The story we here in the outside world heard after the levee problems is that money was allocated to Louisiana for years to do maintenance on the levees, and the money got spent on everything but maintenance on the levees.
If there’s anyone to be imprisoned for manslaughter, it’s the Louisiana and New Orleans government officials who used levee-maintenance money for political patronage.
You were horribly misinformed. The US Army Corps of Engineers designs, builds, & contracts all the levees & canal walls. The canal walls that fell apart in 2005 had all been “rebuilt” and “upgraded” by the Corps and its contractors after the year 2000. The Orleans Levee Board was basically in charge of mowing the grass on those levees and flood walls.
The only levees the local levee board ever built were the “lake fill” “super-levees” on the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain, none of which spontaneously disintegrated during the Federal Flood.