Katrina pummeled huge parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, but the desperation was most concentrated in New Orleans. For instance, some people tried to walk over the Crescent City Connection bridge to the nearby suburb of Gretna, but police officers with shotguns forced them to turn back.
Meanwhile, it was nearly impossible to leave New Orleans: Poor people especially, without cars or anyplace else to go, were stuck. Morial Convention Center complex, but they found nothing there but chaos. Tens of thousands of people desperate for food, water and shelter broke into the Ernest N. City leaders had no real plan for anyone else. At the Superdome in New Orleans, where supplies had been limited to begin with, officials accepted 15,000 more refugees from the storm on Monday before locking the doors. The levees along the Mississippi River were strong and sturdy, but the ones built to hold back Lake Pontchartrain, Lake Borgne and the waterlogged swamps and marshes to the city’s east and west were much less reliable.įor one thing, many had nowhere to go. Over the course of the 20th century, the Army Corps of Engineers had built a system of levees and seawalls to keep the city from flooding. Though about half the city actually lies above sea level, its average elevation is about six feet below sea level–and it is completely surrounded by water. That day, the National Weather Service predicted that after the storm hit, “most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks…perhaps longer.”ĭid you know? During the past century, hurricanes have flooded New Orleans six times: in 1915, 1940, 1947, 1965, 19. By August 28, evacuations were underway across the region. The tropical depression that became Hurricane Katrina formed over the Bahamas on August 23, 2005, and meteorologists were soon able to warn people in the Gulf Coast states that a major storm was on its way.
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