Hurricane Katrina makes landfall near New Orleans, Louisiana, as a Category 4 hurricane on August 29, 2005. Despite being only the third most powerful storm of the 2005 hurricane season, Katrina was the worst natural disaster in the history of the United States. After briefly coming ashore in southern Florida on August 25 as a Category 1 hurricane, Katrina gained strength before slamming into the Gulf Coast on August 29. In addition to bringing devastation to the New Orleans area, the hurricane caused damage along the coasts of Mississippi and Alabama, as well as other parts of Louisiana.
New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city on August 28, when Katrina briefly achieved Category 5 status and the National Weather Service predicted “devastating” damage to the area. But an estimated 150,000 people, who either did not want to or did not have the resources to leave, ignored the order and stayed behind. The storm brought sustained winds of 145 miles per hour, which cut power lines and destroyed homes, even turning cars into projectile missiles. Katrina caused record storm surges all along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. The surges overwhelmed the levees that protected New Orleans, located at six feet below sea level, from Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. Soon, 80 percent of the city was flooded up to the rooftops of many homes and small buildings.
Tens of thousands of people sought shelter in the New Orleans Convention Center and the Louisiana Superdome. The situation in both places quickly deteriorated, as food and water ran low and conditions became unsanitary. Frustration mounted as it took up to two days for a full-scale relief effort to begin. In the meantime, the stranded residents suffered from heat, hunger, and a lack of medical care. Reports of looting, rape, and even murder began to surface. As news networks broadcast scenes from the devastated city to the world, it became obvious that a vast majority of the victims were African-American and poor, leading to difficult questions among the public about the state of racial equality in the United States. The federal government and President George W. Bush were roundly criticized for what was perceived as their slow response to the disaster. The head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Michael Brown, resigned amid the ensuing controversy.
Finally, on September 1, the tens of thousands of people staying in the damaged Superdome and Convention Center begin to be moved to the Astrodome in Houston, Texas, and another mandatory evacuation order was issued for the city. The next day, military convoys arrived with supplies and the National Guard was brought in to bring a halt to lawlessness. Efforts began to collect and identify corpses. On September 6, eight days after the hurricane, the Army Corps of Engineers finally completed temporary repairs to the three major holes in New Orleans’ levee system and were able to begin pumping water out of the city.
In all, it is believed that the hurricane caused more than 1,300 deaths and up to $150 billion in damages to both private property and public infrastructure. It is estimated that only about $40 billion of that number will be covered by insurance. One million people were displaced by the disaster, a phenomenon unseen in the United States since the Great Depression. Four hundred thousand people lost their jobs as a result of the disaster. Offers of international aid poured in from around the world, even from poor countries like Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Private donations from U.S. citizens alone approached $600 million.
The storm also set off 36 tornadoes in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, resulting in one death.
President Bush declared September 16 a national day of remembrance for the victims of Hurricane Katrina.
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Isn’t it amazing that in 8 years, Obama never had to deal with a major landfall like this. Some guys are just lucky, I guess.
Interesting…
I went to Jazz Fest in NOLA for many years and attended in 2006 and noted little damage in the main tourist areas but I did not go to the 9th Ward etc. It was always a shithole there. I did go flyfishing for redfish down towards the coast and the marsh was in pristine condition……clean water, lots of fish……Katrina gave it a good scrubbing and of course, the marsh is perfectly adapted to hurricanes.
The levee’s made by humans failed and flooded the below sea-level areas of NOLA….think big bowl sitting in a bathtub…..if the sides of the bowl fail well the bowl gets flooded and it is hard to get the water out…..no surprises there.
This was an entirely manmade disaster….hurricanes happen we can choose to live in low lying coastal areas with shitty levees at our peril.
I spent ‘my life’ in Katrina for one month as an Air Tanker-Base manager at the airport in Hattiesburg, MS. I flew commercial from Phoenix, AZ to Jackson, MS, and grabbed a rental car and headed south to my assignment. While being some distance (100 miles) from NOLA, Hattiesburg was still a war zone. I’d never seen such destruction … and, then while there Hurricane Rita slammed us. Interesting, never had been in a hurricane before. Just a lot of rain and wind.
