This is the University of Maryland’s scale model of New Orleans where they are in the process of recreating Katrina’s floodwaters.
After the hurricane, academics and government departments looked at their sophisticated mathematical models for predicting damage from big Gulf Coast storms and found that the models they had been using were incomplete, out of date or just plain wrong.
While the levees have long since been fixed and upgraded, the risk assessment -based on a mind-boggling 2 million equations – has only now been completed. Gathering the data for the levee upgrade and the risk maps took three years of back-breaking, mind-numbing effort by hundreds of team members using a surprising mix of high technology, old-fashioned detective work, trick psychology and, when all else failed, intuition. The results have revolutionized authorities’ understanding of Gulf Coast hurricanes and. the US Army Corps have published Google maps on their website in an effort to show Gulf Coast residents what kind of danger they will face from hurricanes in the future. You can see them here, and here.
