Put a sock in it. First of all, New Orleans was not the only city or place affected by one of the most powerful hurricanes in history. The entire Gulf Coast was affected including Mobile, Gulfport, Biloxi, etc. The storm wreaked destruction way inland. 80 percent of Mississippi is without power.
New Orleans is a great American city, and has been for over 200 years. It will survive this diaster and be rebuilt bigger and better. The levee system will be upgraded, pumping stations improved, land rezoned, building codes revised, etc.
The fact that NO is below sea level is not really the issue. So is most of the Netherlands. We have the technology and engineering to make NO safer and more secure from hurricanes, but it will never be risk free. San Francisco is built on the San Andreas fault, there are countless coastal cities in Florida, Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, etc. that are vulnerable to hurricanes, there are cities up and down the Mississippi that are affected by periodic flooding (remember the Great Midwestern flood of 1993), and major parts of the US have frequent tornados.
San Francisco, Charleston, Miami, Mobile, Galveston, the Quad cities, etc. are not going to be relocated. Nor will New Orleans. Its location makes a lot of sense from the standpoint of commerce and trade.
From 1803 until 1861, New Orleans' population increased from 8,000 to nearly 170,000. The 1810 census revealed a population of 10,000 making New Orleans the United States' fifth largest city, after New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore and the largest city west of the Appalachians. From 1810 until 1840, New Orleans grew at a faster rate than any other large American city. By 1830, New Orleans was America's third largest city, behind New York and Baltimore; and in 1860, it was still the nation's fifth largest city.
Pierce Lewis, perhaps its most knowledgeable scholar, describes New Orleans as the "inevitable city on an impossible site." It is a tribute to the ingenuity and greatness of Americans that a great city could be built and then flourish.
Keep a canoe handy. I think floating dead bodies, thousands of evacuees, months of displacement, and billions in repair is definitely a monument to something, but I don't think it's ingenuity. But hey that's me. When the big one cracks San Fran into a million pieces, folks will be walking around shocked about that too, I guess.
Rebuilding the levees higher isn't going to fix the FACT that the levee system and the artificial routing of the mississippi river are going to cause more wetlands to slide into the gulf and place NO in greater danger after we pour billions of tax dollars into that rathole. Yeah, what a brilliant idea.