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 among the worst natural disasters in the history of the United States. In the wake of the storm, there were over 50 failures of the levees and flood walls surrounding New Orleans and its suburbs. The levee and flood wall failures caused widespread flooding.
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.
In a 2006 federal report, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers admitted that the flood-control complex surrounding New Orleans had been incomplete, insufficient and improperly maintained. “The hurricane protection system in New Orleans and southeast Louisiana was a system in name only,” said the report.
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The Weather Channel interviewed some useless shit history professor from Tulane this morning (and will be pushing the racist environmental disaster narrative all day). This guy even had the nerve to mention the “politics” that encouraged folks back into the 9th ward after the disaster of Hurricane Betsy in 1965, yet never bothers to mention anything about the way government itself went out of its way to set N.O. up for a major disaster. 1700s maps of N.O. show the 9th ward and other destroyed areas of the city being swamp land at the time. The French Quarter and areas close by, are the only areas of the city anyone occupied at the time. But the obviousness of flooding wasn’t enough to stop government all along the way, from stealing from one group to benefit another, in creating levies and other structures to try and pretend that mother nature could be kept at bay, all while profiting from real estate sales and property taxes. The involvement of more government clowns in the form of the Army Corps of Engineers after Betsy destroyed most of the existing levy system only showed further hubris. Massive levies up and down the Mississippi, while preventing flooding for some, only worsen flooding for others, while directing massive flooding down to the mouth of the Miss. and N.O. The Army Corps even admitted that the levies were inadequate and improperly maintained before Katrina, yet more tax dollars were stolen to rebuild them once again, at a level inadequate to stand up to the worst possible storms once again. Government has failed N.O. and EVERYONE time and time again, yet even this clown is calling for more government to address the injustice marked by the fact that only white middle class neighborhoods have come back and not the flood-prone 9th ward. They people want it every possible way, yet never learn the root cause of all of their problems. Absent government violence and force, N.O. would have grown to sustainable limits and not the size or vulnerable position it did before Betsy or Katrina. But some are simply unwilling to imagine a world in which their agenda doesn’t have the power and violence of government promoting it.
Mother nature won, pure and simple. The only thing I remember from after the event was the nigs were definitely nigging.