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.

Boarded-up homes. Car wrecks piled on top of each other like dominoes. The stench of refuse. Piet Dircke from the Dutch engineering company Arcadis remembers it as if it were yesterday. He visited New Orleans in the autumn of 2005. Arcadis started work just months later.

The United States government commissioned Arcadis to join efforts to protect New Orleans from future disasters. The result was a whopping 200-million-dollar contract. Construction of the city’s ‘defensive ring’ is in full swing.

“The countless cranes mark where a massive array of levees, dams, storm surge barriers and pumps is being constructed. It’s all got to be finished by June 2011. We’ll have built an enormous delta defence system in just four years. It’s never been done before,” says Mr Dircke, confident it will all be finished on time.

Chaos and shortages
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.

Another Dutch firm, Royal Haskoning, is also working in New Orleans.

“The Dutch are known all over the world for this sort of work. The American press and US politicians quickly homed in on how we do things. We Dutch have had centuries of experience of dealing with water,” René Zijlstra of Haskoning points out.

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.

Let down
Despite all the progress, New Orleans has still not completely recovered from Hurricane Katrina. Some victims feel they have been let down by the US government. Many are still living in temporary housing outside the city. Mr Dircke explains:

”There are neighbourhoods which were badly hit by Katrina where, for the most part, poor black Americans lived. Those areas have still not seen proper reconstruction. They haven’t really bounced back yet.” 

Is it enough?

• Dutch expertise might be in demand in New Orleans, but the flood defences there won’t match the high standards of the Delta Works, warns Professor Bart Schultz of the UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Delft. 
• The Delta Works protect against floods that are likely to occur once in 10,000 years. New Orleans’ new flood defences are only designed to cope with flooding that happens once in a 100 years – no better than the pre-Katrina criterion.
• After the disaster, the US Army Corp of Engineers was allocated 16 billion dollars to take flood defence measures. By way of comparison, the Oosterschelde storm surge barrier, which spans just one of the inlets in the southern Dutch province of Zeeland, cost an equivalent of around four billion dollars.
• The New Orleans defences are being repaired, says Prof Schultz, but there is no attempt to raise the degree of protection. The reason? “New Orleans is a poor area. In the Netherlands, the great flood of 1953 also threatened the heart of the country."
• The ring of defences now being constructed by Arcadis and Haskoning are designed to withstand hurricanes of up to category 3. Katrina was between 3 and 4.