Hurricane is a frequent visitor to New Orleans, LA, and flood is not a new thing either. In fact, New Orleans has been grossly flooded at least three times, and levee leakage is a constant danger (see Scientific American, Aug 31, 2001). Numerous end-of-the-world predictions are useless if there is no money. And it also happens that in the US, everything is very costly. Repairing curb in my neighborhood ended up costing more than one million dollars a mile. For a major fixing of the levee maze in New Orleans, tens of billions are barely enough to start.