This story was published in partnership with Capital B.
Willie Calhoun knows how to live with water. His home, cradled between the Mississippi River and a patchwork of canals, is split by the surging, ever-present current.
But it wasn’t always that way in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. Before the city’s largest aqueduct, known as the Industrial Canal, was built, the stretch of land between the river and Lake Pontchartrain was a place meant for water, fish, and wading birds rather than for people.
The ground was soft and unstable, mostly swamp, dense cypress trees, and tangled undergrowth laced with meandering bayous. But in 1918, dredges cut through the wetlands, carving a straight channel that drained and filled the low ground, creating the Lower Ninth Ward and the impression that the land was ready for houses—and factories and ship traffic.
It then became home to Black families, who affectionally nicknamed the neighborhood the “Lower Ninth” or, simply, “the Nine.” They were drawn by promises of stability, only to inherit the vulnerabilities engineered into the landscape.
He still remembers a day, sitting at the dinner table when he was about 10. His longshoreman father, tired after a day on the barge, declared a warning almost as fact: “If a storm ever come up, it is gonna drown the Ninth Ward.”
The storms did come. “He was right,” Calhoun said.
“Lower Nine was flooded. It drowned.”
Along Lake Pontchartrain, the river, and the navigation canals, levees and concrete floodwalls trace the edges like banks shaping the current. When storms press in, surge barriers and gates swing shut to calm the incoming rush, while pumps gather the rainfall and send it flowing back out.
It isn’t a single wall, but a braided system to protect the city below sea level. Roughly 350 miles of clay and concrete along the lake and river must all work in concert to keep the neighborhoods dry.
In 1965, when Calhoun was 15, the levees along the Industrial Canal failed when Hurricane Betsy struck New Orleans. Dozens of his neighbors trapped in their attics drowned as floodwaters rose to their rooftops.
Four decades later in 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck even harder. The Industrial Canal’s levees crumbled again. Water roared through the streets with enough force to rip houses from their foundations. Cars flipped, tricycles vanished beneath sludge, and bodies remained unrecovered for weeks.
Of the 1,300 people who died in Katrina, Calhoun lost two neighbors and one of his oldest friends.
Today, the sense of loss is palpable. On his block, just four homes remain.
Calhoun, who is now the pastor of Fairview Mission Baptist Church, retired early from the federal government to rebuild a home for his mother in 2008, plunging into debt for the first time in his life. At 75, he is still paying for the honor to return.
Each flood and manmade catastrophe has demanded more than just rebuilding homes, Calhoun said. On some evenings, he stands in the neighborhood at the edge of the canal, sunlight gleaming off the concrete floodwalls rebuilt after Katrina. The shadows stretch across deserted fields and the shuttered Martin Luther King Jr. High School. The stillness feels uneasy: After all the storms he’s outlasted since his father first warned him of these waters, another threat is rising.
It is here where the US government is moving to restart a $4.7 billion canal reconstruction effort. This winter, on the heels of the 20th anniversary of Katrina and 68 years after the project was first approved by Congress in 1956, the US Army Corps of Engineers is expected to decide whether to seek funding for a plan to relocate the canal’s lock system, which transfers boats from the canal to the river and vice versa, and subsequently rebuild a portion of the canal’s flood protection system.
It would leave the city’s weakest flood defenses exposed for more than a decade and allow the Mississippi River—and its storm surges—to flow about a quarter of a mile deeper into the neighborhood. Supporters see it as a long‑delayed fix to a chokepoint vital to Gulf commerce; residents like Calhoun see years of disruption with uncertain protection and a fresh test of what “progress” means for Black families.
For decades, the construction had not moved forward due to sustained community opposition, environmental lawsuits, and shifting economic justification. (Over the last decade, the estimated cost has ballooned by $3.5 billion.)
But today, the Corps now finds itself in a more advantageous position. Lax environmental regulations, a steadily declining population, and the shifting priorities of federal policy have created fewer obstacles than ever before.
The decision will determine the neighborhood’s fate and signal the nation’s position on climate adaptation, equity, safety, and willingness to work with water instead of against it. If construction proceeds, the anticipated timeline would bring years of disruption, with uncertain guarantees. Benefits like job creation may come, but so might increased displacement and ecological harm.
Since Katrina, the rebuilding of his community has “been about how they can make a nickel or a dime off us,” Calhoun said. “And when you go back and you start looking at the history, you start looking at what’s really happening right now in all these 20 years, how is it that they have not produced more for the people here?”
