5 Bold Ideas For A Hurricane-Proof New Orleans

Mega Plumbing
Build a subterranean system to keep the city dry

The History
Shortly after Katrina barreled ashore, Robert Bea assembled an ad hoc team of engineers and headed to New Orleans. Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, had been invited to Louisiana by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to survey Katrina's aftermath. One problem that immediately struck him was The Challenge of getting water out of the low-lying city once it flooded. He blames that, in part, on the open canals that crisscross New Orleans. During a storm, the canals can overflow or crumble entirely, spilling millions of gallons of water into surrounding neighborhoods. From there, the water has nowhere to go.

The Specs
Bea recommends doing away with the canals and replacing them with underground concrete sluiceways, called boxed culverts, to form a giant plumbing system that would carry floodwaters out of the city. Buried under a few feet of ground cover, the culverts would be at least 10 feet tall and 20 feet wide.

"The current canals are arteries for water to flood the neighborhoods," Bea says. "We should fill them in, put nice parklands above them, and build a drainage system underneath. It would be like the plumbing in your shower."
Because New Orleans is below sea level, however, the system can't depend on gravity to move water uphill and back into Lake Pontchartrain. For that, Bea suggests a set of heavy-duty, storm-proof pumps-ones that are armored, diesel-powered and positioned on high ground so that they would keep running no matter what Mother Nature throws at them.

The Challenge
The technology is simple, but turning canals into culverts would require a
massive engineering effort, at a cost of about $1 million per mile of canal, Bea estimates. (The city's three primary canals-the 17th Street, London and Orleans-and their tributaries extend for about 50 miles, and industrial waterways add another 50 miles.)

The Status
After his tour of New Orleans, Bea drafted a white paper entitled "What Do We Do Now?" that outlines his culvert plan. At the very least, he argued, the city's three primary canals should be enclosed. But officials aren't making any promises.