Hey y'all, it's Andrew with Free Tours By Foot in
New Orleans. So today I'm going to bring you on an exploration of New Orleans' hurricane related
sites, particularly Katrina related sites since that's the most famous and maybe the one that
you'll have your own frame of reference to. It's a really big story, there's way, way too much
to it for us to cover it all in one video, so if you have memories of Katrina -- whether you were
here, whether you know someone who was, or whether there's other hurricanes that you went through --
definitely would love to hear your perspective on it in the comments. The stuff we're going to share
is some of the the best known things in terms of places where people took shelter: so that's
going to be the Superdome and Charity Hospital. It's also going to be some of the sites related
to the flooding: the 17th Street Canal, the Lower Ninth Ward. And we're gonna see some natural
bodies of water: Bayou St. John and -- right here next to us -- the Mississippi River. So we
have one of the best views of the city from right here by the Mississippi. You actually can't see
the Mississippi from very many parts of the city, particularly not with the whole skyline in the
background. Only critical element of the New Orleans skyline that you're missing here is the
Superdome, which we'll see a little bit later on, but that is our Business District over there,
over to the right is the French Quarter. You might just be able to make out at the far
right the steeple of St. Louis Cathedral, never mind the Crescent City Connection in the
distance, one of our big bridges -- lots and lots of critical geography right here. So the
Mississippi is something I wanted to start off with for a few reasons. For one thing, it is just
locally our metaphor for the power of nature. We call this the Mighty Mississippi; it is a--one
of the largest rivers in the world, and just a force to be reckoned with in all respects. Don't
go swimming in the Mississippi when you're here. But when Hurricane Katrina was coming in
bearing down on the mouth of the Mississippi, it was strong enough to send this giant river
flowing backwards for a little while, so as strong as the largest rivers in the world are, a
hurricane has the power to match those and really outdo those for a while, so definitely hurricanes
-- especially at their greatest strength -- not to be trifled with. Also, the Mississippi, like I
said, is something you can't see from most parts of the city. This is not something your intuition
is going to easily wrap around if you haven't spent time in cities like ours, but the surface
of the water here? The level of that is higher than the level of most ground in the city. It's
pretty famous that we in New Orleans are largely below sea level -- the majority of the city is
below sea level -- whereas if you think about it, a river -- since it is making its way into the sea
-- has to be a little bit above sea level so that it has a downhill slope to go along, so almost
no matter where you're standing in New Orleans, the river water is probably head level or
so in many cases. But at the same time, because of it being uphill of us and because of
it being often behind flood walls and levees, we don't see it, and so we don't always think
about how present it is and how close to us it is until a disaster reveals itself. And so that's
going to definitely play into the geography of the storm, where the damage was done, whether people
were totally prepared for it or not, and it's one last little thing that the river can really inform
us about. So it is a force of nature definitely, but that's not the whole story; it is also a
manmade thing in a lot of ways, it's been modified by humans in a way that is going to play into the
story of any disaster like Hurricane Katrina. Now one last thing to mention, during Katrina
this river did not flood, it didn't overflow; that's happened plenty of times -- sometimes
during hurricanes -- but in this particular case, while the water rose and while it reversed,
these levees held. The 80 percent of the city that flooded? Counter-intuitively, it's the stuff
furthest away from the river, and it so happens that most of the stuff that you're likely to
visit when you come to town -- the French Quarter over there, the Business District, the Garden
District off that way -- all of that stuff was spared the flooding, that's the 20 percent. So
when you come here, you're very rarely seeing the direct effects of Hurricane Katrina unless you
go way off the beaten path into those below level, later developed, and oftentimes less prosperous
parts of the city. That's what we're going to be exploring, it is not a walking route, we're
going to be going between all those sites by car, so we'll see you on the road as we start
on our way towards the Louisiana Superdome. So, big picture of the way things shook out
is that the stories of what was happening in New Orleans -- often amplified by the news and
by press conferences given by our mayor and by our governor and other people in positions of
authority -- ended up being really different from what was actually happening. And we didn't
know those things, people in--people from New Orleans were watching the same news as everybody
else unless you were actually here living it, and even then you know, your knowledge
was so granular, it was so fine detailed that you had no idea what the big picture
looked like either. And ultimately it's taken years for us to -- through investigative reporting
and and a lot of interviewing and so on -- to find out what really happened, and there's a great
museum in Jackson Square in the Presbytere which goes much deeper into that story, and
which I highly recommend for anybody who, you know, saw the the news stories of the