The Choice at Water’s Edge
Across the Nine, weeds push through cracked sidewalks, power poles lean, and the hum of life is absent. The nearest full-service grocery store is miles away; small corner shops offer mostly canned goods and soda. Work is scarce. The neighborhood has less than half the number of working people as it did pre-Katrina, the starkest decline in the city. Unemployment is more than double the city’s rate, and most households earn less than half the national average.
Many blocks feel paused in time, as though the rush to rebuild never reached here.
Yet even as blocks stayed empty and storefronts went dark, the region poured roughly $14.5 billion into a fortified rim of levees, gates, and pumps meant to keep surge from ever reaching the Industrial Canal and the Lower Nine again. The Army Corps has been in charge of projects that have strengthened levees, floodwalls, and seagates and built the world’s largest pump station and storm surge barriers.
But that system now faces a cut in federal funding and will no longer receive regular monitoring, leaving the city more vulnerable to unnoticed weaknesses and potential disaster.
Already, parts of the new flood system are sinking by as much as 2 inches per year. Standing on the floodwall system in August, Calhoun could fit his finger through cracks in the slowly separating wall. The new project could worsen that decline. When levees settle unevenly, they crack, which weakens the city’s barrier against the fastest-rising sea levels in the United States.
The Corps knows this. “In New Orleans, you’re kind of building on pudding,” Ricky Boyett, a spokesperson for the Corps, said earlier this year. “If you build anything on that ground, it’s going to sink.”
The Environmental Protection Agency knows it too.
Emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show that under the Biden administration, the regional office of the EPA privately voiced concerns about the project’s impact. Officials’ worries focused on the project’s potential to worsen flooding and pollution in a community already facing substantial environmental and health burdens. The emails also showed, at times, a hostile relationship with Corps staffers.
But the Port of New Orleans and the Industrial Canal form a vital gateway between America’s heartland and the world, channeling over $100 billion in economic impact and generating 1 in 5 jobs in Louisiana. In 2023, 81 million tons of grain, fossil fuels, and manufactured goods moved through the waterway, the fifth-largest amount for an American seaport.
To supporters of the project, the canal’s upgrade represents a lifeline for commerce: Every day, massive barges must wait hours—sometimes all day—to squeeze through the century-old lock that connects the canal to the river. The Corps and shipping companies argue that modernizing the waterway will finally break this bottleneck. They point to the stakes in simple terms: Without these improvements, a single stalled barge or shipment can delay millions of dollars in exports, slow deliveries to factories across the Midwest, and threaten the efficiency that keeps New Orleans at the heart of America’s trade with the world.
The port, having lost 15 percent of its volume to other Gulf ports in Texas, Alabama, and Mississippi since Katrina, has spent nearly a million dollars lobbying the Army Corps since 2020 for canal and harbor upgrades in hopes of maintaining its viability.
However, existentially, the project signals something even bigger, explained Rollin Black, a researcher and advocate focused on coastal restoration around New Orleans. In his view, the threats extend beyond the levees themselves.
For a century, the Gulf Coast has, on average, lost 1 yard of wetlands every single minute. And instead of bolstering coastal restoration or adapting to rising climate pressures, he warned, authorities are intensifying the city’s vulnerability by disrupting the very flows of water and sediment that sustain Louisiana’s wetlands against storms.
Recent environmental policy changes have weakened the safeguards that put this project on the Biden administration’s radar last year. Updates to the National Environmental Policy Act have cut public input and environmental justice reviews. The new EPA regional head who covers Louisiana, Scott Mason, was the main author of Project 2025’s EPA plan, which called for speeding up federal funding for water infrastructure by pushing for faster permitting and less environmental review for public works projects.
In response to several questions, Mason’s EPA office said it is working “closely with [the Army Corps] to ensure nearby residents of this project have their concerns addressed.”
But to Black, there is no addressing or mitigating the impact of this project.
“You can come back from water, if you respect it,” he said, but “I think if the canal project were to happen, it’d be a worse hit than Katrina.
“I don’t think they could come back from this project.”
This is in no small part due to the fact that every federal promise since Katrina—from reopened schools to genuine economic revival—has faded, he said.
It is the childhood fear of a forever-underwater Lower Ninth Ward that has kept Calhoun and his family against the project. When the project was first announced and floated throughout the 1960s, his parents were vehemently opposed.
“We understood then that the ground was sinking, that more and more of the waters were coming inland,” he said.
