What was hurricane katrina like

A combination of civic boosterism and excessive faith in engineered water-control systems led New Orleans to keep reclaiming swampland for housing, building canal systems for commercial ship traffic, and dredging spillways that were supposed to draw floodwater away from the city when the need arose. These systems all failed during Katrina. The storm caused massive, sustained flooding. Two hundred and sixty thousand people had to leave their homes. An ambitious long-term hurricane-protection plan passed by Congress and signed into law by Johnson was never completed.

Katrina flooded out many white people as well as Black people, and, within Black New Orleans, many working-class and middle-class people as well as poor people.

But the dynamic of recovery was all about race. New Orleans is a Black-majority city. Nagin was later convicted of taking bribes from city contractors. The committee soon unveiled a plan that entailed not rebuilding some of the Black neighborhoods that had flooded. Many residents were outraged; on the Martin Luther King, Jr.

Instead, the idea was that every homeowner should get prompt and generous help in order to return and rebuild. New Orleans has a large racial gap in resources—the Black poverty rate is triple the white poverty rate—so whites were able to move back more quickly and with less hardship. For a decade after Katrina, New Orleans was a whiter city than it had been before.

That fed into a venerable tradition, in Black New Orleans, of suspicion of what white New Orleans might be up to. But over the Gulf of Mexico, some miles west of Key West, the storm gathered strength above the warmer waters of the gulf. On August 28, the storm was upgraded to a category 5 hurricane, with steady winds of mph. In this satellite image, a close-up of the center of Hurricane Katrina's rotation is seen at a.

EST on August 29, over southeastern Louisiana. Katrina made landfall that morning as a Category 4 storm with sustained winds in excess of mph. On the morning of August 29, , Katrina made landfall around 60 miles southeast of New Orleans.

Within an hour, nearly every building in lower Plaquemines Parish would be destroyed. Winds of mph and storm surges of 28 feet devastated much of Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi. Army Corps of Engineers, which administered the levees, received a report that water had broken through the concrete flood wall between the 17th Street Canal and the city.

The Industrial Canal was later breached as well, flooding the neighborhood known as the Lower Ninth Ward. By late afternoon, the breaching of the London Avenue Canal levees had left 80 percent of New Orleans underwater.

Because of the ensuing destruction and loss of life, the storm is often considered one of the worst in U. The devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina exposed a series of deep-rooted problems, including controversies over the federal government's response , difficulties in search-and-rescue efforts, and lack of preparedness for the storm, particularly with regard to the city's aging series of levees—50 of which failed during the storm, significantly flooding the low-lying city and causing much of the damage.

Katrina's victims tended to be low income and African American in disproportionate numbers , and many of those who lost their homes faced years of hardship. Ten years after the disaster, then-President Barack Obama said of Katrina , "What started out as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster—a failure of government to look out for its own citizens. The city of New Orleans and other coastal communities in Katrina's path remain significantly altered more than a decade after the storm, both physically and culturally.

The damage was so extensive that some pundits had argued, controversially, that New Orleans should be permanently abandoned , even as the city vowed to rebuild. As of this writing, the population had grown back to nearly 80 percent of where it was before the hurricane.

Katrina first formed as a tropical depression in Caribbean waters near the Bahamas on August 23, It officially reached hurricane status two days later, when it passed over southeastern Miami as a Category 1 storm. The tempest blew through Miami at 80 miles per hour, where it uprooted trees and killed two people. Katrina then weakened to a tropical storm, since hurricanes require warm ocean water to sustain speed and strength and begin to weaken over land. However, the storm then crossed back into the Gulf of Mexico, where it quickly regained strength and hurricane status.

Read a detailed timeline of how the storm developed. On August 27, the storm grew to a Category 3 hurricane. At its largest, Katrina was so wide its diameter stretched across the Gulf of Mexico.

Before the storm hit land, a mandatory evacuation was issued for the city of New Orleans, which had a population of more than , at the time. Tens of thousands of residents fled. But many stayed, particularly among the city's poorest residents and those who were elderly or lacked access to transportation.

Many sheltered in their homes or made their way to the Superdome, the city's large sports arena, where conditions would soon deteriorate into hardship and chaos. Katrina passed over the Gulf Coast early on the morning of August Officials initially believed New Orleans was spared as most of the storm's worst initial impacts battered the coast toward the east, near Biloxi, Mississippi, where winds were the strongest and damage was extensive.

But later that morning, a levee broke in New Orleans, and a surge of floodwater began pouring into the low-lying city. The waters would soon overwhelm additional levees. The following day, Katrina weakened to a tropical storm, but severe flooding inhibited relief efforts in much of New Orleans. An estimated 80 percent of the city was soon underwater. It takes warm water off the Yucatan Peninsula does a loop in the Gulf of Mexico and spins up the eastern edge of Florida into the Gulf Stream.

Water above 79 degrees 26 degrees Celsius is hurricane fuel. But these warm water spots keep fueling a storm. In the past 40 years more hurricanes are rapidly intensifying more often and climate change seems to be at least partly to be blame, Kossin and Vecchi said. Hurricane Grace already rapidly intensified this year and last year Hanna, Laura, Sally, Teddy, Gamma and Delta all rapidly intensified.

When a new eyewall forms, often a storm becomes larger in size but a bit weaker, Kossin said. So key for Ida is when and if that happens. It happened for Katrina, which steadily weakened in the 12 hours before it made landfall.