It will be a historic event, Piet Dircke expects, that Hurricane Ida will pass over New Orleans. Not because Ida will surpass hurricane Katrina in damage and casualties, but precisely because that will not happen: “I dare to put my hand in the fire,” says the director of water management of the Dutch engineering company Arcadis. “With Katrina, the story was how New Orleans had failed, but the success story after that must also be told.”
Dirke sounds confident. As of 2005, Arcadis has developed, conceived and prepared for 200 million dollars worth of plans and supervised the construction of a completely new protection system, with dikes, concrete retaining walls and three large storm surge barriers around the city. It is called the Hurricane & Storm Damage Risk Reduction System (HSDRRS).
In total, the New Orleans Delta Works cost $14.5 billion. Dircke himself has been to New Orleans “between forty and fifty times” as part of the work. “Ida is the first real test case of whether the systems hold up.”
Limburg conditions
It is not the first hurricane since Katrina devastated large parts of the city in 2005, killing 1,800. In 2012, Isaac passed over, but that was a hurricane of the lowest category. Katrina was a Category 5 hurricane, Ida was classified Category 4. Moreover, at the time of Isaac, the entire protection system was not yet complete.
Now that is the case, although you can never really say that it is finished when it comes to water management, says Dircke: “In the Netherlands we started protecting ourselves against the water around the year 1200 and we still see floods there. , as recently in Limburg.”
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