Chris Mooney says “Remem­ber Kat­ri­na”:

[A]ssuming that, indeed, New Orleans has been spared the worst–as now seems plausible–we can’t rest easy. Instead, it will be time for the real work to begin. We must call, imme­di­ate­ly, for a mas­sive engi­neer­ing project, per­haps almost TVA-size in its scale, to bring the city’s hur­ri­cane pro­tec­tions up to Cat­e­go­ry 5 lev­els. There will be no excuse to delay even a sin­gle day.….

The Big Easy dodged a bul­let, but not by much. 

One fac­tor that’s easy to over­look as a rea­son why storms are more dan­ger­ous to New Orleans than they might once have been is loss of wet­lands. Where waves once would have bro­ken on the wet­lands between the Gulf and New Orleans, now there’s a lot of open water or land that peo­ple built on. Wet­lands pro­vide a buffer against the waves and against the wind, and even give the hur­ri­cane a chance to weak­en before it hits town.

Any com­pre­hen­sive plan for hur­ri­cane proof­ing the Louisiana coast has to involve restor­ing coastal wet­lands and pre­serv­ing exist­ing wet­land. Dikes and lev­ees are impor­tant too, but wet­lands are nat­ur­al buffers, they serve valu­able pur­pos­es for local pop­u­la­tions, includ­ing fil­ter­ing out water pol­lu­tion and attract­ing wildlife. I know lots of peo­ple who’ve gone on trips out­side of New Orleans in order to see the birds and beasts in the swamps, so that’s tourist mon­ey out­side of Bour­bon Street.

Of course, Kat­ri­na is still a threat and the first step is to pro­tect the rest of the peo­ple in its path, rebuild what was dam­aged, and bury the dead. Then we have to make sure no one else has to be unprotected.