What made Hurricane Katrina a catastrophe, and why its horrors linger 20 years later

Twenty years after one of the most costly and transformative disasters to hit the United States, visuals from Katrina are seared into collective memories – of a major American city drowning.

Two decades ago, before Hurricane Katrina inflicted unprecedented devastation along the Gulf Coast, before it killed at least 1392
people and displaced hundreds of thousands, before levees failed and floodwaters swallowed New Orleans, before the glaring lapses in the Government response led to years of questions about how to better prepare for such disasters … before all that, there was the anticipation of a Category 5 hurricane carving a path toward the Louisiana coast.

“This could be the storm that everyone feared,” a front-page story in The Washington Post proclaimed on August 29, 2005.

And it was.

August 24, 2005: Tropical Storm Katrina approaching Florida on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. Photo / Getty Images

Twenty years after one of the country’s most costly, deadly and transformative disasters, memories may fade and younger generations have no firsthand recollection of how Katrina unfolded. It becomes easier to forget what made the storm so catastrophic, how much of the death and destruction was the result of human failing rather than nature’s wrath alone.

August 25, 2005: A man washes sand from his face as 80km/h winds blow in advance of Hurricane Katrina in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Photo / Getty Images

Here is a brief, incomplete visual timeline of what happened before, during and immediately after a storm that forever reshaped parts of the Gulf Coast:

“I don’t have any way to get out”

By the morning of August 28, 2005, Katrina had already barrelled across Florida and swooped through the Gulf of Mexico on its way north.

That Sunday, a prescient warning came from the National Weather Service in New Orleans, about 19 hours before Katrina made landfall in the small Louisiana outpost of Buras.

August 28, 2005: Traffic is backed up over the Mississippi River Bridge as residents try to leave New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina lands the next day. Photo / Getty Images

Forecaster Robert Ricks made the call to issue the dire alert at 10.11am, predicting Katrina could cause “human suffering incredible by modern standards”.

“Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks, perhaps longer,” the warning read. “At least one half of well-constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail, leaving those homes severely damaged or destroyed.”

August 29, 2005: Lower Ninth Ward residents stranded on the roofs wait for a rescue boat. Photo / Getty Images

It went on to envision all manner of suffering, including the vulnerability of commercial buildings, apartment complexes and high-rises, the deadly dangers of flying debris, the likely devastation of crops, the potential for long-lasting power outages and debilitating water shortages.

It was among a growing chorus of warnings.

August 30, 2005: Floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina cover streets in New Orleans. After several levee failures, officials estimated that 80% of the city was inundated. Photo / Getty Images

President George W. Bush declared a state of emergency for Louisiana and Mississippi. The mayor of New Orleans issued the first-ever mandatory evacuation order for the city. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime event,” Mayor Ray Nagin said, imploring people to leave.

Along the coast, people jammed highways, filled hotels and overwhelmed gas stations as they fled.

August 30, 2005: A SUV lies against a house and rubble in Biloxi, Mississippi. Photo / Getty Images

But of course, tens of thousands of New Orleanians, many of them poor and Black, many facing chronic health issues, had no access to the transportation necessary to escape a city that sat largely below sea level, protected only by an ageing system of levees and pumps. The Superdome, home to the New Orleans Saints, would be used as a shelter of last resort, officials announced as the storm bore down.

“I know they’re saying, ‘Get out of town,’” 74-year-old Hattie Johns told a Post reporter as Katrina approached, “but I don’t have any way to get out”.

“Greater than our worst fears”

Katrina swept ashore early on a Monday morning as a Category 3 storm, its fierce winds and swelling surge leaving a trail of destruction that stretched across multiple states.

The storm sank boats and levelled communities in places such as Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, where it first made landfall. It made a second landfall over Hancock County, Mississippi, near the mouth of the Pearl River.

August 31, 2005: US President George W. Bush looks out over devastation from Hurricane Katrina. Photo / Getty Images

Rising waters killed dozens at an apartment complex in Biloxi, Mississippi, and obliterated nearby casinos. The surge engulfed antebellum mansions near the waterfront in Gulfport, buckled bridges and roads, and left scars that stretched from Pass Christian to Ocean Springs to Pascagoula. In Alabama, flooding that reached a dozen feet deep washed away homes on Dauphin Island and swamped parts of downtown Mobile.

Further inland, Katrina dumped massive rainfall on the Mississippi Delta and spun off tornadoes in parts of the South.

Katrina had hit his state “like a ton of bricks,” Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour told reporters, saying he feared how high the toll of casualties could climb.

September 1, 2005: The floor of the Houston Astrodome is covered by Hurricane Katrina refugees. Photo / Getty Images

New Orleans saw its own first wave of destruction. Downtown high rises were scarred by shattered windows. The winds peeled away part of the roof of the Superdome. Fallen trees and debris left roads impassable, and power and water went out. Reports trickled in of extensive flooding in some outlying areas, such as St. Bernard Parish.

But at least in those early hours, there was also a sense of cautious optimism that the Big Easy had somehow dodged the big one.

“This wasn’t it,” one resident told a Post reporter as he walked his dog along the shuttered French Quarter soon after Katrina had passed.

That initial relief did not last.

