With Support from the Rockefeller Foundation, This New Orleans Neighborhood Is Fighting Flooding By Welcoming It
For decades, New Orleans fought to keep water out of the city. In the city's new resilience district, with projects that will break ground later in 2017, the goal is to let water in—which paradoxically can reduce flooding.
The plan was developed as part of the Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities initiative; New Orleans's strategy launched in 2015, and last year, the city was awarded $141.3 million through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Natural Disaster Resilience Competition to further the implementation of the plan. "What Katrina exposed for us is that we cannot just rely on manmade, engineered systems . . . you have to have a more resilient system that has redundancy and multiple different flood protection features in order to protect the city," says Jeff Hebert, the city's chief resilience officer. "The second thing is that we really have to go back into history and learn how to live with water in a city that is so wet..."