March 7, 2021 Levees with unacceptable ratings are far more common than acceptable. And 73 systems with unacceptable ratings are considered high or very high risk. The U.S. levee system — once considered the second largest piece of the country's infrastructure "rivaled only by the highway system" — is now nearly a century old and failing inspections far more often than it passes them. Only one in 25 federal levees are rated Acceptable. Newsy's data analysis of the National Levee Database in the spring of 2020 focused on two things: the status of the overall infrastructure and finding...