From Flood Control to Integrated Water Resource Management

This occasional paper presents a historical analysis intended to seek insights that might guide current reconstruction efforts in the Gulf of Mexico coastal region of the United States in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which struck in the late summer of 2005. Katrina—and the failure of multiple levees in New Orleans stressed by the storm’s surges—brought unprecedented death and destruction over a 90,000-square-mile area. As of this writing (June 2006), many area residents who evacuated before the storm have not yet returned. The social infrastructure will require significant repair and renovation. There is much work to be done. In this paper, we examine four mid- to late-20th-century cases of severe flooding to observe whether and how lessons were incorporated into water management, both before and after the disaster (see Table S.1). In each of the four cases, the areas involved were subject to record rainfall or storms that overwhelmed the systems that had been designed to cope with these events.