Orleans Levee Board

From 1890 through 2006, the Orleans Levee Board was the body of commissioners that oversaw the Orleans Levee District (OLD) which supervised the levee and floodwall system in Orleans Parish, Louisiana. The role of the OLD has changed over time. Prior to Hurricane Betsy in 1965, the OLD developed land and sold it to raise money to build and improve levees. After 1965, Congress directed the Army Corps of Engineers to be responsible for design and construction of the hurricane flood protection system enveloping New Orleans.

Owing to the 1965 legislation, the OLB's duties regarding hurricane surge protection were now limited to collecting the 30% cost share for project design and construction, and to maintaining and operating completed flood protection structures. Until the end of 2006, the OLB was a major governmental entity which functioned independently of municipal government in and around Orleans Parish. (Orleans Parish is coextensive with the city of New Orleans; their boundaries are one and the same).

In the wake of the catastrophic levee failures in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, two new regional flood protection authorities were created to replace the multiple parochial levee boards, including Orleans Parish's Levee Board. Most of the Orleans Levee District now falls under the jurisdiction of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - East, charged with the oversight of all flood-protection infrastructure for Greater New Orleans on the East Bank of the Mississippi River. The Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - West possesses the same metro-wide jurisdiction for the West Bank of the Mississippi, and it includes that portion of the Orleans Levee District on the West Bank (i.e., Algiers).

After Hurricana Katrina, it was widely believed that perhaps a different form of levee board governance might be more appropriate for a major marine terminal like New Orleans. Nevertheless, the issue of whether the members of the OLB Engineering Committee acted incompetently or negligently has not been conclusively demonstrated or proven.

The pre-Katrina Orleans Levee District (OLD), governed by the Orleans Levee Board (OLB), owned considerable assets, mainly real estate, a peculiarity that stems from its history. The Orleans Levee District was created by the Louisiana legislature in 1890 for the purpose of protecting the low-lying city of New Orleans from floods. At that time, communities along the Mississippi River were largely in charge of creating their own levees to protect themselves, as no unified levee system existed. Most neighboring parishes had (and some still have) similar parochial levee boards. In the early twentieth century, the OLD reclaimed a portion of Lake Pontchartrain, a 24-mile wide lake north of New Orleans. The OLD developed the land and sold it to raise money to build and improve levees. Starting in the 1920s, the Board undertook a massive flood-protection initiative involving the construction of a stepped seawall several hundred feet north of a portion of the existing south shore of Lake Pontchartrain. The intervening area was filled to several feet above sea level and was to serve as a "super levee" protecting the city from the Lake's storm surge.

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