Last year, the hit British TV show “Top Gear” visited New Orleans and was shocked to find the city’s outskirts still in ruins.

“We sort of figured the world’s largest economy would have fixed it by now,” said host Jeremy Clarkson, driving past a Humvee on a desolated Elysian Fields Avenue.

New Orleans and the Gulf Coast were decimated by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. A year later, and two years since Lake Pontchartrain swelled over the cities levees, recovery remains slow.

Oil production on the Gulf coast and shipping through New Orleans has returned to normal, and the Saints football franchise has sold out every seat in the Superdome till the end of the season. Business in the relatively undamaged French Quarter is back to normal, but many suburban houses remain in abandoned ruins and an estimated 200,000 of the some 462,000 original inhabitants still haven’t returned to the city.

The racial demographic of the traditionally African-American city is also changing rapidly. The Louisiana Health and Population Survey reports that the city’s Latino population, 3.06 percent of the city’s makeup (20,000) pre-Katrina, has tripled to 60,000 due to an influx of migrant workers from across the country helping to rebuild the city.

This has led to a baby boom that has strained the city’s healthcare services, according to the New York Times, particularly its charity prenatal clinics. Two Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals clinics have seen an increase in 1,200 women last year alone.

“Before the storm, only two percent were Hispanic; now about 96 percent are Hispanic,” said Beth Perriloux, the head nurse in the department’s health unit, to the New York Times.

In what the National Weather Center has predicted to be another unusual hurricane season, New Orleans remains in a vulnerable position this year. While its levees have been repaired, the wetlands that once shielded the city from storm surges are more damaged than ever.

“We did everything we could for a hundred years to destroy our coast in all sorts of ways – putting levees on the Mississippi River, slicing thousands of kilometers of canals, massive oil and gas production,” said John Day, professor of the Louisiana State University (LSU) School of the Coast and Environment in Baton Rouge, to National Geographic.

Worse, the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet (MRGO) remains open to the sea. Created in the 1960s as a direct, deep channel from the city to the coast for deep-draft ships carrying cargo containers, it is little used today. In the event of a hurricane, the MRGO provides a straight, unobstructed path for a storm surge directly to the city. LSU’s Hurricane Center estimates the canal more than doubles a storm surge’s speed and adds 20-40 percent more to its force as it hits the city.

Little used, eroded, and too shallow for its intended purpose, the Army Corps of Engineers has requested to close the canal and wall it off to protect the city.

The U.S. Geological society estimates that Katrina and Rita destroyed over 100 square miles of costal wetlands, but Professor R. Eugene Turner of LSU found that the hurricane’s storm surge ultimately helped the wetlands by depositing 144 million tons of silt and sediment (about one to six inches), which stabilizes them. LSU researchers have found that hurricane storm surges provide a wetland with over 227 times more sediment than a river deposits in a year.

“It does sound a little counterintuitive,” said Mark Ford, deputy director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana (CRCL) in Baton Rouge, to National Geographic. “I don’t think most people expected that.