day and wants to complicate their sense of how things went. It's a lot more than just a
'Lord of the Flies,' everybody's awful kind of story. But it did end up affecting the
reality in a lot of ways, so the fact that the evacuation from here was so delayed and that
lives were lost along the way had a lot to do with fears that people had. Sometimes people gathered
together in groups for some kind of mutual care after the storm, and able-bodied people who were
taking care of sick or disabled or elderly people would go out to find the things those people
needed, and sometimes that meant in order to save a life breaking into a grocery store or a drug
store, and that got categorized alongside the more selfish kind of looting and that could sometimes
lead to violent reactions. In fact, the best documented shooting that happened in the follow-up
of Katrina was a shooting that involved police. So vigilantes, civilians, and also police officers
took it upon themselves sometimes to guard bridges as exits from the city -- people trying
to get out and find somewhere else where they could take some kind of shelter -- were kept from
doing so, and in one case on the Danziger Bridge, a group of five police officers shot at six
unarmed black men, killed two of them, one of them shot in the back, and wounded the other four;
later covered up the incident and eventually that led through a year's long legal process to prison
sentences for all of the officers involved. So perception versus reality was a pretty wide
disjoint during that time, and it was the thing that created tragedies more than it actually
documented tragedies. So eventually people are actually evacuated from here, and they are sent by
and large to Houston, Texas, to shelters in other cities; some of them never have the resources to
return or never have the inclination to return, and to this day New Orleans population
is smaller than what it was pre-Katrina. But after the fact, no matter what it was that
you'd heard, no matter what you'd experienced, no matter what you believed, the Superdome was a
symbol of some pretty awful stuff that happened in the in the wake of the storm -- and yet somehow
it becomes this proxy for the recovery story. And the recovery story was a surprise for a lot
of people, there were lots of people who predicted the city was never going to get on its feet again,
that we were going to be a desolate wasteland, and that you know, those holes on the roof
would be there forever. But as it happens, it took some work, it took an awful lot of work as
any recovery here did, but FEMA -- that disaster management organization -- eventually provided
100 million for the restoration of this. While simultaneously, homeowners could be frustrated
about what they were able to get from FEMA, this could be a frustrating sight to see.
But this got rebuilt, Tom Benson -- the owner of the Saints who's got a statue nearby -- was
eventually persuaded not to take the Saints away to another city, to keep them here to help people
bolster their spirits. And eventually in fall of 2006 -- almost a year or a little more than a year
after Katrina -- the first game was played here, and it was against the Saints classic rivals
the Atlanta Falcons. And actually as I speak, the Saints just played the Falcons yesterday
and had a similarly decisive victory as they did that day in 2006. And alongside just the
general kind of timeliness of that victory and the fact that the place -- 70,000 seats, all sold
out and filled up -- they also built a monument after the fact several years later to one of the
really dramatic moments from that game. What you see over there is the Saints' Steve Gleason on
the right intercepting a punt. It's a rare and dramatic moment, something that was one of the
many factors that turned the game in their favor, and the monument is titled 'Rebirth.' So small
moment of the Saints, a team that had always been underdogs in a way, making this big comeback
at right the time when the city needed it. Eventually in 2010, the Saints won the Super Bowl
and that became one more point in the argument that the Saints had either sort of symbolized
the city's recovery -- or maybe even caused the city's recovery by bringing back crowds, making
them hopeful, arguing that the city was viable and that it would be back on its feet, stimulating
restaurants in the neighborhood -- all that great stuff. And in the end it did ultimately get back
on its feet with a lot of help from Mercedes-Benz. Uh the Smoothie King Center as it's called
today also got its naming rights bought in the neighborhood of that time; used to be the
New Orleans Arena, Smoothie King is based in New Orleans, so not the uh, not the best name in
the world, but there you have it. These places have gotten back on their feet, not everything
that played a big part in the Katrina story has; so the next thing we're going to see is Charity
Hospital, a place that had a somewhat similar story to the Superdome in terms of the function
it served in the time of the storm and the days immediately following, but whose aftermath has
been a really different story, so that's up next. Here we are at Charity Hospital y'all, you can
tell at a glance this place is not in great shape, that was somewhat true before Katrina as well.
This is the sixth location of the second oldest hospital in the country. This is built in
1939, it's a project of the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, the
federal agency that did build projects all over the country -- and this was state of the art then,
but what was great in 1939 had not necessarily aged incredibly well into the 2000s. But it was
super active, this was one of the most active trauma centers in the country, lots of births.
