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 New Orleans, Lousiana
August 28-September 2, 2005
A storm ripped open a city’s heart and exposed society’s failings.
What happened?
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August 28: After coming ashore in Florida, Katrina was headed for Louisiana. New Orleans’s mayor issued an evacuation order, but thousands chose to stay or had no way to leave.
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August 29: Katrina’s eye passed just east of New Orleans. Water began gushing into the city through a break in one of its levees.
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August 30: The storm had moved inland and died, but in New Orleans, water inundated the city as levees failed in 28 places. Hundreds of people drowned in their homes or were stranded on rooftops.
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September 2: Food, water, and buses finally arrived at the Louisiana Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center for residents who had sought shelter there as much as four days earlier. |
Across the entire Gulf Coast, Katrina is believed to have killed some 1,800 people, including more than 1,500 in New Orleans. Tens of thousands more were left homeless. Katrina was only a Category 3 hurricane when it hit New Orleans. But circumstances conspired to make it one of the worst disasters in U.S. history.
We won’t soon forget what happened. People trapped on rooftops after the water had risen through the floorboards, poured through windows, and filled the attic. Mothers and small children—and children without their mothers—stranded for days in the overcrowded Superdome.
Here was New Orleans, one of America’s most vibrant and visited cities, underwater. It’s hard to believe how easily a natural disaster became an unnatural disaster.
Continue to An Unnatural Disaster. >>
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