New Orleans is still at risk

NEW ORLEANS - In this city still half-emptied from one of the worst floods in American history, one question provokes the ever-present doubt.

Exactly how risky is it to live here?

Yesterday, for the first time since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, U.S. officials offered some specific answers, the results of a landmark study of the flood threat.

After nearly two years of levee repairs, the chances are 1 in 500 that nearly all of the city will be flooded again this year with more than six feet of water, according to flood-risk maps issued by the Army Corps of Engineers.

There is a 1-in-100 annual chance that roughly one-third of the city will be flooded with as much as six feet of water. For dozens of city blocks, the chance of significant flooding is twice as high.

"If I were moving or returning to New Orleans, I'd have one of these flood maps in my back pocket," said Donald Powell, the Bush administration's Gulf Coast recovery chief. "I'd want to be safe."

Meteorologists estimate that on average, a storm like Katrina strikes once every 400 years.

The new flood-risk maps for any given block are expected to renew the controversy here, sometimes racially charged, over what parts of the city ought to be rebuilt.

While some experts have pressed for the most vulnerable neighborhoods to be closed at least temporarily, Mayor C. Ray Nagin has bowed to pressure from residents of those areas and insisted that every resident has the "right of return." He has said that the free market, not planners, should dictate where the city is rebuilt.

In a statement, Nagin said: "We need assurance that this is reliable data. . . . But even if this information is accurate, simply identifying the risk does not solve the problem. . . . These American citizens deserve the protection they were denied to begin with."

Powell predicted that "now you'll have science and political will all clashing. What will prevail? I don't know."

By 2011, the corps is supposed to finish its $7 billion levee construction project. That is intended to significantly reduce the flooding risks, though details regarding the added safety to be achieved are not yet available.

In December, corps officials are expected to present to Congress various options for the levels of flood protection that could be provided beyond the $7 billion project. The cost estimates are expected to be in the tens of billions of dollars.

"We will never be able to say there's no risk," said Karen Durham-Aguilera, director of Task Force Hope, the ongoing levee project.

The study of flood risks was conducted by the same team of academic and private-sector engineers that has issued an eight-volume report on the levee system's failures after Katrina. It was led by Ed Link, a senior research engineer from the University of Maryland.

"There is a gnawing sense out there: 'Can we trust the corps?' " Powell said. "This team was independent."

The study showed that the levee work completed so far had significantly reduced the flood risks in some neighborhoods, particularly in Lakeview, the site of one of Katrina's catastrophic levee breaches. Elsewhere, only slight reductions in risk have been achieved.

Out in the neighborhoods where people are rebuilding, the immediate reaction to word of the new risk assessment was primarily: Now they tell us?

Dwight Carter, 55, a school maintenance worker, and his wife, Joann, 53, a school cook, are among a handful of people who have rebuilt homes in their Gentilly neighborhood, which was wiped out by Katrina.

Following the then-federal guidelines for rebuilding, the couple raised their home about three feet over the ground. But the new maps show there is a 1-in-100 chance of having eight feet of water in the area, which sits below sea level.

"I wish they'd told us that," Joann Carter said, shaking her head.

Then, like many others, they embraced the hope that another catastrophe was unlikely.

"I just don't see it happening again," Dwight Carter offered.

His wife said, "We're just going to have to trust in the Lord."