "The more protection I can get for my home, the better."

As strong as the local desire for Category 5 levees is, however, the cost that would be borne by U.S. taxpayers is expected to be daunting, and it is unclear whether Congress would OK the spending.

The budget for the 100-year protection project already has risen from $5.7 billion to $7 billion and is expected to rise again in July when new cost estimates are announced. Some federal officials said the figure could double.

Moreover, the request for more expensive flood-protection projects would be one of several pleas for financial help from Louisiana. The state wants the federal government to plug a $2.9 billion gap in its homeowner rebuilding program, called the Road Home, and it has developed a coastal-restoration and hurricane-protection plan estimated to cost more than $50 billion, with the federal government asked to put in about two-thirds of the money.

For now, people such as Brown and his few neighbors are focused on making it through another hurricane season, even as the Army Corps of Engineers tries to find ways to build the 100-year protection over the next four years.

Col. Jeff Bedey, who is leading the Army Corps work in the city, identified the flood protections along the Industrial Canal — the one that flanks the Lower Ninth Ward to the west — as the system's "Achilles' heel." In a major hurricane, storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico presses into Lake Borgne and the canals, possibly overtopping them.