Twenty years ago Hurricane Katrina devastated Southeast Louisiana and Coastal Mississippi. It left nearly 1,400 people dead, the most damage in hurricane history, 80 percent of New Orleans flooded and hundreds of thousands of people displace, with no idea if they would every go home.
NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information indicates that Katrina was responsible for $125 billion in damage.
The destruction that Katrina inflicted on the region led to a complete rethinking of how levees and floodwalls should be designed and built. Katrina taught a hard lesson that designers missed after Hurricane Betsy.
The pre-Katrina levee system dated back to that 1965 storm, and it was still under construction in some areas when Katrina came calling 40 years later.
"When you look at the pre-Katrina system, it was authorized in 1975," said Rickey Boyett with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. "We were still working on it in 2005."
Boyett said that after Katrina, Congress funded the project up front, and the Corps was able to complete the system much faster.
"We started design in 2007. We were able to defend against a 100-year level of storm by 2011, and then the final major component of the structure, the permanent canal closures and pumps; they were finished in 2018," Boyett said.
H.J. Bosworth, a civil engineer who works with the watchdog Levees.org, says the new system -- which eliminates the outfall canals that penetrate deep into the city, and closes off the Gulf intracoastal on both sides of the river -- is much improved.
"Are we better off? Absolutely," said Bosworth of the post-Katrina flood risk reduction system. But he also had this sobering caveat:
"Any time a storm comes, it tests what the engineers and contractors and authorities have constructed. When it tests them, then you know."
There have been some $15 billion spent on surge barriers, flood walls, levees, pumps and more.