Looking Back on Hurricane Katrina

As the 20 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaches, let's take a look back at the tragedy that rocked New Orleans.  Barely edging the tip of Florida, speeding through the Gulf of Mexico, and making a devastating landfall in Louisiana, Hurricane Katrina is the most costly and one of the five deadliest hurricanes ever to exist. Hurricane Katrina amassed “1,833 fatalities and approximately $108 billion in damage.” The hurricane formed over the Bahamas as a tropical depression, slowly developing and eventually hitting the South side of Florida as a Category 1 hurricane. After passing Florida, it rapidly developed into a Category 5 hurricane, and when landfall was made around Louisiana, Katrina weakened to a Category 3. New Orleans was unfortunate enough to have to try and power through this disaster. In a hurricane, especially for a coastal city, the winds aren’t the issue; it’s normally the storm surges and the flooding resulting from that, “floods that buried up to 80 percent of New Orleans.” Thousands of people were trapped in New Orleans when the hurricane passed, as many decided not to evacuate for the storm. Poverty was a big issue, impacting the evacuation procedures as well. “New Orleans is a city in which 27.9 percent of residents live below the poverty line, 11.7 percent are age 65 or older, only 74.7 percent are high school graduates, and 27.3 percent of households do not have cars.” While the upper-middle-income residents could just board up the windows and leave town, the lower-income residents had few choices, as many don’t own vehicles. Nearly 30,000 people of New Orleans fled to the Superdome, the conditions were dire, the Dome had “limited power, no plumbing, a shredded roof and not nearly enough supplies”, the evacuees had to survive for several days. In the Superdome, the conditions were extremely difficult. Hurricane Katrina was not only a natural disaster but a human tragedy that exposed deep inequalities and left a lasting scar on the city of New Orleans. (Weather.gov, Earth Observatory, USA Today)