NEW ORLEANS — Burnell Cotlon lost everything in Hurricane Katrina — “just like everyone else,’’ he said.
When the flawed flood wall bordering his neighborhood here in the Lower Ninth Ward gave way in August 2005, the waters burst through with explosive force that pushed his home off its foundations and down the street. What was left: rubble, mud, and mold.
Not far from his rebuilt home stands a rebuilt flood wall, taller and more solidly anchored in its levee than the old one. On the other side of that lies the canal whose storm-swollen waters toppled the old wall, letting Lake Pontchartrain spill into the neighborhood and then sit, more than 10 feet deep, for weeks on end.
As an added shield, an enormous gate closes the canal off from the lake when storms approach. Similar gates can secure the city’s other major canals.
In all, federal, state, and local governments spent more than $20 billion on the 350 miles of levees, flood walls, gates, and pumps that now encircle Greater New Orleans.
“I hope and pray that the money was well-spent and it is a decent system,’’ said Cotlon, who opened the first grocery store in the still-recovering neighborhood in 2014.
In the Midwest over the past week, residents have been coping with heavy rainfall and flooding. Rivers overflowed their banks from the Ohio River to Michigan and Wisconsin.
Missouri Governor Eric Greitens signed an executive order Saturday declaring a state of emergency ahead of anticipated storms and flooding in parts of southern Missouri.
In a separate development, a tornado watch was issued Saturday in parts of four states as a strong storm system moved into the South and Plains states. The watch was in effect in most of Arkansas and in northeastern Texas, southeastern Oklahoma, and northeastern Louisiana.
The weather service said the system was also capable of producing wind gusts of up to 75 miles per hour and hail up to 2 inches in diameter, or about the size of an egg. Heavy rain and flooding are also possible.
This year, New Orleans will celebrate its 300th birthday. Whether it will see 400 is no sure thing.
As Jean Lafitte and other vulnerable little towns that fringe the bayous plead for some small measure of salvation, New Orleans today is a fortress city, equipped with the best environmental protection it has ever had — probably the strongest, in fact, that any US city has ever had.
Yet even the system’s creators have conceded it might not be strong enough.
The problem, in the argot of flood protection, is that the Army Corps of Engineers designed the new system to protect against the storms that would cause a “100-year’’ flood — a flood with a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. And that, experts say, is simply insufficient for an urban area certain to face more powerful storms.
“All along, we knew that ‘100-year’ was somewhat voodoo math,’’ said Garret Graves, a Republican representative from Louisiana and former chairman of the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority.
The corps has stopped calling its handiwork a hurricane protection system, opting instead for the more modest Hurricane & Storm Damage Risk Reduction System.
How that came to be is a story of money and politics and, perhaps, a degree of Louisiana fatalism. In simplest terms, though, it comes down to a mismatch between limited resources and limitless amounts of water.
If New Orleans is culturally and culinarily unique among US cities, it is also uniquely vulnerable: Half the city lies below sea level and is sinking still, and the buffer of protective wetlands that can knock down the force of incoming hurricanes is eroding away.
Climate change threatens to make these problems far worse.
The rising oceans will strengthen storm surges, and increased moisture in the atmosphere will add to the drenching rains that regularly overwhelm the city’s aging drainage system. Scientists also suggest that a warming world will bring stronger hurricanes.
“Climate change is turning that 100-year flood, that 1 percent flood, into a 5 percent flood or a 20-year flood,’’ said Rick Luettich, a storm surge expert and vice chairman of one of the New Orleans area’s two regional levee authorities. By that inexorable logic, the 500-year flood becomes a 100-year flood, and so on.
The Army Corps spent nearly 50 years building the old hurricane protection system for New Orleans. More than 1,400 people died in the city when it failed. So in the aftermath of Katrina, Congress thought big.
Funding measures that passed beginning in late 2005 outlined a three-stage program for restoring a shattered and sodden New Orleans. The first step was to repair the broken levees and flood walls to what they were before the storm.
At the same time, the corps would develop a plan to offer “interim protection,’’ that 100-year level, achievable within several years.
Finally, Congress called on the secretary of the Army, who oversees the corps, to “consider providing protection for a storm surge equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane — a storm, that is, more powerful than Katrina.’’
