CityLab Daily: Lessons From a Disaster That Wasn’t

Levee en rose: As Hurricane Barry headed toward the Gulf Coast last week, New Orleans stared down what could have been a “perfect storm” for catastrophic flooding. Louisiana uses different sets of infrastructure to control various kinds of high water: pipes, pumps, and canals for local rainfall; levees and walls for storm surges; and a complex flood control system for the rising Mississippi River. For a while, it looked like New Orleans would need to use all of them for Barry, all at the same time.

Luckily, the storm largely spared New Orleans, but it underscored the hard choices that flood-prone places face in a warmer, wetter climate. As Alexander Kolker, a coastal scientist at the Louisiana University Marine Consortium, writes, “Climate change will not only put stress on our infrastructure, but will make our decisions about how to use that infrastructure more difficult.” On CityLab: Hurricane Barry: Lessons From a Disaster That Wasn’t