Because the city was virtually uninhabitable, however, it was closed for months, with its porte cochÃ¨re pressed into service as a New Orleans Police Department command center. The casino, located near the entrance to the French Quarter, sustained only minor cosmetic damage.

When Katrina hit, Payne was regional president of Harrah’s (now Caesars) Gulf Coast Division, which included Harrah’s New Orleans. “There is an entrepreneurial spirit here that the city never had before.” “From a tourist standpoint, the city is the strongest it’s ever been,” said John Payne, the CEO of Caesars Entertainment Operating Co. It’s helped sustain and revive the wounded city. In the past decade, the three-casino market has done more than provide a healthy revenue stream to their Las Vegas-based owners. Caesars Entertainment Corp.’s Harrah’s New Orleans reopened in time for Mardi Gras six months later.Ī damaged casino riverboat survived, but now operates elsewhere in Louisiana. Two casinos - Las Vegas-based Pinnacle Entertainment’s Boomtown and Boyd Gaming Corp.’s Treasure Chest - were back in business less than two months after Katrina. The New Orleans casino industry, for the most part, emerged from the August 2005 storm intact. Senate report estimated the damage at $150 billion. The subsequent flooding left more than 80 percent of the city under water for weeks, destroying thousands of homes and businesses and killing more than 1,570 people in the worst natural disaster to hit the Deep South. It was completed five years after Katrina breached several levees in the New Orleans area. of Engineers along Peters Road to protect the suburban Jefferson Parish community of Harvey, should the Mississippi River again overflow. The 3.5-mile-long structure was built as a safety measure by the U.S.

“With the big iron doors, it kind of reminds you of ‘Escape from New York,’ ” said Boomtown general manager Harold Rowland, comparing the Harvey Canal Floodwall to prison walls in the 1981 John Carpenter film. NEW ORLEANS - The most noticeable change in The Big Easy casino market 10 years after Hurricane Katrina is the 14-foot-high concrete-and-steel wall that encircles Boomtown New Orleans. The Boomtown Casino sign is seen through flood walls in New Orleans on Tuesday, Aug.

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