NYT: New Orleans’s Storm Defenses Nearly Ready, but Mistrusted

[steve2470]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/us/24levee.html

LAKE BORGNE, La. — The great wall of Lake Borgne is a monster. Nearly 2 miles long and 26 feet high, it spans a corner of the lake, 12 miles east of New Orleans. On Aug. 29, 2005, that corner funneled Hurricane Katrina’s surge into New Orleans, causing some of the city’s most violent flooding. Now, the corner is being blocked.

Nearly five years after Katrina and the devastating failures of the levee system, New Orleans is well on its way to getting the protection system Congress ordered: a ring of 350 miles of linked levees, floodwalls, gates and pumps that surrounds the city and should defend it against the kind of flooding that, in any given year, has a 1 percent chance of occurring.

The sheer scale of the nearly $15 billion project, which is not due to be completed until the beginning of next year’s hurricane season, brings to mind an earlier American age when the nation built huge works like the Brooklyn Bridge, the Hoover Dam and the Interstate highway system.

While New Orleans’s bulwark is still almost a year away from full strength, the city’s reinforced defenses are already stronger than they were before Katrina. Even so, experts argue, that the city’s defenses after 2011 will still provide less protection than it needs to avoid serious flooding in massive storms.