A city, but one with water on top

I sat through Acts III and IV of Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke.
He did, just as the reviews had said, edit in the interviews with people who actually believed that someone (white people, rich people, the government, George Bush, the Man, the System, depending) deliberately let the levees break in order to force black people to leave so that Donald Trump and unnamed others could "buy up all the land" and gentrify New Orleans, replacing its black citizens with white citizens.
(I'm not sure where all these white people would come from, bringing big money for the 'opportunity' to live below sea level, but conspiracy theory doesn't have to be rational...)

The part that really galled me, however, was watching a series of interviews with people protesting the media's use of the word 'refugee' to describe those fleeing the destruction of their city. One even said "when did the hurricane erase my citizenship"?
Why does this foolish diatribe make me mad? Because the media bought into it, and stopped calling them refugees. They stumbled around for awhile, but most ended up choosing 'evacuees' as an acceptable alternative. (Even that didn't satisfy some of their critics, thought I'm not sure what would have.)

Why is it foolish? Because anyone who can read a dictionary can easily ascertain that 'refugees' was exactly what they were: people seeking refuge.

Unfortunately, many people focused on the political definition of refugee: "A refugee is defined as a person outside of his or her country of nationality who is unable or unwilling to return because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion." But there's also a broader definition: "Refugees are a subgroup of the broader category of displaced persons. Environmental refugees (people displaced because of environmental problems such as drought) are not included in the definition of "refugee" under international law, as well as internally displaced people."
They could also have gone with an even less restricted definition: "A refugee is a person who has left, or has been forced to leave, his state and move to another state because of a well-founded fear for his/her safety."

So, environmental refugee, displaced person, or Katrina 'victim'? Does it really matter?

Hundreds of thousands of people are now living, some with jobs but many on public assistance, outside Louisiana. Many of them will never return. Many of them would like to.
The Corps of Engineers has now spent a billion dollars trying to make New Orleans as 'safe' as it was before Katrina.
Experts disagree, but it's probable it's not safe enough to survive another Katrina-sized hurricane, much less the direct hit from a Category Five hurricane she was supposed to be.

We've been lucky, so far, this hurricane season. Not a single hurricane has yet formed, and only perhaps one may still make landfall in the US this year.
We won't be that lucky forever.
New Orleans won't be that lucky forever.
If history repeats itself (and why shouldn't it?), sometime in the next few decades a Big One will roar out of the Gulf of Mexico and overtop or undermine the levees of the Crescent City yet again.
How many times can we afford to rebuild a city under water?