City still vulnerable

Just weeks before the start of a new hurricane season, New Orleans' hurricane levees are incomplete leaving the city at risk from even small hurricanes.

The New Orleans metropolitan area will enter the 2007 hurricane season with an incomplete levee protection system that could fail on its eastern and southern borders -- even during smaller hurricanes, independent critics and officials with the Army Corps of Engineers agree.

Lt. Col. Jeffrey Bedey, commander of the corps' Hurricane Protection Office that oversees levees on the east bank of the Mississippi River, agreed that the protection offered levees, walls and gates does not yet meet levels authorized by Congress before Hurricane Katrina.

But major strides have been made since the August 29, 2005 disaster, he said.

"In general, the repairs have strengthened the levees enough to prevent another catastrophic breach, but haven't yet raised them enough to prevent overtopping in places.Even a strong Category 2 hurricane entering the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway from Lake Borgne could overtop levees guarding eastern New Orleans and the Lower 9th Ward to the north, and St. Bernard Parish to the south. As during Katrina, that channel can still funnel high water into the Industrial Canal, where it would top levee walls on its western side, which remain as much as two feet too low.

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