Katrina Hits: New Orleans Levees Break, City Drowns

Hurricane Katrina made landfall near Buras, Louisiana, on the morning of August 29, 2005, as a Category 3 storm with sustained winds of 125 miles per hour. The wind damage was devastating, but what followed was catastrophic: the federal levee system protecting New Orleans failed in over 50 locations, flooding 80 percent of the city and trapping tens of thousands of residents on rooftops, in attics, and inside the Superdome. The storm killed approximately 1,836 people and caused over $108 billion in damage, making it the costliest natural disaster in American history at the time. Katrina had formed over the Bahamas on August 23 and crossed southern Florida as a Category 1 hurricane before entering the Gulf of Mexico, where it exploded into a Category 5 monster. Warm Gulf waters fed the storm to peak winds of 175 miles per hour. Mandatory evacuation orders were issued for New Orleans on August 28, but roughly 100,000 residents, many of them elderly, poor, or without transportation, could not leave. The city provided no buses. The Superdome was designated as a shelter of last resort, and roughly 20,000 people crowded inside. The storm surge along the Mississippi coast reached nearly 28 feet, obliterating beach communities from Waveland to Biloxi. Casino barges were hurled hundreds of yards inland. But the worst destruction occurred in New Orleans, where the levees built and maintained by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers proved fatally inadequate. Floodwalls along the Industrial Canal, the 17th Street Canal, and the London Avenue Canal failed not because the storm exceeded their design capacity, but because of fundamental engineering flaws in their construction. Water poured into neighborhoods at terrifying speed. The government response was disastrously slow. FEMA director Michael Brown was removed from command after ten days. Evacuees at the Superdome and the Convention Center waited days for food, water, and transportation. Television footage of American citizens wading through floodwater, begging for help from rooftops, and dying in plain sight shocked the world. The racial and economic dimensions of the disaster were impossible to ignore: the neighborhoods that flooded most severely were overwhelmingly Black and poor. Katrina exposed failures at every level of government and forced a national reckoning with infrastructure neglect, emergency preparedness, and the persistent inequalities of American life.