My air crew couldn’t find rooms in motels because every motel in that town – and as far as Meridian to the north, and Biloxi to the south, was crammed to the hilt. The highways and streets everywhere were pasted and littered with displaced people living in cardboard boxes, under newspapers, in makeshift tents, under blankets, in sleeping bags, and you name it. What a sight! We were fortunate and found a home at a secluded hunting lodge in the Loblolly forest north of town.
FEMA and DHS panicked and thought there was an imminent fire danger due to all the thousands of jack-strawed trees and crushed homes and buildings covering the region, so the U.S. Forest Service dispatched fire crews and air crews from all over the U.S. into the region to quash any fire disasters. Well, that was just a typical government photo-op show and a total waste of tax-payer money, because there wasn’t a single fire in that sopping wet country the entire time we were all stationed there.
I have two lasting memories of Mississippi, which today I can recall vividly:
(1.) Lovebugs. These flying insects were swept inland with the storms and there were absolutely billions upon billions of these foul-smelling pests in the air and everywhere else. They infested everything, even our food, our clothing, and living and workplace quarters. One couldn’t drive two miles without stopping and literally scraping their repelling yellow gue from the windshields in order to see.
(2.) I never saw so many fucking niggers in all my entire life! Fact: We were warned to never leave the direct routes to and from the airport and not to venture onto any back streets sightseeing the neighborhoods, as we might never be heard from again – I repeat, fact! It was one scary place to be in the midst Blackened America.
This was my first time to ever visit this part of the deep south, and Mississippi. I have no desire to ever see it again. And, especially … I have absolutely no desire to visit New Orleans. No thank you.
In 2004 Ivan destroyed my dock (and house) in September. I had rebuilt the dock and boat lift when Katrina came ashore over 200 miles away, the following year. It was not bad enough here to take the dock again but the wooden retaining wall along the shoreline – that had been in place for 12 years, did not make it.
And now androgynous Dorian threatens to cross Florida and enter the hotter than normal Gulf. So much for the Labor Day plans to stay in a finally rehabilitated family home hit by Michael last year.
Dorian /ˈdɔːriən/ is a unisex given name of Greek origin. In Greek the meaning of the name Dorian is: Of Doris, a district of Greece; or of Doros, a legendary Greek hero. Doros was the son of Hellen of Sparta (who was the daughter of Zeus and Leda). Doros was the founder of the Dorian tribe, and the most likely origin of Doros’ name was the Greek word “doron”, meaning “gift”. The Dorians were an obscure, ancient Hellenic tribe that were supposed to have existed in the north-eastern regions of Greece, ancient Macedonia and Epirus.
Another possible origin of the name Dorian, is from the Greek “Dorios”, meaning ‘child of the sea’ .[1] Wiki
It’s also where we get the name, Doritos from Frito Lay. Just kidd’n.
I’m a 150 miles inland from the Gulf. I got hammered by Harvey. No big deal said I, I’m too far inland to worry. Except the path of Harvey and the fact that it circled and circled, etc. made for some lively times. I live on a hill, the surrounding areas were underwater for awhile.
I remember Katrina and what I remember most is how the Negroes from NOLA and surrounds got on buses and got to Houston and proceeded to rob people in the bus parking lots. Houston has never truly recovered from that invasion.
I was in Houston for Alicia; it chased me to Dallas, where it killed one guy in a convertible when the wind caught the culverts on a flat-bed truck ahead of him and snapped the retaining chains; one rolled backwards off the truck and onto him. Alicia was a trickster; she walked up the Houston Ship Channel and reached downtown essentially undrained, ripping the glass out of the downtown buildings and splashing it six inches deep in the streets. People went to work by canoe! But even sneakier, she ripped leaves and limbs out of the trees and sent them down in the storm drains. A few weeks later, six inches of rain flooded those same streets again when it couldn’t drain fast enough. More canoe commuting, and jacked-up pickup trucks submerged to the roof in interstate underpasses.
Weeks later I was walking through a Sears TV display and caught the words “storm center fifty miles offshore and headed north-northwest towards Galveston ..” and stopped in my tracks. What storm? I hadn’t heard a word about any new storm …? Then I saw that someone had used a VCR tape of the news from Alicia to demonstrate how nifty their new TVs were. I dropped a word with the staff that some bodies hadn’t been found yet, and maybe they could choose a different tape? Ten minutes later a new one was on.