Reconstruction of New Orleans
Open-knowledge reference entry
The reconstruction of New Orleans refers to the process of rebuilding the city following the failure of levees and floodwalls during Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005. The federally built hurricane protection, called the Lake Pontchartrain and Vicinity Hurricane Protection Project failed, resulting in breaches that released tens of billions of gallons of water flooding approximately 80% of the city. The flooding remained in the city for days, in many places for weeks.
Over 204,000 homes were severely damaged or destroyed, and an estimated 200,000 vehicles were totaled. More than 800,000 citizens were displaced—the greatest displacement in the United States since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.
Residential reconstruction was hindered by bureaucratic problems in the heavily criticized Road Home rebuilding program which was federally funded and state-managed. Critics also said that national politics factored into the program which was based on pre-storm home values, leading to disparities between rich and poor. Faith-based and volunteer agencies provided considerable supplemental relief.
The original flood protection system was redesigned and built at a cost of $14.5 billion and was 100% funded by the Army Corps through post-Katrina emergency appropriations. The new system was renamed the Hurricane & Storm Damage Risk Reduction System (HSDRRS) and is an integrated flood protection system designed to provide the Greater New Orleans area with a 100-year level of risk reduction.
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This entry incorporates text from “Reconstruction of New Orleans” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.