September 2, 2005: Crew members of an Air Force C-17 cargo transport direct victims of Hurricane Katrina onto the plane for evacuation to a shelter in San Antonio. Photo / Getty Images

Soon after the storm, several levees breached, including critical failures at spots such as the 17th Street Canal and the Industrial Canal.

Devastating flooding soon followed in about 80% of the city, inundating entire neighbourhoods, leaving people stranded in attics and on rooftops and plunging the city into prolonged chaos.

“Within some sections of our city, the water is as deep as 20 feet,” Nagin told a television station.

The storm had moved on, but the misery it caused was only beginning.

“The devastation is greater than our worst fears,” Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said. “It’s just totally overwhelming.”

“This is mass chaos”

The ordeal that followed produced images that remain seared into collective memories of a major American city drowning.

Of rescue boats coming and going through the murky waters. Of stranded residents, waiting on rooftops and stoops and atop parking garages. Of desperate crowds awaiting federal aid that was excruciatingly slow to arrive.

Of despairing people – parents, grandparents, children – camped out along highway overpasses. Or those trying to flee on foot, some of whom perished on the pavement in the searing heat of late summer. Of National Guard troops in the streets and helicopters circling above.

September 3, 2005: New Orleans residents paddle through flood waters. Phoro / Getty Images

Or of the exodus by those who were able, to Baton Rouge and Houston, to Dallas and Atlanta. Many had lost everything. Many never returned.

“This is mass chaos,” a 27-year-old National Guard policeman who had been stationed outside the Superdome told a Post reporter as the conditions grew more dire.

“We’ve been trying to get out,” Cornelius Washington told The Post as he walked along an overpass near the Superdome days after the floodwaters had filled the saucer-shaped city like a bathtub. “No one is giving the who, what, where, why and when. When they give us information, it’s about what they’re not going to do.”

“I never thought I would see New Orleans this way,” a man named Jose Mejilla said in Spanish, after he had walked several miles from his home carrying a duffel bag that held his only belongings. “I feel like I’m dead.”

A man peers down his street which was devastated by flooding and winds from Hurricane Katrina. Photo / Michael Robinson Chávez, The Washington Post

This reporter, who was in New Orleans to document the storm and its aftermath, felt much the same.

“It was worse than I could have imagined,” I wrote in a journal several days after arriving. “I have seen the weary and hungry and dying outside the Superdome and the convention centre and living on the concrete of Interstate 10 … I have been on rescue boats as they glide along the oil-black water, past the floating dead on their way to find the living.”

The deserted streets, the submerged neighbourhoods, the armed soldiers on patrols. It felt and still feels inexplicable.

“This,” I scribbled one Monday in New Orleans, a week after Katrina hit, “can’t be America.”

“Katrina revealed weaknesses”

Books have been published, documentaries filmed and government reports written about what made Katrina so devastating, why the memory of its horrors is so enduring and what could have prevented some of the suffering and death.

This much is certain, said Mark Davis, director of the Tulane Centre for Environmental Law at Tulane University: Katrina was powerful, but nature alone did not cause such a catastrophe.

September 5, 2005: A makeshift grave near the Garden District in New Orleans. Photo / Michael Robinson Chávez, The Washington Post

“It was a political and government failure,” he said in an interview this week. “Katrina revealed weaknesses.”

Weaknesses in the levees. Weaknesses in planning. Weaknesses in a city with deep inequalities and inadequate resources to deal with calamity on such a massive scale.

Some of the weaknesses that existed before Katrina changed over time. After the storm, Congress gave Fema increased authority during natural disasters and established it as a separate agency within the Department of Homeland Security, amid other reforms.

September 5, 2005: Firefighters pass a burning home near the French Quarter, one of numerous fires that erupted in the wake of the hurricane. Photo / Michael Robinson Chávez, The Washington Post

The rebuilt and more comprehensive levee system around New Orleans, while not invincible, has left the city less exposed to the type of storm it faced two decades ago.

“We are much better protected,” said Norma Jean Mattei, an emeritus professor of environmental engineering at the University of New Orleans, and a former president of the American Society of Civil Engineers. “Nothing is guaranteed … But as long as we maintain it properly, we’re in a much better situation than we were before Katrina.”

September 9, 2005: Members of the US and Mexican navies work to clean an elementary school in D’lberville, Mississippi, which would be used as shelter for Katrina evacuees. Photo / Getty Images

But Mattei, a New Orleans native, has a broader worry. In an era of climate change, the nation is facing more frequent and more intense weather-related disasters, and many places remain vulnerable to the sort of cataclysmal event that Katrina made clear was possible.

Davis believes other monumental disasters inevitably will strike. That’s part of why he worries so deeply about the recent cuts to Fema, the National Weather Service and other key pieces of the country’s ability to forecast and respond to such events.

“I’m seeing evidence that we are actually going the wrong way,” he said.

September 19, 2005: The 17th Street Canal, where a levee breach contributed to the devastation of New Orleans after Katrina. Photo / Ricky Carioti, The Washington Post

In New Orleans, where so much is different and so much has endured 20 years later, Davis said residents carry with them the realisation that everything can change in a blink. And that without the right planning and diligence, survival isn’t a sure bet.

“I think we came out of it with a greater sense of our own mortality – as a people and a city,” he said.

It’s a lesson, he believes, that the nation would be wise to remember.

“Katrina is a bigger thing than what happened to New Orleans,” he said. “It’s about what happened to America.”

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