By State › Louisiana

Louisiana: Overview

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Everything in the main manual and the skill guides applies in Louisiana exactly as written. What’s different here is the specific hazard profile and the state, local, and legal context around it. This page is the starting point; the other three pages under Louisiana go deeper on laws, local resources, and the data behind the risks named here.

Hurricane Katrina: an engineering failure as much as a storm

Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, and while the storm itself was severe, most of New Orleans’s catastrophic flooding came from a different cause: levees and floodwalls failed in more than 50 locations around the city, built on weak soils with pilings driven too shallow, several failing below their own design height. The flooding submerged 80% of New Orleans and 95% of neighboring St. Bernard Parish. More than 1,390 people died, total damage reached roughly $125 billion, and roughly 400,000 residents never returned to the city permanently. See the Risks page for the full data.

Coastal land loss: a standing crisis, not a single event

Louisiana’s other defining risk isn’t a storm at all, it’s the ongoing loss of the coastline itself. The state holds more than 45% of the intertidal wetlands in the lower 48 states, yet accounts for more than 90% of the nation’s total coastal wetland loss. Between 1932 and 2000 alone, an estimated 1.2 million acres of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands disappeared, and another 448,000 acres are projected to be lost by 2050. This is a genuinely different kind of risk from a hurricane, permanent, cumulative, and directly connected to how much storm surge protection the coastline can still provide.

What this means for how you use the rest of this manual

The manual’s Tier structure and the skill guides apply without modification. What’s different in Louisiana: hurricane evacuation planning needs to account for the reality that levee and floodwall protection, even where it exists, isn’t guaranteed to hold, and coastal and near-coastal households should understand that the wetlands that once buffered storm surge are disappearing, meaning the same storm today can push further inland than an equivalent storm decades ago.

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