Levee Plans
Written by Katie Pesce
Researched by Team 4 

Many challenging factors had to be taken into account for our plan. As mentioned above, the loss of the wetlands over the years and the rising Mississippi River are two of the biggest threats, but subsidence and the fact that much of New Orleans is already below sea level also affected our solution. Our figures also had to be readjusted to account for global warming. In the future, global warming will cause sea levels to rise, which means more land loss and a rising water line, and it will also cause increasingly powerful hurricanes from the Atlantic, which means more powerful storm surges and flood waters. We also looked at the possible environmental effects of our plan because we didn’t want to greatly imbalance any ecosystem. 

Many of the levee failures, which we looked at in detail in our Background section, were human error and bad engineering design, which can be fixed by careful design, construction, and maintenance. The New Orleans flood protection system was not built cohesively as one uniform system. It was built in phases and stages by many different groups. We emphasize the importance of standardizing the construction, monitoring, and maintenance of the system.