Protect New Orleans, Don't Simply Rebuild It

Summary

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NEW ORLEANS -- Before I try my very best to make you care about levees, floodwalls, wetlands and the like, first let's deal with a more engaging question: Why rebuild New Orleans at all?

After all they've been through, New Orleanians tend to sputter and fume when asked whether their city hasn't somehow forfeited its right to exist. I don't blame them one bit -- they don't owe anyone an answer. But the question is out there, and ignoring it doesn't make it go away: Why should taxpayers spend billions to reconstruct and safeguard a city that lies below sea level, wedged between the continent's greatest river and a vast "lake" that's really an estuarine arm of the nearby Gulf of Mexico? Inevitably, skeptics point out, another Katrina or Wilma will come along and destroy New Orleans again.

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Protect New Orleans, Don't Simply Rebuild It

Things have changed, this argument goes. It's not 1815, so we no longer need a garrison at the mouth of the Mississippi to guard against the British fleet. Before the flood, New Orleans was po...

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