Repairs Don't Allay Fears of Next Storm

Even at the current budget, which is low, the $7 billion expenditure amounts to more than $5,800 per person in the protected area, even when using the higher pre-Katrina population.

Moreover, the request for more expensive flood protection projects would be one of several pleas for financial help from Louisiana. The state wants the federal government to plug a $2.9 billion gap in its homeowner rebuilding program, called the Road Home, and it has developed a coastal restoration and hurricane protection plan estimated to cost more than $50 billion, with the federal government asked to put in about two-thirds of the money.

Tensions between officials here and the federal government, already raw, are expected to worsen as those requests are pressed forward.

At his State of the City speech here this week, Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) lashed out again at Washington for failing to fulfill its promises after the storm.

"It's not our fault that the levees breached that the federal government built," he said during the fiery conclusion to his speech on Wednesday night. "And don't talk to me about we're not smart to be living under sea level. I don't want to hear it! Don't talk to me about we need to be smaller. . . . We want the whole city fixed."

In response to questions about better protection for the city, Powell said the administration is "committed" to the 100-year-flood protection, and says he will support spending more money to get to that level.

"In my view, you should be able to trust the United States," he said in a recent conversation, standing atop one of the city's Mississippi River levees. "People thought they were protected, and the levees breached. We need to bridge that trust gap. That's what these levees are about."

But he turned aside questions about Category 5 protection, noting that extensive new studies set to be released this summer will inform residents how likely they are to be flooded when the new 100-year project is finished.

"Then they can make their decisions," he said.

For now, people such as Brown and his few neighbors are focused on making it through another season, even as the Army Corps of Engineers tries to find ways to build the 100-year protection over the next four years.

Col. Jeff Bedey, who is leading the Army Corps work in the city, identified the flood protections along the Industrial Canal -- the one that flanks the Lower Ninth Ward to the west -- as the system's "Achilles' heel." In a major hurricane, storm surge from the Gulf of Mexico presses into Lake Borgne and then into the canals, possibly overtopping them.

"There are 40,000 linear feet of flood walls and levees along the canal that are below 15 feet high," he notes. "That's too low."

He is hopeful that by 2011 a barrier can be erected on the city's eastern flank that would block that surge from ever reaching into the city's canals.

In the meantime, Brown has adopted a fatalistic pose.

"I'm leaving it in the hands of the man -- the man upstairs," he said during a break in restoring his home. "Life goes on."