The storm that divided Louisiana’s timeline into “pre-Katrina” and “post Katrina” came ashore Aug. 29, 2005. 

Katrina made its initial landfall on August 25 along the southeast Florida coast as a Category 1 hurricane. After moving west across south Florida and into the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, it intensified rapidly and attained Category 5 status as it moved northwest. 

Katrina weakened to a Category 3 before making landfall along the northern Gulf Coast, first in southeast Louisiana and then along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. With New Orleans in the storm’s path, forecasters feared the predicted 28-foot storm surge would overtop the city’s levees. 

“We are facing a storm that most of us have long feared,” said Mayor Ray Nagin, who ordered a mandatory evacuation. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Later investigations found that some of the levees failed even at water levels well below what they were supposedly built to withstand. About 80 percent of the city flooded, with some neighborhoods getting as much as 10 feet of water. 

The National Hurricane Center estimated that the storm caused 1,833 deaths. That number was revised down to 1,392 following a review the center released in 2023, making it the third-deadliest hurricane in U.S. history behind the estimated 8,000 dead in the 1900 Galveston hurricane, and the more than 2,500 dead in the 1928 Lake Okeechobee, Fla., storm.

Katrina’s inflation-adjusted damages total $190 billion, according to NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. Of the $120.5 billion in federal spending, about $75 billion went to emergency relief, not rebuilding. Philanthropic giving was about $6.5 billion, while private insurance claims covered less than $30 billion of the losses.

In 2021, the grim anniversary of Katrina was marked by Hurricane Ida, which landed as a Category 4 at Port Fourchon. Officials attributed 55 deaths in the United States directly to Ida, while also deeming the storm indirectly responsible for 28 deaths along the Gulf coast, including 26 in Louisiana and two in Alabama. 

Editor’s note: Information for this piece came from The Data Center, Fox News, NOLA.com and the National Hurricane Center.  

This piece first ran in the Aug. 29, 2024 edition of LaPolitics Weekly. Wish you could have read it then? Subscribe today!