Hurricane Katrina’s devastating effects to New Orleans in 2005 were a prime example of how important functional levees are to some coastal communities. It was also a reminder of how communities can suffer when there are insufficient inspection procedures. As Bob Turner of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East stated, “If you wait until a storm event to find out something isn’t working properly, then it’s too late.”

During Katrina, many of the city’s levees were poorly maintained or built to outdated standards. As a result, Katrina’s storm surge inundated the city and claimed about 1,800 lives.

In 2006, the U.S. Department of Transportation and Development established documentation standards to track quarterly inspections to aid in compliance. The National Levee Safety Program was created to support guidelines, management, data collection and a database of levees. The Levee Safety Action Classification system was established as part of the database to help track the probability of levees being loaded, conditions, current and future maintenance needs, and potential consequences from loading all levees.

Now 20 years after the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina, there are numerous new methods of enhancing levee inspections that are taking place from surface level to beneath the water. And it perhaps can’t come soon enough, as many of the lessons taught by Katrina remain unheeded.

Looking at levees

The most prominent style of levee is an earthen embankment. Floodwalls are another type of levee. These can fail due to a variety of reasons.

Source: USACE

Levees nationwide are currently rated at a score of D+, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers' 2025 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure. These D+ rated infrastructures are also responsible for protecting 17 million Americans and two trillion dollars' worth of property. It is estimated to cost $70 billion to return them to proper states of repair.

Federal budget cuts nearly halted New Orleans’ levee inspections for two years, in 2025 and 2026. Much of the state of Louisiana is below sea-level, so these cuts mean many of its 3,100 miles of levees go uninspected. Local agencies have stepped up to conduct some regular inspections, but the public is largely being left in the dark for current statuses on the levees. Some drive-by inspections have been secured for 2025, but 2026 remains unknown. Louisiana has routinely been receiving less and less money each year for its inspection procedures.

Regular levee inspections are used for monitoring conditions overall, locating defects, planning maintenance, identifying priorities for funding assistance and updating the public. Levee inspections are also critical for the National Flood Insurance Program’s (NFIP) decisions, which are administered by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA). A standard checklist and GIS/GPS inspection tool are used in routine and periodic inspections.

After many years of improper inspections that were resolved with a revamped inspection system, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) is moving away from certain reporting measures. Rich Varuso, levee safety manager with the USACE in New Orleans stated, “The system itself no longer gets a rating. At one point, it did, but the systems no longer get ratings…we don’t want to miscommunicate conditions of levees by using just one word. So, really, it's the narrative description of what comes out of the inspection report that really helps us understand the condition of that levee.”

So, despite the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina, levee inspections are woefully underfunded. And the general public lacks a means to understand the safety of the infrastructure their lives may depend on.

A helping hand from modeling and drones

A routine inspection is a visual-based inspection conducted yearly. It verifies and rates general operation and maintenance. A periodic inspection is more robust every five years and conducted by a professional engineer.

First, a collection of previous data on operations and maintenance, emergency action plans and flood fighting is conducted. Second, a more in-depth visual inspection is completed. Lastly, a comprehensive report discussing data, field findings, changes in design criteria from its construction date, and recommendations and aspects that further evaluation is required are documented. There are 125 aspects to assess the operations and maintenance of the levee embankments, floodwalls, drainage, pump stations and channels.

It is a time consuming, high effort and data intensive task to inspect a levee. That means it is also expensive. Thanks to recent advances in technologies like drones or AI, levee inspection is getting marginally easier.

The Automated and Robotic Inspection of Flood Control Systems (ARIS) project by a Texas A&M University research team and sponsored by the USACE is working to improve the process of monitoring and inspecting earthen flood control systems. Civil engineering, remote sensing, robotics, computer science, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are coalescing to allow land-based, aerial and satellite-based tech to inspect levees. This would save numerous man-hours from the approaches done just 10 years prior, which were nearly ongoing and took teams six weeks to fully inspect in New Orleans alone.

Optical and thermal imagery via remote sensing and synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and multispectral imaging via satellites are being used for inspections. AI and ML models are being developed for culverts to help identify cracking, erosion, vegetation overgrowth, settlement and seepage in levees. Operational and maintenance-related defects for culverts are also being evaluated. Finally, the efficiency and frequency of levee inspections is increasing due to 360॰ Street View and mobile light detection and radar (lidar) scans. This would all be initiated by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs): wheeled ground robots and legged ground robots, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs).

DOER Marine, a robotics engineering firm based in the San Francisco Bay Area, offers solutions for these underwater and terrestrial inspections. Land and sensor technologies are critical to assess scenarios in confined spaces and water. Their program is dubbed TULES: Terrestrial and Underwater Levee Evaluation Systems or “an MRI for the levees.” They collect real-time data, video, gas monitoring, communications, conditions, faults and expected lifespans via remote-operated vehicles.

While turbidity in muddy water, vegetation, construction methods, access and environmental concerns can make levee inspection challenging, DOER has combined sensor data with electronic media and software to provide internal and external inspections complete with in-situ data and images. A fully fleshed out inventory would also be created, future-proofing later inspection procedures and allowing for engineers, policy makers, scientists and engineers to access all data in a geographic information systems (GIS) environment. This will be an ongoing process.

While the TULES system can provide measurable data and insights, a crucial benefit will be the standardization, historical data compilation and proof of accuracy from non-destructive testing through GIS compilation for the future.

Issues remain

There are evidently research efforts ongoing that will largely aid the massive undertaking that levee inspections require. From remote sensing to specialized imagery all obtained from unmanned vehicles on the surface, underwater and in the sky, levees will be able to be inspected from every angle without an engineer needing to be on-site. This, in times of funding cuts and ever-increasing sea level and rising storm surges, will be crucial to bolster communities like New Orleans whose entire livelihood and safety is banking on embankment levees.

But, it is imperative that our communities — our officials, engineers and community leaders — do not allow levee maintenance to fall to the wayside, which could enable another Katrina-like disaster.