Since 2005, making sure New Orleans and America
get the safe levees we deserve
Why the levees broke
We're educating America on why the levees broke in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina
A Campaign for Engineering Disaster Education
We believe engineering schools should require a course on engineering disasters for all students.
August 2025 marks the twenty-year anniversary of the catastrophic levee failures during Hurricane Katrina. We are asking school leaders to pledge to implement a course requirement by then.
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Ensuring safe levees for all
Levees.org was established in November of 2005 and has the commitment of experts and communities locally and nationally.
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Additional Resources
Learn more about the 2005 New Orleans levee failures and gain the tools to advocate for your community.
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News & Articles
Myth busters
MYTH: New Orleans is below sea level.
TRUTH: Half of New Orleans is at or well above sea level.
Source: Tulane School of ArchitectureMYTH: The vast majority of homeowner losses in New Orleans were uninsured.
TRUTH: Pre-Katrina, more New Orleans homeowners had flood insurance per capita than the rest of the nation according to data obtained by Donald Powell with the Bush administration.
Source: New Orleans Times-PicayuneMYTH: The Orleans Levee Board spent only a few hours annually inspecting the levees before going to lunch.
TRUTH: The Army Corps of Engineers spent only a few hours annually inspecting the levee districts’ maintenance before going to lunch.
Source: Water Policy, Vol 17, Issue 4 Monday Morning QuarterbackingMYTH: The Orleans Levee Board forced the Army Corps of Engineers to build the inadequate levee system that failed during Hurricane Katrina.
TRUTH: As reported in the New York Times, experts J. David Rogers and Raymond Seed retracted this erroneous conclusion in their 2006 levee investigation. The levees failed mainly due to a mistake the Army Corps made in the 1980s when interpreting the results of their levee load test study.
Source: Water Policy, Vol 17, Issue 4; AbstractMYTH: New Orleans has a peculiar geography in that it relies heavily on levees for protection.
TRUTH: Sixty-two percent of the U.S. population lives in counties protected by levees. Click on map below to enlarge.
Source: FEMA.MYTH: As Katrina advanced, the residents of New Orleans were warned that the levees could breach.
TRUTH: Even the most desperate appeals to residents from local, state or federal officials did not warn that the levees could breach and fail. The first suggestion that levees could fail occurred at 1:47 a.m. in a memo from the Homeland Security Operations Center to the White House Situation Room, six hours after the evacuation was already completed.
Source: McQuaid and Schleifstein, Path of Destruction (Little Brown and Co, 2006), 179.