Too late now

With Hurricane Gustav bearing down on New Orleans, once again Rico presents his Plan To Save New Orleans. Who knows, it might, in the long run, be cheaper...

This shows the scale of the enterprise, some ten by five miles of below-sea-level city (and what moron thought that was a good idea; even the Dutch knew it wouldn't work long-term without massive infrastructure). So now all we have to do (with all that Federal money they're going to have to spend anyway) is fill it all in to, say, ten feet above mean high tide.

Ah, you say, but where do we get all that dirt? Well, nicely, the Mississippi brings it to you for free every day, twenty four hours a day. Right now, unfortunately, it's dumping it well south of the problem, and extending the Delta out into the Gulf of Mexico (that large blob encroaching on the deep water). But with a little judicious pumping action, you could capture all that silt as it passes the City and redirect it into the Lower Ninth Ward and other low-lying areas and, voilá, high ground.
How do you actually do it? Block by block. It's a (relatively) simple engineering task: you put a house up on a truck, move it over aways, put the previously-drained fill dirt in, compact it, and run the house up the slope onto a new foundation. Repeat ten thousand times. But think of all the construction jobs (most of them low-skill, so you can hire the now-unemployed of New Orleans and, unfortunately, probably a lot of Mexicans) you'd create...

Generations to come who will be able to visit, eat in, and spend their money in a new, dry New Orleans will thank you.