It was a teaching hospital, and so you had lots of careers launched out of here associated with
the Louisiana State University -- LSU -- system, and so its influence on the city historically
and in the recent past was huge. Our mayor C. Ray Nagin at the time of Katrina was born here, so
definitely a place that many, many New Orleanians feel a real closeness with. Whether or not it
was the absolute top-line hospital in the world, it provided what was needed here, which was
accessibility to a vast swath of people. So Charity Hospital is a great example of people
who couldn't relocate when evacuation time came; you had an ER here, you had critical care,
you had people who could not be moved without severe risk to themselves, and so this
was one of the cases where with some preparation folks hunkered down into what we call sheltering
in place -- they stayed put for the storm, they rode out the night. The same problems happened
here that happened over at the Superdome though, you get flood water really early on and you get
power outages, only unlike there, you end up with where here -- generators were in the basement --
so generator power, too, was lost really fast, and the ER -- where a lot of the most critical
cases were -- was on the ground floor, which is great for access when you're trying
to get somebody in and cared for fast, but in the flood it meant everybody in the
ER space had to be brought upstairs by hand, and oftentimes had to be hand-respirated as
they were taken. Same went for a few days later when they started to evacuate the most
critical cases from the building, took days; ultimately, some of the hospital staff had to go
out and find news cameras and get in front of them to say here's what's happening, here's what we're
dealing with, and a chain of aid came together such that from a neighboring building they
were able to use a helipad to airlift some people out of here. And in one case a patient
even had to be operated on without anesthesia in motion as they were brought over for that
evacuation, so if you want to look for kind of indisputable heroes from the time of Katrina, the
Charity Hospital staff -- already pretty heroic folks to begin with -- really did some amazing
things during that time. Afterwards, once the place was emptied out, last hospital in the city
after all the private ones to be emptied out, you have a full cleanup of the space that's done
by a mixture of volunteers, military medical professionals, engineers, people who really know
what they're doing, and they do their best to get this place ready to serve again in a city that's
gonna need it. But after that clean up of the lower floors, LSU shutters the building, declares
it unfit for use, and doesn't let anybody inside. Subsequently they're in negotiations with FEMA
for quite a while trying to get some money to in theory put this place back online, but they
keep negotiating the number up and up and up until they get to a critical benchmark, which
is -- once FEMA agrees that the damage equates to half the cost of rebuilding -- that's when
they'll go over to paying for new construction, and what LSU really wanted was a new
hospital, one that was more state-of-the-art, one that was in perhaps a different location,
and one that possibly also didn't have to serve the same fairly expensive clientele who weren't
going to be able to pay full cost for a lot of stuff. So there was the leveling of 27 blocks
purchased through imminent domain nearby, a lot of homes that had been recently restored from the
storm, a lot of small businesses torn down to make space for what today is called University Medical
Center, and in the meantime this has sat empty. Ultimately there is uh, pretty recently
an agreement between them and a developer to completely redevelop this building in a
mixed-use way, such that there's going to be probably a combination of business, retail
residence, and maybe some of the indigent care, the mental health care that did not survive
the transition from here to University Medical Center. Those things might make it in, yet to be
seen, construction hasn't gotten underway yet, so that is still a good ways out, but if you
visit in the future and pass by this spot, who knows what it is you'll end up seeing -- news
there, before too long we hope y'all. If you're curious to learn more about Charity Hospital,
there's an incredible documentary called Big Charity that focuses on pre-Katrina, during
Katrina, and post -- kind of whole history of the thing, centered on what happened during the storm;
incredible source of information. We are going to make our way out to another of Charity's historic
sites, their cemetery out on the edge of town. Y'all we just left Charity Hospital and made
our way to the Charity Hospital Cemetery. Pretty good distance away from the actual
hospital, but in the part of town where the most cemeteries are clustered together. This
was the Charity Hospital Cemetery until 2008, going all the way back to 1848 when this first
opened up. You can imagine what, with Charity Hospital's crowd that it served, a lot of people
died in their care, either ultimately unidentified or whose families never came to claim them because
they didn't have the means to provide a burial, and so this was Potter's Field; this was a place