Calhoun argues the process is sidestepping Black elders. At a July public comment meeting, every local resident who spoke opposed the project, but only 15 percent were Black. Despite the community still being majority Black, the number of Black residents in the area is 67 percent less than it was in 2000.
The number of white residents has grown by 920 percent.
“They don’t understand the stakes,” Calhoun said.
While white transplants, drawn by cheap property and the neighborhood’s cultural cachet, now lead much of the opposition to the canal project, those voices, longtime residents said, can overshadow their own.
The Corps’ justification for the project relies partly on the neighborhood’s population change since the last flood, claiming the construction will have a lower human impact. Today, the area’s population is 7,500, down from 19,500 in 2000. It’s a circular logic, residents say: Destroy a community through incompetence, then use that destruction to justify further damage.
In response to questions, the Army Corps said it had developed two programs to mitigate risk, but that the lock expansion was “the least environmentally damaging practicable alternative under federal law.”
The federal government maintains that, though economic gains from the project may be debated, action is inescapable because the century-old lock is so deteriorated that it could fail unexpectedly. If it did, it could unleash floodwaters with catastrophic consequences for the community, regardless of whether the canal is upgraded or not. From their vantage along the river, officials argue that waiting is itself a gamble.
For residents like Calhoun, the compounding situation—the neglect, displacement, and erasure—raises questions about if the pre-Katrina community will ever have a say in its own destiny again.
“It’s about more than water,” he said. “We’re still Hurricane Betsy survivors. Still Katrina survivors. But who’s going to survive the next storm?”
Crosscurrents in the Ninth Ward
As more muggy summer days surrender to dusk in the Lower Ninth Ward, the line between past and future blurs along the battered canal. Everyone in the neighborhood—old timers and newcomers—now stand at a crossroads shaped by water, memory, and power.
Across the neighborhood, there has been murmurs about what benefits the project could bring. Congress mandates allocating roughly 10 percent of the project’s cost, nearly $480 million in this case, for community-based projects. Proposed ideas from the Corps of Engineers include new green spaces, job training, support for youth and seniors, and historical markers recognizing Black community heritage.
Some arguments in support of the project rest on how federal infrastructure actually gets made. The Corps develops alternatives and mitigation packages through congressionally authorized studies and feasibility reviews, with public meetings and comment periods giving residents a way in. But the options are ultimately winnowed by cost‑benefit math, engineering risk, environmental review, and the politics of local sponsors and Congress. History here is instructive: pre‑Katrina canal decisions showed how neighborhood preferences could be sidelined when cheaper, faster designs won the day.
Opponents can delay a federal project through organizing, lawsuits, and relentless scrutiny, yet the decisive votes sit in Washington. And though neighborhood pushback has managed to postpone the canal project about six times since the 1960s, there’s a persistent fear that their objections will eventually be swept aside.
It is why many longtime residents, especially older Black homeowners directly affected by these decisions, have grown apathetic after decades of being ignored.
“Either you’re going to allow the project to happen and make it work for you, or you’re going to stand on the side and be frustrated, and it still happens,” said Robert Green, one of the few remaining homeowners on his street just two blocks from the canal. Katrina killed his mother and his 3-year-old granddaughter Shanai “Nai Nai” Green.
It is hard to get activated around the project, Green said, because he doesn’t have relationships with the people he sees leading the movement. Before Katrina, he knew all of his neighbors. Today, he does not.
Corps officials admit the greatest benefits of the canal expansion will go to navigation and shipping, not Lower Ninth residents, who will face years of upheaval. For many, it’s a familiar story: Black neighborhoods absorbing the health and environmental costs of Louisiana’s industrial corridor, reinforcing the region’s “sacrifice zone” status, even as calls rise to move away from fossil fuels.
“Twenty years after Katrina, we just want the Corps to focus on us for once,” said Chris Williams, a 46-year-old resident who attended the last public hearing.
Currently, half the canal’s cargo supports fossil fuel production, while an additional 38 percent serves other pollution-heavy industries. The powerful Gulf Intracoastal Canal Association, which backs the project, did not respond to requests for comment. The Port of New Orleans deferred all comments to the Army Corps.
No matter the outcome, grain, oil, gas, and coal will still flow through New Orleans tomorrow. The project, advocates argue, highlights the tension between economic promises and environmental reality. As global markets shift toward cleaner energy, in theory, these materials will go extinct soon.
