A state emergency official said the system will be “basically meaningless” to him during a major storm because the most reliable maps can not be issued until after he must order evacuations. And a UNO researcher who is expert on the risks facing communities on Louisiana’s sinking coast worries some of the maps could give residents a false sense of security.

On Monday BP released a statement claiming the environment of the northern Gulf of Mexico had returned its “baseline condition” five years after its Deepwater Horizon disaster pumped more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf off Louisiana’s coast. But on Tuesday the U.S. Coast Guard was supervising the ongoing removal of a large oil tar mat on East Grand Terre Island that has yielded more than 25,000 pounds of oil mixed with sand since late February, a BPO spokesman confirmed.

It’s a peculiar position for those who make their livings and live their lives around the fishing culture of St. Bernard Parish: They say that a post-Katrina rock dam restricting the waterway, which flooded the parish, is hurting their business. But scientists say it’s a return to a natural balance that was upset when the canal was dredged.

A city that prides itself on embracing contradiction is now waking up to this one: The levees and pumping stations it has spent nearly 300 years perfecting to guard against external threats have also been the catalysts allowing an unseen enemy below to savage its budgets and cloud its future.

Despite giving the go-ahead in concept, Congress has not sent a penny to build 15 approved projects.