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If Hurricane Katrina hit this city tomorrow, it would likely cause only light flooding, according to U.S. government and other engineers. But many engineers and local politicians argue that the new ring of defenses may not be good enough.

Government officials and scientists have sought to transform the lessons learned from Katrina's damage into better policy. But the city is still recovering, and much work remains to be done to reduce its vulnerability to future Katrina-like storms.

Rebuilding efforts have turned New Orleans into a hopeful start-up city, but troubling new - and old - problems abound. As one activist put it, New Orleans is always going to be between storms.

The Katrina floodwaters that drowned New Orleans caused many to wonder if the city could ever recover. Five years later, recovery is evident in spades.

Conservation was never a top priority in New Orleans, but Katrina changed that. The city is now an incubator for new home building featuring natural resources and sustainable architecture.

Newly elected New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu recently marked his first one hundred days in office by announcing one hundred Katrina recovery projects. Here are five critical areas of public policy which may determine whether New Orleans has a successful recovery by 2015.

Five years after Hurricane Katrina flooded more than 80 percent of this city, the Army Corps of Engineers says billions of dollars of work has made the city much safer and many of its defenses could withstand a storm as strong as the deadly 2005 hurricane.

Hurricane Katrina knocked New Orleans to the canvas. With the help of the federal government -- which has spent $142 billion in assistance to the affected Gulf states plus another $37.9 billion in Recovery Act funds -- and of foundations and big-hearted volunteers, they have been pulling themselves up ever since.

The $143 billion federal recovery effort for the New Orleans region, wrecked by Hurricane Katrina five years ago, has produced spotty successes and lingering failures. Help still hasn't reached enough of the victims. Obama promised to do better; people are waiting.

The memory of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is changing, undergoing a kind of revision even as the region is still rebuilding, still healing.

Five years after Katrina, one might think that Washington has realized the importance of preparing adequately for the next major hurricane on the Gulf Coast. Not so.

This city, not that long ago, appeared to be lost. Only five years have passed since corpses were floating through the streets, since hundreds of thousands of survivors sat in hotel rooms and shelters and the homes of relatives, learning that they were among the ranks of the homeless.

Katrina took their homes. BP’s spill took their jobs. And coastal erosion is taking the very land their ancestors called home for centuries. But the tiny, Native American community of Grand Bayou Village is determined to hang on.

Environmental justice advocate Beverly Wright has worked to clean up contaminated soil and improve levee protection since Hurricane Katrina. If the hurricane exposed racial biases in public policy, Wright says post-Katrina rebuilding has shown not much has changed.

Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent humanitarian disaster in New Orleans focused an uncomfortable spotlight on FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA became a lighting rod for criticism of the government's lackluster response to the disaster. Five years later, FEMA has undergone some changes.

The Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans was destroyed during Hurricane Katrina. Now, with the help of the Brad Pitt-backed organization Make It Right, some residents are trickling back into their old neighborhoods to live in newly built houses.

If you talk to officials and New Orleans residents, they'll tell you that one of the worst disasters in U.S. history - the flooding of New Orleans - wasn't caused by Hurricane Katrina but by the failure of the flood protection system. But the new flood protection system still leaves New Orleans vulnerable.

It is almost exactly five years since hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, and the city is bracing for attack. But some say the upgraded defences, which cost the US federal government $14.45 billion, aren't tough and comprehensive enough - in part because climate change could lead to more powerful storms.

Television is brooding about Katrina this weekend. Flashbacks, shown in faded black and white, lock in on those still-shocking scenes of chaos and despair at the Superdome and the Convention Center in New Orleans.

Before Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans’s Lower 9th Ward was home to an estimated 18,000 people. But five years later, only about a quarter of that number live in the hard-hit neighborhood.