20 years after Katrina, New Orleans’s levees are sinking and short on money

It has been 20 years since New Orleans’ faulty levee system failed during Hurricane Katrina, causing a flood that claimed almost 2,000 lives and inflicted more than $150 billion in economic damage. The catastrophe was so bad that some doubted the city could continue to exist at all — the U.S. Speaker of the House at the time declared that rebuilding New Orleans “doesn’t make sense” and that much of it “could be bulldozed.”

Rather than just patch up the damage, which would have left one of the country’s most iconic cities exposed to every future storm, the federal government doubled down on flood protection, building a new $14.4 billion levee system that ranks as one of the most sophisticated anywhere in the world.

Over the course of a decade, the Corps rebuilt and expanded almost 200 m