Five Years Later, Roy Arrigo Still Marks Where Water Drowned His Home

NEW ORLEANS, Aug. 28, 2010 — -- New Orleans resident Roy Arrigo doesn't own anything that is more than five years old.

Arrigo's home, located just 50 feet from the 17th Street Canal where the floodwalls infamously breached after Hurricane Katrina in August 2005, was under more than seven feet of water, flooded for months following the storm.

"If those levees had held, people would be scratching their heads and asking, 'What was the name of that one storm that came real close to us back in late August of '05?'" Arrigo said.

"In New Orleans, that's what people would be saying," he said, "But everyone knows that name well -- Katrina."

Arrigo, 54, said it isn't the storm he blames for the damage to his house -- he lost essentially everything he owned at the time -- but the failure of the floodwalls.

"Because of engineering mistakes, the levee walls failed when they were exposed to forces that were far, far less than what they were supposed to be built to sustain," he said. "And those mistakes and those levee failures caused the destruction of about 80 percent of New Orleans, and caused a loss of all my material possessions."

Today, on the eve of the five-year anniversary of the devastating storm, Arrigo told ABC News that he still doesn't trust the levee repairs the Army Corps of Engineers are working on completing by next year. But like so many natives of the Crescent City, he always knew he'd return.

"We'll always been vulnerable [to a storm]," Arrigo said.

"Those critics who say we're stupid for living here -- living in a bowl -- they tell us that if we live below sea level that it's to be expected at some point [that our homes will flood]," he said. "But these levees and floodwalls can be built better and you can hold back these storms."

In 2005, Arrigo said he didn't believe a category 3 storm like Katrina would destroy his home the way it did.

"At first, I had a moment of, 'Oh well, maybe my house was in a slightly higher area,'" Arrigo said of the hours just after the storm touched down. "But my house is so close to the levee failure we could see it in the media photos and we could see it, we knew we had water, real deep."