Hurricane Katrina turned out not to be a Category 5 tropical storm, and as the storm moved a little to the east of the city, the storm waters did not top the levee system. The worst was avoided, blessedly. But civic engineers, FEMA officials, and meterologists remain concerned about the prospect for a major disaster, and some have even talked about building a "haven" in the central city around the French Quarter, with high walls, where residents could flee in case of a catastrophe.
An excellent story from American Radioworks (available in both print and audio versions) on preparations in New Orleans and the surrounding parish for a hurricane, concludes with the following thought from emergency operations chief Walter Maestri:
"One of the things that’s frustrating now for all of us in my business," explains Maestri, "is that if that Category Five Hurricane comes to New Orleans, 50,000 people could lose their lives. Now that is significantly larger than any estimates that we would have of individuals who might lose their lives from a terrorist attack. When you start to do that kind of calculus – and it’s horrendous that you have to do that kind of calculus – it appears to those of us in emergency management, that the risk is much more real and much more significant, when you talk about hurricanes. I don’t know that anybody, though, psychologically, has come to grip with that: that the French Quarter of New Orleans could be gone."
Kit Stolz 