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After two years and more than a billion dollars spent by the Army Corps of Engineers to rebuild New Orleans’s hurricane protection system, that is how much the water level is likely to be reduced if a big 1-in-100 flood hits Leah Pratcher’s Gentilly neighborhood.Looking over the maps that showed other possible water levels around the city, Ms. Pratcher grew increasingly furious. Her house got four feet of water after Hurricane Katrina, and still stands to get almost as much from a 1-in-100 flood.By comparison, the wealthier neighborhood to the west, Lakeview, had its flooding risk reduced by nearly five and a half feet.“If I got my risk reduced by five feet five inches, I’d feel pretty safe,” said Ms. Pratcher, who along with her husband, Henry, warily returned home from Baton Rouge, La. “Six inches is not going to help us out.”New Orleans was swamped by Hurricane Katrina;now it is awash in data, studied obsessively in homes all over town. And the simple message conveyed by that data is that while parts of the city are substantially safer, others have changed little.New Orleans remains a very risky place to live.The entire flood system still provides much less protection than New Orleans needs, and the pre-Katrina patchwork of levees, floodwalls and gates that a Corps of Engineers investigation called “a system in name only” is still just that.The corps has strengthened miles of floodwalls, but not always in places where people live. It has built up breached walls on the east side of one major canal, but left the west side, which stood up to Hurricane Katrina, lower and thus more vulnerable. It has not closed the canals that have often been described as funnels for floodwaters into the city.And its most successful work, building enormous floodgates to cut off the fingerlike canals that brought so much flooding into the city, had a divisive effect. The gates now protect prosperous neighborhoods like Lakeview, and though corps officials say there has been no favoritism, the effect has been to draw out old resentments and conspiracy theories in a city that never lacked for them.“We have spent a lot of money and gotten some very good patches, but we’re putting them on this decayed old quilt,” said Robert G. Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who is an author of an independent report on the levee failures. “We’re still with this damned patchwork quilt.”As a result, the city still lacks a system that can stand up to that 1-in-100 storm, let alone one like Hurricane Katrina, which the corps calls a 1-in-396 storm. The work that could build the more robust system-originally estimated at $7 billion, and now at least twice that-will not be completed until 2011 at the earliest, and experts agree that even that level of protection will be less than the city needs.The corps is working on a two-year, $20 million study to find ways of providing even more protection, but it will not even be released until December.Without a strong rampart of protection against storms, New Orleans will have a hard time persuading its far-flung residents and businesses to return and rebuild. Matt McBride, an engineer who became an anti-corps gadfly on flood-protection issues, left the city along with his wife after deciding he simply did not trust the new system.“There’s too many things that can go wrong,” Mr. McBride said.Maggie Carver, a Gentilly resident now living in Woodstock, N.Y., but hoping to get back, said she thought that all the time and work would have resulted in more progress and a clearer sense of safety than she had seen.“If I sell my house and put everything into rebuilding and living in New Orleans and it happens again, then where am I?” Ms. Carver asked. “I’m in a boat somewhere with four Jack Russell terriers and my grandson. I won’t have anything.”To read more go to:
As in the days of Noah...
