06:48 PM CDT on Monday, October 10, 2005

Dave McNamara / WWL-TV

Construction crews were barged to the hurricane protection levee along the Mississippi River gulf outlet. It’s the levee that was supposed to shield St. Bernard Parish from a hurricane as strong as a category-3 storm like Betsy. The levee could not handle a category-4 Katrina.

WWL-TV

A boat sits amid rubble in St. Bernard. The levees there failed, wiping out almost every home in the parish.

“It looks to me that we had a fairly substantial storm surge,” said Bob Turner, who manages the Lake Borgne levee district. “(It was) probably in the area of 20 to 25 feet which is nearly twice what the levee is designed for."

Turner said 80 percent of his main hurricane protection levee is gone. A six-mile stretch of earthen levee, topped with sheet piling, provided a barrier that was 17-and-a-half feet high.

Now, the levee is shredded. Katrina's storm surge tore around flood gates and Bayou Bienvenue, and at Bayou Dupre, barges are shoved over the top of the levee.

Closer to homes in Chalmette, a second line of protection, a 15 foot high drainage levee, barely slowed the hurricane's massive storm surge. A 75-foot long shrimp boat sailed over the levee untouched and smashed into a residential neighborhood.

The roofs on the homes on Gallo Street in Chalmette are thatched with grass that washed in from the marsh. It’s the result of what the parish president estimates was a 30-foot storm surge that overwhelmed all of the levees in St. Bernard.

"The force of that water and the wind that drove that water, I don't know if there was a levee that could have saved us from that," said Parish President Junior Rodriguez.

He blames the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a shipping channel build by the Corps of Engineers in the 1960's, for funnelng Katrina's storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico to his parish.

"There is not a house that you can spend the night in, in this parish,” said Rodriguez disgustedly. “Not a house.

Then Rodriguez corrected himself. “I take that back. I think there's one. That's it. There's nothing standing."

The levee manager in is not too hopeful about the future. He says St. Bernard’s rebuilt levee system will be better than it was before Katrina for the next few years.

Then, Bob Turner predicts that the soft marshy soil that supports the levees will subside again, leaving a less than perfect barrier - a levee that even at full strength, will be no match for any hurricane like Katrina.