where people who had no other means of burial, but who died in the hospital's care could be
buried, albeit just about always unmarked. Today this has been turned into our Katrina Memorial,
and the 80 people who were ultimately never identified after Katrina, but who were casualties
of the storm, were buried here. For context, about that many unidentified people? Ultimately,
the US got through the Vietnam War without ever having an unidentified body, so the number here is
pretty staggering. Take a step inside, as you come in you'll see the logo that they've designed
for this, which is the shape of a hurricane with a fleur-de-lis -- New Orleans' own symbol on
top of it -- and the shape of a hurricane is also used in the monument itself, so it's clearer from
above, but you'll get a sense of it coming inside. You can see, too, with the plaques coming in -- so
part of the funding for this was provided by FEMA, but part of it also came from a
coalition of funeral home owners from around the country; they would have
been especially sensitive to the fact that people were left unburied
after a disaster like this. And you can see using our classic
above ground burial style, this kind of mausoleum approach that they've used. The old people buried here originally for
Charity Hospital Cemetery wouldn't have had their names marked, because this hospital didn't
have the resources to mark them; in this case it's because they aren't known, and this place
isn't really known to a lot of New Orleanians either. As much as we could use kind of a
collective grieving spot for this disaster, the moment when this opened -- which was
the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in late August of 2008 -- was of course
during hurricane season itself, and that was when we got Hurricane Gustav coming towards
Louisiana, and it was estimated -- partly through, you know the vagaries of meteorological science,
and partly through just justified fears and-and a bit of paranoia maybe -- to be the next Katrina,
to be this moment when we would have to see the limited improvements we'd be able to make
really tried for the first time since Katrina. And so, huge amount of to do about this incoming
storm, and a lot of New Orleanians evacuated, and they evacuated largely many of us go to
the nearest major city, which is Baton Rouge. A lot of us know people there, it's a lot of
space, you got hotel rooms, and in the end Gustav ended up skipping us almost completely
and hitting Baton Rouge instead, so people who evacuated there actually were worse off just by
chance than folks who stayed put in New Orleans. So that hurricane and all the news around it ended
up really overshadowing the opening of this place, and so if you come and visit it you'll likely
find it about as lonely as it is right now, as we're paying it a visit. Y'all we're driving
along West End Boulevard, this is a part of town there's not much chance you'd end up in visiting
here, but we're on our way out to a real canal and we're along right now the route of
a former canal. So you can see the big green space over on the side of us here with the
other lanes of the road on the other side of it, and this was the site of the New Basin Canal.
So over by the French Quarter there was the Old Basin Canal, and for a long time the Mississippi
-- I mean still today really -- the Mississippi is a hard stretch to navigate towards
the bottom. So for shipping purposes, the bottom of the Mississippi is unreliable, uh
it gets too shallow for boats to make it out; it's twisty and turny, you gotta
really know your way around. And so the Mississippi was all fine up until about
New Orleans, but then if you could get out to Lake Pontchartrain and out to the Gulf of Mexico that
way, that was the more reliable form of shipping. So canals were dug -- first the Old Basin Canal,
then the New Basin Canal -- to make that possible, and the Old Basin Canal was built by Creoles;
these are the people who lived in and built New Orleans, 18th-19th century, and then you have the
New Basin Canal that was built by Americans who bought Louisiana in 1803, and then gradually
kind of took over in part by making their own version of everything that Creoles already
had. So massive canal dug by Irish immigrants, and with this one you would have been able to
see the water everywhere. Mentioned earlier, water in New Orleans today is largely invisible,
and we'll see a canal of today that really shows you how that is the case nowadays. We have houses
all along here which were flooded during Katrina, and nowadays you don't see water lines anymore --
there used to be a water line on just about every single one of these houses where you could see
that it was a close to eye level, about head level that the water rose to -- and as you can see, very
few of these houses are built to accommodate that. Once in a while you get a house that's
built up above the level of the flood water, but because water is so invisible to us
today, it's not a thing that necessarily future homeowners think of when they commission a
house to be built. A little different now, you'll see houses that are being newly lifted up, but
this kind of uh early mid-20th century addition to the city, by then we had such confidence
in our engineering that we generally built for regular times and not for disastrous times.
