At Southern University at New Orleans, hit hard by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a battle between university officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has thrown into sharp relief an elevation-based discrepancy in efforts to repair the campus, reports the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

The university has petitioned the federal agency, known as FEMA, for an estimated $94-million to relocate the campus to higher ground, at a site a half-mile away. The proposed location is where students and faculty members lived and conducted classes in trailers for 2½ years after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast.

But because an agreement has not been reached, the lower levels of many academic and other buildings — which were inundated in the post-Katrina flooding — remain gutted and unoccupied, while the upper floors house students and faculty members in classrooms and offices.

In order to obtain the federal funds, FEMA officials said the state must provide documentation from an expert in flood-plain management saying the buildings have been substantially damaged. “The fact that they’ve been able to make repairs and occupy those upper floors indicates that the viability of those buildings is still there,” Jim Stark, FEMA’s assistant administrator for Gulf Coast Recovery, told the newspaper.

State and university officials, however, said the possibility of renewed flooding on the low-lying campus had made them reluctant to make any repairs to ground floors. —Caitlin Moran