Five years after Hurricane Katrina struck

Five years after Hurricane Katrina struck, a ring of water defences is rising round New Orleans. The system of levees and barriers is being constructed in record time thanks to Dutch expertise and American effort.

On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans with winds of up to 233 kilometres an hour. The levees gave way and 80 percent of the city was soon under metres of water. The result was chaos: people had to be rescued from roofs, the relief effort was inadequate, there were shortages of food and clean drinking water. Residents were ordered to evacuate the city to prevent outbreaks of disease. Over 1800 people were killed as a result of the disaster.
 

New Orleans quickly became a gloomy ghost town. Major work had to be done to make the city habitable again. And to prevent such a thing happening again. A huge system of water defences was needed to keep the sea at bay.
 

Tradition

The Netherlands experienced its own sea flood disaster in 1953, so that’s where the Americans went looking for expertise. The Dutch have learned a lot through building dykes, reclaiming land and constructing their Delta Works system of sea defences.
 

The combination of Dutch know-how and American endeavour has produced results. The system of sea defences round New Orleans will have taken just a few years to build whereas the Dutch ‘Delta Works’ took decades.
 

http://www.rnw.nl/english/article/dutch-us-water-defences-keep-new-orleans-dry