Celtic cross out there, and the Celtic cross here is a memorial for the Irish folks who dug this
canal. We're standing on where it was filled in in the early and mid-20th century -- we lose this
-- but it was dug largely by Irish immigrants, many of whom died in the process and many of
whom are buried in this earth. So this is out in our suburbs, this is not really a part of
the city that you would see if you were doing a typical visit here. Where we're about to
see is a canal that still exists and one that had a big part to do with why the whole city
flooded, so we'll be at the 17th Street Canal momentarily. Just hopped out next to the 17th Street Canal
y'all. So this is the front door view for a bunch of people who live along this street. This
is an outfall canal, so what we just talked about was the New Basin Canal, which was a shipping
canal; outfall canals are for the purpose of emptying water out of the city. So on the other
side of this wall is water that has landed, usually in the form of rain, all over the
city, gone through a massive drainage and pump system -- the biggest one in the world --
to flow out through here into Lake Pontchartrain. Prior to 1965, you would not have seen the walls
here, you'd have a slope up to it. This earthen artificial levee would be here and then you'd be
able to see the water on the other side -- not from your house, but walk up there and it would be
visible -- now you can only see it if you go up on a bridge. So it's not easy to forget that this is
here, but it's easy not to think about the water element of it. But this is the biggest of our
outfall canals and there are billions of gallons of water passing by here every hour, so the
amount, the pressure of it is massive, and it's only divided from the water of Lake Pontchartrain
by a lock over along the way, and that lock was among the many things that failed when Hurricane
Katrina came along. So Katrina ends up giving us a huge storm surge into Lake Pontchartrain, which
sends water back into this canal, raises up the water level beyond what this is able to contain,
and water doesn't top over it -- it bursts through the bottom of the wall. So what you first would
have seen was a spray coming up from ground level, and then the wall itself collapsing and the
water coming cascading in -- all of that was unexpected fallout from the construction of these
things. These weren't here, like I said, prior to 1965 -- that was the year of Hurricane Betsy,
which was one of the major Katrina-like events of our relatively recent past. At the time of Betsy,
just those earthen levee canal or canal levies, and you ended up having federal legislation
that said we had to have federally built, Army Corps of Engineers designed and maintained walls
added to these, among many other small additions. And while not all of that legislation actually
ever got fully carried out, this piece was, and so those walls gave us not only distance from
the water, but this false feeling of security that the walls were going to do their job
fully. As it turned out, pretty slim work on the foundations of them -- was a cost-cutting
measure -- studies by the Army Corps of Engineers itself and also by the Times Picayune, a local
newspaper, had both predicted that in the event of really serious flood water or water coming
into the canals into the lake that you would have exactly that sort of situation happen, but nothing
had ever actually been done about it until after Katrina when water from this would have made it
all the way to the Superdome, Charity Hospital, the other sites that we've seen. So we'll see
another similar situation to this later on, but in terms of the volume of floodwater that came
into the city, the 17th Street Canal is the main event. The London Avenue Canal nearby did some of
it too, but that's why we have our commemorative plaque here that speaks to the enormity of this
particular one of the -- as it mentions -- 50 ruptures, and also why this, of all spots for
something that commemorates the entire disaster. We've gone a little bit further
out past the canal that we just saw to Lake Pontchartrain and the particular bit we've
got here -- so Lake Pontchartrain is huge -- it's a massive estuary, meaning it is lake-like,
but it opens out into the Gulf of Mexico, so it is fresh on one side, salty on the other. So
definitely not a place to swim one way or another, but if you swam on this side you might see
alligators, and if you swim on the other side you might see sharks. This part was where the New
Basin Canal used to open up. There's a tiny bit of canal on the other side of the lighthouse here,
and the lighthouse that you see now -- this is built 2012 -- but there's been one standing here
since 1839 when the New Basin Canal was finished, and the idea was to light the way into the
canal for ships that were coming from the gulf and across the lake. Uh this today is a museum
of the purposes that this thing has served, and also of some of the ecology and the nature
of Lake Pontchartrain. Uh hard to picture given you know how light-hearted everything around
us is right now, but when Katrina came in, a 10 to 14 foot wave came in from this, knocked
that whole lighthouse and everything else around it over. Everything we see today
has been built since Katrina and then gradually been rebuilt since, including the
lighthouse using some pieces of the old one, so you're looking at a place that is completely
rebuilt. We're actually outside of the city's flood protections right now, and all of the land
we're on is artificial, so this was all built out onto the former lake bed in order to provide space
for some of the kind of tourist attractions that are out here, although this is more of
a hangout area for locals than anything. We didn't empty the water out of the city after
Hurricane Katrina until October 11th of 2005, when the storm was in late August; and when that did
happen, it was all emptied out via the pump system into Lake Pontchartrain, and so Lake Pontchartrain
had its whole own separate disaster in terms of having to absorb all the gunk that was in the
streets and to recover from it in natural and ecological terms. We've kind of just gotten there
