Reconstruction of New Orleans
The reconstruction of New Orleans refers to the process of rebuilding the city following the widespread destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005. The storm caused levees to fail, releasing tens of billions of gallons of water. The Mississippi River Gulf Outlet breached its levees in approximately 15 places. The major levee breaches in the city include the 17th Street Canal levee, the London Avenue Canal, and the wide, navigable Industrial Canal, which left approximately 80% of the city flooded. The levee failure contributed to extensive flooding in the New Orleans area and surrounding parishes.
About 80% of all structures in Orleans Parish sustained water damage. Over 204,000 homes were damaged or destroyed, and more than 800,000 citizens displaced—the greatest displacement in the United States since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Wind damage was less severe than predicted. The damage that took place that needed to be repaired cost about $125 billion.
Reconstruction was hindered by bureaucratic problems and funding issues with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Relief agencies provided supplemental relief. By mid-June 2006, the city was again hosting conventions and promoting tourism.
While ownership, definition of requirements, operation and maintenance of the system belonged to the Orleans Levee Board, federal responsibility for New Orleans's flood protection design and construction belongs by federal mandate to the US Army Corps of Engineers.
Flooding from the breaches put the majority of the city under water for days, in many places for weeks. The Corps made emergency repairs to breaches, as pumps worked at draining the city. Hurricane Rita brushed the city nearly a month later, causing reflooding of some areas, most significantly from water flowing through incompletely repaired levee breaches.
Background
Flooding due to rain and storms has long been an issue since the New Orleans's early settlement due to the city's location on a delta marsh, much of which sits below sea level. The city is surrounded by the Mississippi River to the south, Lake Pontchartrain to the north, and Lake Borgne to the east. Construction of the levees along the River began soon after the city was founded, and more extensive river levees were built as the city grew. The levees were originally designed to prevent damage caused by seasonal flooding. Today, the floodwalls atop the 17th Street and London Avenue Canals are used for drainage, to pump water from the city streets out to Lake Pontchartrain. These floodwalls are wide at the top and widened to at the base. The visible portion is a concrete cap on steel sheet pile that anchors to the wall. Sheet piles are interlocked steel columns, in this case at least long, with visible above ground; examinations afterward showed that some pilings were not as deep as specified. The wide, navigable Industrial Canal is used for shipping.The heavy flooding caused by Hurricane Betsy in 1965 brought concerns regarding flooding from hurricanes to the forefront. Congress removed responsibility from the state and mandated that the US Army Corps of Engineers have sole authority over the design and construction of the New Orleans area flood protection, although local cooperation was stipulated. This is spelled out in the Flood Control Act of 1965. Forty years later when Katrina struck, the flood protection was between 60-90% completed with an estimated completion date of 2015, despite the initial expectation of completion within thirteen years. As of May 2005, work in Orleans Parish was certified as 90% complete, with "some work remaining" along the London Avenue Canals, and 70% complete in Jefferson Parish.
There were many predictions of hurricane risk in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina in August, 2005. In 2001, the Houston Chronicle published a story which predicted that a severe hurricane striking New Orleans, "would strand 250,000 people or more, and probably kill one of 10 left behind as the city drowned under of water. Thousands of refugees could land in Houston." Many concerns also focused around the fact that the city's levee system was only designed for hurricanes of no greater intensity than category 3. As it turned out, Katrina was Category 3 when it made landfall and most of New Orleans experienced Category 1 or 2 strength winds. However, due to the slow moving nature of the storm in its pass over New Orleans, several floodwalls lining the shipping and drainage canals in New Orleans collapsed and the resulting flood water from Lake Pontchartrain inundated the city within the two days following the storm, causing costly damage to buildings and resulting in many deaths.
Furthermore, the region's natural defenses, the surrounding marshland and the barrier islands, have been dwindling in recent years due to human interference.
