17th Street Canal

The 17th Street Canal marked the border between two parishes and two fates. When the floodwall on the Orleans side split open at 6:30 am on August 29, 2005 — water five feet below the design limit, a 450-foot breach — Jefferson Parish stayed dry while Lakeview drowned. Thirty-one people were recovered from the flooding that poured through. The canal had been dug in 1858 to drain swampland. A. Baldwin Wood's early-20th-century pumps still run at Station 6, which before Katrina moved 9,200 cubic feet per second into Lake Pontchartrain, more than the Orleans and London Avenue canals combined. New Orleans is a city built against water. The Mississippi deposited the land around 2200 BCE; French settlers chose a natural levee in 1718 because it was relatively high ground. Everything since has been engineered refusal. After Hurricane Betsy, levees were raised. After Hurricane Georges in 1998 pushed lake water within inches of topping the floodwall, the canal was upgraded and considered in good shape by 2005. Sonar after Katrina found the steel sheet pilings 7 feet shorter than specifications. The Corps had misinterpreted a 1980s load test and driven pilings to 17 feet instead of the necessary 31 to 46. In 2008, a federal court placed responsibility on the Corps; the Flood Control Act of 1928 shields it from liability. Post-Katrina repairs included storm-surge gates, a permanent pump station, and reinforced walls. In 2010, a grassroots group installed a plaque at the breach site noting 50 ruptures in the federal flood protection system that day. The canal still forms the Jefferson-Orleans line — the place where two parishes survived the same storm differently.