Engineering New Orleans' Future

At the time, I was confidently told that nature had been conquered in the Mississippi delta: the huge system of levees, locks and floodways meant New Orleans would never flood again.

Over a hundred years of major civil engineering projects had seen to that. We all know now this wasn't true.

For the anniversary of the Katrina disaster, I returned to the city to look at what went wrong, where and why the levees were breached and to understand the political and engineering lessons that have been learnt from the hurricane.

There are many places in New Orleans where it looks like the flooding happened yesterday: whole neighbourhoods are deserted, flooded buildings still show the high watermarks, the mangled wreckage of smashed homes still present a health hazard.

Mountains of scrap metal, everything from refrigerators to buses, are piled up waiting to be taken away.

Low-level existence

Debbie Simon, a former disaster manager now working with the US Army Corps of Engineers in the city, has a phrase for it: "When people ask me what New Orleans is like, I say 'it's like landfill', thousands of square miles of landfill - but with people still living in it."