in the last few years to where this is a graceful place for fish and birds and so on to live
again, but it is the part of New Orleans where before Hurricane Katrina and today, you can find
seagulls and fishermen and a lot of the things that might -- maybe one might associate more with
the gulf coast than with New Orleans normally. The lakefront stretches quite a ways, we are towards
the Western end of the city's portion of it right now, and just way off in the distance you can see
the bridge that crosses it over what we call the North Shore. This is one of the longest bridges
in the world. Lake Pontchartrain is enormous, and down much further East of us where we're going
to be going next is where the lake meets Bayou St. John, which is another natural body of water,
and it served -- for a long time, even before New Orleans was built -- the purpose that the shipping
canals like the New Basin Canal eventually came to serve. Y'all as you can see from the things
we've seen so far, living with water is just a daily reality all through the history of
South Louisiana, and our next stop is going to be Bayou St. John, which will help us see both
how early Europeans in the area dealt with it, and really how the ways they dealt with it
were building on what Native Americans did here long before. Y'all were right on the edge of
Bayou St. John. So the bayou over here is a natural body of water with a little bit of human
help. So a bayou is a river-shaped body of water, but one that sits still, and this one is the
result of a long-ago crevasse in the Mississippi River -- meaning the Mississippi broke its
banks, a long stream of water made its way out, and it built up its own kind of natural levees
along the side as it went, and this has remained a kind of catch basin for storm water ever since
then. So while I wouldn't go swimming or anything here, the Mid-city neighborhood that we're in
derives a lot of beauty from Bayou St. John and it's one of the most historic neighborhoods
in the city. So we have for example one of the oldest houses in the city which is known as the
Old Spanish Custom House -- maybe a custom house, maybe not; maybe Spanish, maybe not -- but this
is what we'd call French Colonial architecture, it's buildings that were constructed originally
to be sort of above ground basements on the bottom with residences above, and everything was around
the idea of air circulation and around the idea of minimizing the experience of heat, and of
course of accommodating floods so that if the city flooded, water would pass through
the area of the house that you didn't live in and do some harm -- but minimal harm -- and
that's actually kind of in the mindset of the Native Americans of the region. So you had
Native Americans, largely the Choctaws living in this vicinity, and they stuck to high ground
for the most of their residential time, but they also had houses that could be disassembled and
rebuilt elsewhere. So they responded to floods rather than trying to build around avoiding them
completely, and so you get two very different kind of philosophies about interacting with
nature; either on the one hand dealing with it as it comes and building everything to be
temporary, or on the other hand building things permanently and trying to change the environment
to give it what you want out of it. Mentioned the wall of water that came in here y'all in the uh
immediate lead up to Hurricane Katrina arriving, so that's what's called storm surge, and storm
surge is one of the parts of a hurricane that is massively hazardous, but it's not measured. So
I mean that in terms of when a storm is coming it tends to only get described in terms of wind
speed, those categories that were mentioned earlier, so the storm surge is a thing that
those of us who live here are very aware of, but it's not something where it's the
main way that a storm is being described, even though it is about as predictable as wind
speed based on the path that it's taking. So with the particular path that Katrina took, it
went a little East of New Orleans, which usually would be good news because the Eastern side of
a storm is the strongest wind-wise, and so when we get hit by the western side that means wind
damage is going to be a little bit less, but it so happens that the mouth of Lake Pontchartrain
out into the gulf is a little bit East of us and so the storm surge from the gulf is driven into
the lake, that in turn comes through the lake and that in turn goes into these canals which end
up bursting their walls because of that influx of water. So the bodies of water with natural levees
like the Mississippi never actually end up over topping -- even though it did flow backwards
for a little while and the level certainly would have risen, it never actually overflows
-- so really the vast majority of the damage, whether it was directly from Lake Pontchartrain
or from one of the canals that links into it, are coming from this side from things where we're
relying more on man-made controls than on natural controls. So without these canals ever built
here in the first place and without the level of contact between the residential city and
Lake Pontchartrain, a storm that was as strong as Hurricane Katrina wouldn't have the power to
do nearly the degree of damage, so when we say it's a disaster that was part natural/part
manmade, that's what we're talking about: the amount of interference that we've done in the
first place and the limited quality of maintenance that we've done on those things that we've made,
that's what brings about a lot of the damage. All right y'all, more to see, but we're gonna do
it next time, we'll call this it for part one. Soon we're gonna drop a part two, and that's
gonna mainly focus on the upper and lower Ninth Wards. If you wanna know when that comes
out, hit subscribe, you'll be one of the first to know. And in the meantime like and comment,
we'd love to have a conversation with you down in the comments below. And you'll be able to
see the Venmo and Paypal details if you'd like to throw us a tip for what you saw today. Thank
you so much for watching and we'll see you soon!
