How New Orleans Plans for Resilient, Smart Future

The US city of New Orleans is known for its culture, cuisine, vibe and festivals, but it has also become known for extreme weather events like Hurricane Katrina or the 2017 floods. These events have deeply influenced and impacted the municipality’s ability to deploy and scale smart city projects. The hurricane left over 1,800 deaths and $100 billion in damage in its path, so when federal funding arrived in the city, it went towards citizen projects and rebuilding the infrastructure, and for obvious reasons, smart city projects weren’t prioritized.

As time went by and some of the infrastructure was rebuilt, the city focused on projects that were needed, made the city more efficient and had a clear return on investment, like changing streetlights to LED and deploying a flood monitoring and warning system.

In this video, we talk to Kim LaGrue, Chief Information Officer at the City of New Orleans, about what smart projects they’ve focused on and the challenges they face when deploying and scaling solutions without a proper backbone infrastructure.