With a death toll of more than 1, , Katrina was the third-deadliest hurricane in US history after Galveston in which killed 8, to 12, people and Okeechobee in which killed 2, to 3, people , according to US News and World Report. Much of this damage was likely unavoidable: Katrina was a huge, category 3 hurricane when it hit Louisiana and Mississippi, and it hit areas — including New Orleans — that were largely below sea level and therefore vulnerable to flooding.
But many of the issues were worsened — if not caused — by a government response that was unable to deal with the storm before, during, and after it made landfall. One reason Katrina and the floods it caused broke through New Orleans's levees was because the storm was too strong. But reports since the hurricane have also exposed another culprit: shoddy engineering. More than six months after Katrina hit, the US Army Corps of Engineers released a report in which they took blame for the levees breaking, flat-out admitting that the levees were built in a disjointed fashion based on outdated data.
Much of this, the report revealed, was due to a lack of funding — resulting in a flawed system of levees that was inconsistent in quality, materials, and design. Engineers also failed to account for the region's poor soil quality and sinking land, which created more gaps in barriers. The federal government was largely culpable for this mess, since it was largely on the Corps — a federal agency — to oversee the construction of the levees after Hurricane Betsy flooded New Orleans in As the New York Times's Campbell Robertson and John Schwartz reported, a report placed some of the responsibility for the levees' failures on dysfunctional interactions between local officials and the Corps.
But a new paper published in the journal Water Policy this year — and penned by one of the authors of the report — put the blame more squarely on the Corps, which allegedly made poor decisions during the construction of the levees to save money. The result was some short-term savings for taxpayers and the Corps, but ultimately a bigger disaster through Katrina.
This is just one of the many ways the federal government failed to prevent a disaster in the lead-up to Katrina. Even though there were always serious concerns about how a hurricane could destroy New Orleans, the federal agency in charge of building better levees and flood walls was at times more worried about money than about building proper protections, and relied on outdated data to build what turned out to be deeply flawed structures.
About 1. But as the New York Times's David Gonzalez reported as the storm battered the region, tens of thousands of people remained in the city — not necessarily by choice, but rather because they were too poor to afford a car or bus fare to leave. It was common during and after Katrina to hear people asking why everyone didn't just leave New Orleans.
But the truth is that many of them couldn't leave — as the Times reported — and the government did little to nothing to help them get out of Katrina's path before the hurricane hit. This is one of the reasons Kanye West infamously said that "George Bush doesn't care about black people.
And while New Orleans has reportedly made improvements in its evacuation plans since , the inadequate response at the time of Katrina led to more deaths and pain that could have otherwise been avoided — particularly among impoverished, minority communities.
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. By September 2, four days later, the city and surrounding areas were in full-on crisis mode, with many people and companion animals still stranded, and infrastructure and services collapsing. The city of New Orleans was at a disadvantage even before Hurricane Katrina hit, something experts had warned about for years , but it had limited success in changing policy. The region sits in a natural basin, and some of the city is below sea level so is particularly prone to flooding.
Low-income communities tend to be in the lowest-lying areas. Widespread criticism of the federal response to Katrina led to the resignation of Michael D. In , the U. Army Corps of Engineers, which was responsible for the design of the levee system in New Orleans, acknowledged that outdated and faulty engineering practices used to build the levees led to most of the flooding that occurred due to Katrina.
On the state and local level, Louisiana Gov. Blanco declined to seek reelection in , and died in Nagin left office in , and was later convicted on charges of bribery, fraud and money laundering committed while in office. The mass exodus from the Gulf Coast and New Orleans during and after Katrina represented one of the largest and most sudden relocations of people in U. Some 1. In April , according to the Data Center , the population of New Orleans was ,; by July , not quite a year after Katrina, it had dropped by more than ,, to some , Some of those who left later returned, and by the population reached just over , , or about 80 percent of its pre-Katrina population.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! The authors of the study that counted Louisiana deaths took a different approach, counting only deaths that could be directly attributed to the storm. NOAA, meanwhile, has reviewed death reports and removed indirect deaths from its count, a major reason that its total went down.
Most of the storms are listed by where they made landfall because they occurred before hurricanes were named. Neither does the U. Mutter decided to try to improve on the existing counts for Katrina, seeking to include indirect deaths that had never before been linked to the storm. Some of the responses were helpful. Mutter is sure the true death toll is higher than the official figures. Another effort arrived at a total of more than 4, with a method that researchers use to estimate civilian deaths in conflict zones.
Mutter ran out of funding in , and his work largely stopped then. But people still send him new names for his count, especially around the time of year that Katrina struck. The database — which includes all events since colonial times in which 10 or more people died — was compiled by Wayne Blanchard, a retired manager of emergency management instruction at FEMA.
The findings — estimates of the total number of deaths for Katrina and the other storms, broken down by direct and indirect causes — are expected to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
The project has taken an emotional toll on the NOAA employees who have been involved. Reviewing death records is very different from forecasting storms. Other federal agencies treat the keeping of official death counts as a core job, done by specialists, rather than the side project of people who are trained for other work. The U. Katrina flooded New Orleans less than four years after the Sept.
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