the gulf or the levee?

The levees broke and Lake Ponchartrain, half the size of Rhode Island, was unleashed.

They've known for decades that his would happen if the right storm hit. I've found articles all over the Internet.

Houston, Texas got its real start after the storm of 1900 flattened Galveston and bright people crawled out of the wreckage and said to one another "Y'know, this is really dumb..."

 

True, but those who wanted to remain in Galveston made a wise decision. They raised the island 17 feet with the sea wall. It's pretty neat to walk on the sea wall and look straight down to the beach 17 fett below and think that the entire city used to be at that height.

Of course, the west end, which doesn't have a sea wall, still floods at the drop of a hat.

The difference for Galveston was that about 95% of the buildings were levelled in the storm, so raising the city didn't pose a great problem to existing property. New Orleans still has the buildings, so raising that city would be an astronomical feat.

 

Remember that the levees in New Orleans were only designed to take a slow moving Category 2 and a fast moving Category 5 hurricane. The levees were simply not capable to handle the Category 4 Katrina. On a positive note, the mojority of the levees did take the hurricane. Only a relatively small section of the levees actually broke. But as we've seen, it only takes a small break to cause extreme damage.

They're now saying everyone knew this would happen with this type of storm, but as always, improvements take money and it appears no one wanted to spend the money then.

It's going to take over $100 billion to recover the damaged area now.