Levee

Levees.org is devoted to educating America on the facts associated with the 2005 catastrophic flooding of the New Orleans region. The work of Levees.org is critical because after the levees failed, over 100,000 families were displaced from their support base and could not collectively confront the myths and misinformation that dominated the media a... fter the flooding. The catastrophic flooding of metro New Orleans was due to the failure of the levees and floodwalls which should have performed, and also to the manmade destruction of protective forests and wetlands in south Louisiana which had historically performed as storm surge buffers. Primary responsibility for the failure of the levees and floodwalls lies with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers according to the US District Court of Eastern Louisiana and according to the federally authorized Hurricane Protection Decision Chronology, both released in 2008. Responsibility for the destruction of south Louisiana's wetlands is a shared one. Protective cypress groves and wetlands were ravaged in the past 50 years when canals were dredged for shipping and for oil and gas exploration. Meanwhile, the leveeing and weiring of the Mississippi River over the past 150 years by the U.S. government to benefit navigation has starved south Louisiana's wetlands of nourishing silt leading to their progressive loss. And so in October 2005, with a mission of education, Levees.org was founded by Sandy Rosenthal and her son Stanford, then 48 and 15 while exiled in Lafayette, Louisiana. With 55% of the American people living in counties protected by levees, it's important that Americans living outside the New Orleans region understand what really happened in south Louisiana during Katrina.Read More