By Justin Worland
Times
Where should we expect the next Hurricane Katrina to hit? Despite 10 years of work and some $15 billion in investment in disaster preparedness, experts say we may still want to look to New Orleans.
Identifying the places facing the most serious risk of a devastating hurricane requires a two-pronged approach: figuring out where the next big storm is likely to strike and determining how well those locations have prepared.
In Louisiana, federal dollars have funded the creation of a 133-mile levee system designed to protect the city from a once in 100-year storm. (That means, there’s a 1% chance that a storm of that size will occur on any given year.) As a storm approaches, officials can close off 220-ton gates and activate pumps that remove rainwater from the city’s sewage system. The pumps—the world’s largest—could fill the Superdome with water in 90 seconds.
At a cost of nearly $15 billion, the system wasn’t cheap. But it may not be enough to withstand the next serious storm, one that will likely be exacerbated by global warming and changing conditions in New Orleans. For one, land in the city is sinking at a rate of nearly half an inch each year due in part to changes in the soil that have resulted from human settlement. The occurrence, known technically as subsidence, has left many parts of the sea below sea level and especially vulnerable to flooding.
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