Manufacturing and energy jobs anchor Louisiana’s economy, but since 2020, their stagnation has contributed to the state and New Orleans experiencing the steepest population loss in the country, said Allison Plyer, a demographer in New Orleans. Compared to 2004, the Lower Nine has 60 percent fewer industrial workers living in the neighborhood today. She urged greater scrutiny of whether new industrial projects truly reach locals. (The canal expansion would generate several hundred temporary positions.)
Andre Perry, director of the Center for Community Uplift at the Brookings Institution, noted that cities must pursue industries that provide income and protect local environments—a bar the Lower Ninth’s canal project may not clear. A joint report from Brookings and the Data Center warns that this fight plays out amid a deeper, decadeslong crisis. Despite post-Katrina investment, most Black neighborhoods remain close to toxic sites, air pollution, and soil laced with lead and arsenic. These are lasting scars that canal expansion could deepen.
The community closest to the canal is exposed to more pollution than 90 percent of the country. State records show that several major oil spills and fires have taken place in the canal since 2020, and at times, companies have been hesitant to follow state cleanup processes.
Federal documents received through FOIA also showed that soil at the bottom of the canal contains hazardous chemicals like DDT, a long‑lasting pesticide that can build up in fish and people, where it disrupts hormones, can harm the brain, and increases cancer risk. Plans to excavate and transport this contaminated soil have heightened neighbors’ fears about what further disruption the future may bring.
After Katrina washed the city with toxins, cleanup was slowest in these most polluted areas, prolonging health hazards and depressing property values. Now, with state regulators weakening enforcement and making it harder for communities to challenge polluters, these “sacrifice zones” remain locked in a cycle in which poverty magnifies pollution’s harm, and pollution in turn stifles recovery. The Brookings report calls for a new approach: Make polluters pay into a resilience fund, clean up the neighborhoods most burdened by industry, and channel investment into “green zones” that give residents a healthier, more secure future against the guarantee of more storms.
As it stands today, said Deborah Campbell, a 72-year-old lifelong resident who was thrust into activism after Katrina, “the only thing we’re looking forward to—what they’re trying to push in our backyard—is poor health and stress.”
Campbell’s group, A Community Voice, believes the project has greater legs under a Trump administration because President Donald Trump’s strongest Louisiana ally, Boysie Bollinger, is a major shipyard owner who operates extensively along the Gulf. In 2017, the Trump administration listed the canal project among its 50 most important infrastructure priorities. (Bollinger Shipyards did not respond to requests for comment.)
Since Trump’s return, the rules of the fight have shifted. The Supreme Court has tipped leverage away from regulators and toward industry in the most technical corners of environmental law. At the water’s edge, the Supreme Court’s 2023 guidance in Sackett v. EPA narrowed which wetlands the Clean Water Act still protects. Meanwhile, the Justice Department has stepped back from environmental justice enforcement.
Even the Corps’ civil works purse has become a battleground, with Democrats alleging that the Corps’ projects are being funded only in Republican districts, leaving coastal neighborhoods guessing who gets protected next.
In that opening, the canal’s backers see a clearer lane, and the people most exposed are again left to do what the government has not: Defend their health and their homes as they brace for the water to rise.
At Sankofa’s wetland park, rainwater seeps slowly into native grasses and cypress roots instead of rushing toward flooded streets, while families often stroll shaded trails where egrets rise from the reeds. Just down the road, neighbors gather at the Sankofa Market, trading recipes over baskets of locally grown and cost-friendly mustard greens, okra, and sweet potatoes.
Down the way, Freedom to Grow NOLA has turned a vacant lot into orderly rows of vegetables and herbs, where residents pull berries from bushes and learn how food connects to care for the land and each other. And along the edge of the city’s disappearing marsh, volunteers with Common Ground Relief, founded by a former Black Panther member days after Katrina hit, are planting mangrove seedlings, their roots anchoring the coast against the slow bite of the Gulf, before heading back to distribute bags of fresh produce and pantry staples to residents.
Together, these spaces are replacing scarcity with abundance and abandonment with stewardship, protecting both the landscape and the health of the community it sustains, residents have explained.
They understand that regardless of what decision the Corps makes, the canal’s waters will still divide New Orleans. The canal serves as a living line between what nature once claimed and what was claimed from it. It reminds Calhoun that here, the cost of development has mostly fallen on those Black families, and ultimately the question left hanging is existential: Whose safety, prosperity, and history does America choose to defend, not if, but when the water threatens to return again?
“New Orleans is surrounded by water, and it can either sustain us or kill us,” he said. “It seems like some people would rather continue to work against it, which only leaves one of those two options for us.”
Additional data analysis by Melissa Lewis.
