This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
It has been 20 years since New Orleans’ faulty levee system failed during Hurricane Katrina, causing a flood that claimed almost 1,400 lives and inflicted more than $150 billion in economic damage. The catastrophe was so bad that some doubted the city could continue to exist at all — the US House speaker at the time declared that rebuilding New Orleans “doesn’t make sense” and that much of it “could be bulldozed.”
Rather than just patch up the damage, which would have left...
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