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As Mississippi River recedes, flood warning lifted for New Orleans By John Pope, The Times-Picayune Based on a drop in the level of the swollen Mississippi River, the National Weather Service on Friday canceled its weeks-long flood warning for New Orleans and points downriver. Despite this development for south Louisiana, the weather service’s flood warning remains in effect for points upriver, including Baton Rouge, where levee seepage has led the state Office of Transportation and Development to close River Road’s southbound lane from North Third Street to State Capitol Drive. In New Orleans, the river’s flood stage is 17 feet,...

NEW ORLEANS - The manatees that grazed in Lake Pontchartrain before Hurricane Katrina haven't been seen since, but eight dolphins were leaping in the lake this week. "If the big critters are back, the lake is definitely coming back," Carlton Dufrechou, executive director of the Lake Pontchartrain Basin Foundation, said Thursday. Flocks of pelicans and the pod of dolphins spotted Monday indicate that there are fish for them to eat, he said. Earlier in the week, the journal Environmental Science & Technology reported that tests had found the dirty floodwaters pumped out of the city may be a long-term hazard...

After Hurricane Betsy swamped New Orleans in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson... pledged federal protection. The Army Corps of Engineers designed a Lake Pontchartrain Hurricane Barrier to shield the city with flood gates like those that protect the Netherlands from the North Sea. Congress provided funding and construction began. But work stopped in 1977 when a federal judge ruled, in a suit brought by Save Our Wetlands, that the Corps' environmental impact statement was deficient.... Speaking for environmentalists, the Center for Progressive Reform called the charges in the Los Angeles Times "pure fiction" because the judge stopped construction only until the...

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, much of New Orleans is under water in the top satellite image, taken on August 30, 2005, at 11:45 a.m. CDT by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Early news reports say that as much as 80 percent of the city is flooded after levies failed to hold Katrina’s massive storm surge back. The flooding is getting worse as water slowly seeps into the city from Lake Pontchartrain. On Saturday, August 27, 2005, New Orleans formed a tan and green grid sandwiched between the lake shore and the river in...

Therefore...the official forecast brings Katrina to 115 knots...or a category four on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale. The GFDL is more aggressive and calls for 124 knots and 922 mb. The FSU superensemble is even more aggressive bringing Katrina to 131 knots. track info HERE