New Orleans – Two years after Hurricane Katrina, much of the “city that care forgot” still lies in ruins. But Otis Biggs’ task as he shuffles his tarot deck is to peer into the future to 2015, the storm’s 10th anniversary.
An upside-down tower – violent storms will hold off until levees are repaired.
The ace of cauldrons – money will flow.
The empress – stability, fruitful things.
Downtown, near the riverfront, Biggs sees a gleaming glass and steel tower rising, the tallest in the state. Elections will bring new blood and vision. Companies will feel safe to invest in the city, and most of those who fled will return.
“There’s hope,” Biggs says, his hazel eyes twinkling in light reflected through a crystal ball.
There may be hope, but there are few assurances.
“For every positive that’s going on in New Orleans right now, there’s a negative, there’s a concern,” says Reed Kroloff, who until recently was dean of the school of architecture at Tulane University.
The failure of federally funded, state-administered recovery programs to quickly take hold, and the city’s struggle to define and fund plans for neighborhood redevelopment, has shaken confidence about New Orleans’ short-term future. Mayor Ray Nagin favors a “market- driven” recovery. Critics say he has not made tough decisions necessary to get planning into high gear.
There are geophysical challenges ahead. By 2015, parts of New Orleans will have subsided nearly an additional 8 inches. The city filled up like a bowl when Katrina broke levees on Aug. 29, 2005. Roughly 240 more square miles of the eroding wetlands that protect the city from storm surge will be gone by 2015.
If the Army Corps of Engineers has its way, and billions in federal funds don’t get siphoned off by war or another natural disaster, those who remain should be better protected from flooding by 2015.
To the east, a massive levee-and- floodgate structure rising from the brackish marsh should block the surge from the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and the Mississippi River- Gulf Outlet. To the north, new flood gates and pumping stations would prevent a surge from Lake Pontchartrain and prevent a repeat of the failures along the city’s drainage canals.
The city’s population will be smaller a decade after the storm. A recent estimate pegs the current population at around 270,000 – about 60 percent of the pre-Katrina total.
