It's been nearly three years since New Orleans's levees broke after Hurricane Katrina, and the city is still vulnerable. The Associated Press reports that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that the storm surge from a Category 2 hurricane or higher could send water over the city's levees.
The Corps of Engineers is determining how high to build levees under a congressional mandate to complete by 2011 a hurricane protection system capable of handling a storm likely to hit over the next century. A strong Category 2 likely would fall under that definition.
On Monday, the corps was unable to provide a breakdown on how much has been spent so far on work to repel storm surge. Since Katrina, Congress has given the corps about $7.1 billion to work with and it is considering giving the corps $5.7 billion more. ...
The NOAA storm surge estimates do not take into consideration possible engineering failures, like the levee breaches that caused most of the misery in New Orleans during Katrina, which was a category 3 upon landfall south of New Orleans.
See and read a report from WWL-TV that shows how the Army Corps of Engineers is using newspapers to repair floodwalls in St. Bernard Parish.