Background
New Orleans was settled on a natural high ground along the Mississippi River. Later developments that eventually extended to nearby Lake Pontchartrain were built on fill to bring them above the average lake level. Navigable commercial waterways extended from the lake into the interior of the city to promote waterborne commerce. After the construction of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal in 1940, the state closed these waterways causing the town's water table to lower drastically. After 1965, the United States Army Corps of Engineers built a levee system around a much larger geographic footprint that included previous marshland and swamp. These factors created subsidence of up to 8 feet (2.4 m) in some areas due to the consolidation of the underlying organic soils.
A 1999–2001 study using LIDAR technology found that 51% of the terrestrial surface of the contiguous urbanized portions of Orleans, Jefferson, and St. Bernard parishes lie at or above sea level, with the highest neighborhoods at 10–12 feet (3.0–3.7 m)) above mean sea level, while 49 percent lies below sea level, in places to equivalent depths.
In 1965, heavy flooding caused by Hurricane Betsy brought concerns regarding flooding from hurricanes to the forefront. That year Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1965 which, among other issues, gave authority for design and construction of the flood protection in the New Orleans metropolitan area to the Corps of Engineers subject to cost sharing principles, some of which were waived by later legislation. The local municipalities were charged with maintenance once the projects were completed.
When authorized, flood control design and construction were projected to take 13 years to complete. When Katrina made landfall in 2005, the project was between 60–90% complete with a projected date of completion estimated for 2015, nearly 50 years after it first gained authorization. Moreover, another major hurricane flooding had long been predicted, and while the close call of Hurricane Georges in September 1998 galvanized some squabbling scientists, engineers and politicians into collective planning, as at October 2001, Scientific American declared that "New Orleans is a disaster waiting to happen".
On August 29, 2005, flood walls and levees catastrophically failed throughout the metro area. Many collapsed well below design thresholds (17th Street and London Canals). Others collapsed after a brief period of overtopping (Industrial Canal) caused “scouring” or erosion of the earthen levee walls — an egregious design flaw. American Society of Civil Engineers refers to the flooding of New Orleans as the worst engineering disaster in US history.
Read more about this topic: Effects Of Hurricane Katrina In New Orleans
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