Will the 'Great Wall' of New Orleans Save It From the Next Killer Hurricane? - TakePart
NEW ORLEANS—On a sweltering blue-sky September day, I stand atop a 26-foot-tall white concrete wall that stretches for nearly two miles across the Golden Triangle Marsh on the eastern edge of the city. 1 billion Inner Harbor Navigation Canal-Lake Borgne Surge Barrier is wide enough to accommodate a Ford F-250 truck and ranks as one of the biggest public works projects in the United States. When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, there was nothing here to stop a 15-foot-high wall of water that roared out of the lake and tore through shipping canals leading into the city, toppling levees and floodwalls and drowning the Lower Ninth Ward. “One of the challenges you have in building anything in New Orleans—when it comes to risk reduction—is that the city depends on water,” says Ricky Boyett, public affairs chief for the Corps in New Orleans. Today, a decade after Katrina left 80 percent of New Orleans underwater and killed more than 1,600 people, the Big Easy has been reconstructed as a walled city. The Lake Borgne Surge Barrier is just one of a series of gargantuan structures and reinforced levees and floodwalls designed to defend the city against a 100-year storm—a Katrina-like catastrophe that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any... This feat of engineering, prosaically called the Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System, forms a 133-mile enclosure around New Orleans and the 350 miles of canals that traverse the city—the canals the. Source: www.takepart.com
