Willie Calhoun knows how to live with water. His home, cradled between the Mississippi River and a patchwork of canals, is split by the surging, ever-present current.
But it wasn’t always that way in the Ninth Ward. Before the largest canal known as the Industrial Canal was built, the stretch of land between the river and Lake Pontchartrain was a place meant for water, fish, and wading birds rather than for people.
The ground was soft and unstable, mostly swamp, dense cypress trees, and tangled undergrowth laced with meandering bayous. But in 1918, dredges cut through the wetlands, carving a straight channel that drained and filled the low ground, creating the Lower Ninth Ward and the impression that the land was ready for houses — and factories and ship traffic…