Repairs Don't Allay Fears of Next Storm; Another Katrina Would Top Levees In New Orleans

By Peter Whoriskey; Washington Post Staff Writer

Where the canal wall burst and doomed the Lower Ninth Ward during Hurricane Katrina, there now stands an imposing concrete monolith.

The new flood barrier is taller, wider and, by its shape, harder to topple.

But could the rebuilt defenses handle another Katrina?

The answer is no. Even by Army Corps of Engineers estimates, another Katrina would send storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico cascading over the walls that protect the Lower Ninth Ward from inundation.

Standing this week in the front yard of his rebuilt shotgun-style home, Charles Brown, 48, a carpenter, cast an eye at the nearby wall.

"Everyone knows another big storm would tear that sucker up," he said.

Today, the first day of hurricane season, few dispute that the city is safer than it was before Hurricane Katrina. But as time passes and rebuilding costs mount, the idea that the federal government will provide protection from the worst of hurricanes here seems ever more remote.

After Katrina's catastrophic inundation, many declared "Never again!" With that message, Congress ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to study how to protect the city from flooding in Category 5 storms, the most devastating on the Saffir-Simpson scale. The idea still has strong political appeal.

"I believe we should order the Corps to achieve Category 5 protection over time," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said during a presidential campaign stop here recently.

But nearly two years after the storm, with the feasibility of protecting the city to that level under study, a project to defend the city from less-ferocious storms is proving far more expensive than anticipated. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has signaled that its commitment does not extend to Category 5 protection.

What the federal government has undertaken is a construction effort providing new flood walls, gates, pumps and levees around the canals that permeate this city. Some of the flood works are vast: At the 17th Street Canal, for example, the new tangle of massive metal pipes and pumps occupies 11 acres in the midst of the suburban Lakeview neighborhood.

When it is all done in 2011, these projects are supposed to give the city "100-year protection" -- that is, protection against a storm so powerful it happens on average only once in 100 years.

For any given year, the roughly 1-in-100 chance of a storm overcoming the defenses might sound like attractive odds.

But it is far below local expectations, for several reasons.

The 1-in-100 annual chance means that, over a lifetime, such an event is more likely to happen than not. Moreover, protection against the 100-year storm is far less than would be necessary for a Hurricane Katrina, which is considered a 400-year event, and certainly less than what could withstand a direct hit by a Category 5.

Finally the 100-year protection leaves the New Orleans area at far more risk than other well-known flood projects: The system in the Netherlands, for example, is designed to withstand a 1-in-10,000-year storm, the Herbert Hoover Dike around Lake Okeechobee in Florida is designed for a 1-in-935-year event, and the Mississippi River flood works are designed for a 1-in-800-year flood.

Not surprisingly, a recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that 95 percent of residents here want to see Category 5 protection, even if it costs more.

"Well, for me, that's obvious," Brown said last week.

He is one of only a handful of homeowners in the area to have started rebuilding. Most of the other houses stand vacant and wrecked, but he has hopes that his neighbors will one day return.

"The more protection I can get for my home, the better," he said.

"The two questions I get most from people here are 'If another Katrina hits, are we safe?' and 'When are we going to get Category 5 protection?' " said Donald E. Powell, the federal Gulf Coast rebuilding coordinator.

As strong as the local desire for Category 5 levees is, however, the cost that would be borne by U.S. taxpayers is expected to be daunting, and it is unclear whether Congress will embrace the local ambitions for that margin of safety.

The budget for the 100-year protection project has already risen from $5.7 billion to $7 billion and is expected to rise again in July when new cost estimates are announced. Some federal officials said the figure could double.

However much the price rises, Congress would have to approve more money for what is proving to be a very expensive project.

Even at the current budget, which is low, the $7 billion expenditure amounts to more than $5,800 per person in the protected area, even when using the higher pre-Katrina population.

Moreover, the request for more expensive flood protection projects would be one of several pleas for financial help from Louisiana. The state wants the federal government to plug a $2.9 billion gap in its homeowner rebuilding program, called the Road Home, and it has developed a coastal restoration and hurricane protection plan estimated to cost more than $50 billion, with the federal government asked to put in about two-thirds of the money.

Tensions between officials here and the federal government, already raw, are expected to worsen as those requests are pressed forward.

At his State of the City speech here this week, Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) lashed out again at Washington for failing to fulfill its promises after the storm.

"It's not our fault that the levees breached that the federal government built," he said during the fiery conclusion to his speech on Wednesday night. "And don't talk to me about we're not smart to be living under sea level. I don't want to hear it! Don't talk to me about we need to be smaller. . . . We want the whole city fixed."

In response to questions about better protection for the city, Powell said the administration is "committed" to the 100-year-flood protection, and says he will support spending more money to get to that level.

"In my view, you should be able to trust the United States," he said in a recent conversation, standing atop one of the city's Mississippi River levees. "People thought they were protected, and the levees breached. We need to bridge that trust gap. That's what these levees are about."

But he turned aside questions about Category 5 protection, noting that extensive new studies set to be released this summer will inform residents how likely they are to be flooded when the new 100-year project is finished.

"Then they can make their decisions," he said.

For now, people such as Brown and his few neighbors are focused on making it through another season, even as the Army Corps of Engineers tries to find ways to build the 100-year protection over the next four years.

Col. Jeff Bedey, who is leading the Army Corps work in the city, identified the flood protections along the Industrial Canal -- the one that flanks the Lower Ninth Ward to the west -- as the system's "Achilles' heel." In a major hurricane, storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico presses into Lake Borgne and then into the canals, possibly overtopping them.

"There are 40,000 linear feet of flood walls and levees along the canal that are below 15 feet high," he notes. "That's too low."

He is hopeful that by 2011 a barrier can be erected on the city's eastern flank that would block that surge from ever reaching into the city's canals.

In the meantime, Brown has adopted a fatalistic pose.

"I'm leaving it in the hands of the man -- the man upstairs," he said during a break in restoring his home. "Life goes on."