Reconstruction
Levee repairs
There were 28 reported failures in the first 24 hours and over 50 were reported in the ensuing days. Before dawn on Monday August 29, 2005, waves overtopped and eroded the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet levees. At about 5:00 am, a 30-foot section of floodwall, called a "monolith," on the east side of the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal, breached and released flood water into the adjacent Lower Ninth Ward, a dense lower to middle class neighborhood of primarily Black homeowners. By 6:30 a.m. CDT, levees along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, lining the south side of New Orleans East, also overtopped and breached. The surge flooded the primarily middle to upper class Black region.On the west edge of New Orleans, between 6 and 7:00 am, a monolith on the east side of the London Avenue Canal failed and allowed water over 10 feet deep into Fillmore Gardens, a mostly Black middle class neighborhood. At about 6:30 a.m., on the western edge of the city, several monoliths failed on the 17th Street Canal. A torrent of water blasted into Lakeview, a mainly white middle class neighborhood of homeowners. Local fire officials reported the breach. An estimated 66% to 75% of the city was now under water. The Duncan and Bonnabel Pumping Stations were also reported to have suffered roof damage, and were non-functional.
At approximately 7:45 a.m. CDT, a much larger second hole opened up in the Industrial Canal just south of the initial breach. Floodwaters from the two breaches combined to submerge the entire historic Lower Ninth Ward in over 10 feet of water. Between 7 and 8:00 am, the west side of the London Avenue Canal breached, in addition to the east side, and flooded the adjacent mixed-race neighborhood of homeowners.
The Orleans Avenue Canal midway between the 17th Street Canal and the London Avenue Canal, engineered to the same standards, and presumably put under similar stress during the hurricane, survived intact due, in part, to the presence of an unintended 100-foot-long ‘spillway,’ a section of legacy wall that was significantly lower than the adjacent floodwalls.
In September 2022, the Associated Press issued a style guide change to Katrina stating that reporters when writing about the storm in New Orleans should note that “…levee failures played a major role in the devastation in New Orleans. In some stories, that can be as simple as including a phrase about Hurricane Katrina’s catastrophic levee failures and flooding….”
National Academy of Sciences Investigation
On October 19, 2005, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that an independent panel of experts, under the direction of the National Academy of Sciences, would convene to evaluate the performance of the New Orleans levee system, and issue a final report in eight months. The panel would study the results provided by the two existing teams of experts that had already examined the levee failures. The academy concluded that "the engineering of the levee system was not adequate. The procedures for designing and constructing hurricane protection systems will have to be improved, and the designing organizations must upgrade their engineering capabilities. The levees must be seen not as a system to protect real estate but as a set of dams to protect people. There must be independent peer reviews of future designs and construction."Conspiracy theories
leader Louis Farrakhan among other public figures claimed the levees were dynamited to divert waters away from wealthy white areas. The conspiracy theory reached a United States House of Representatives committee investigating Katrina when a New Orleans community activist made the claim. According to the New Orleans Times Picayune this is an "urban myth". Reasons for belief in these theories have been ascribed to the decision by city officials during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 to set off 30 tons of dynamite on the levee at Caernarvon, Louisiana which eased pressure on levees at New Orleans but flooded St. Bernard Parish, the Ninth Ward taking the brunt of the city's flooding during Hurricane Betsy, the general disenfranchisement of blacks and lower-class people, and the similarity of the sound of the levees collapsing to that of a bombing.Pre-storm preparations
On Saturday, August 27, while Katrina was a Category 3 storm gathering strength in the Gulf of Mexico, the Army Corps of Engineers Mississippi Valley Division was preparing and posturing elements from as far as Hawaii. Anticipating the possibility of a Category 5 storm placing water in New Orleans, preparations began for drainage operations.On August 29, 2005, as Katrina made its second and third landfalls on the Louisiana-Mississippi coast, Corps District Commander, Col. Richard Wagenaar, and a team worked out of an emergency operations shelter in New Orleans. Other teams waited in the storm's path across the Gulf coast.
The Corps worked with the U.S. Coast Guard, Army National Guard and other state and federal authorities to bring in all assets available to expedite the process. "We're attempting to contract for materials, such as rock, super sand bags, cranes, etc., and also for modes of transportation like barges and helicopters, to close the gap and stop the flow of water from Lake Pontchartrain into the city," said Walter Baumy, Engineering Division chief and project manager for closing the breach.