Katrina comes ashore at Buras; hours later, New Orleans is drowning
An estimated 100,000 to 150,000 people remained in New Orleans despite mandatory evacuation orders. Hurricane Katrina made landfall near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, as a Category 3 storm with 125 mph winds, then struck again near the Louisiana-Mississippi border hours later. Storm surge caused 53 breaches in the region's flood protection system, and 80 percent of New Orleans was submerged. Katrina stayed a hurricane more than 150 miles inland, weakening near Meridian, Mississippi.
Investigators later found the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, tasked under the Flood Control Act of 1965 with building New Orleans' hurricane defenses, responsible for the failed floodwalls that caused most of the deaths. A federal appeals court ruled the Corps could not be held liable, thanks to a 1928 law. The disaster became a defining test of the federal government's disaster response.
QWhy did New Orleans' evacuation buses sit flooded and empty instead of carrying people out of the city?
Louisiana's own emergency plan called for using school and public buses to move residents who had no cars, but the buses never rolled. Not enough licensed drivers were available, and Governor Kathleen Blanco did not sign the emergency waiver that would have let any licensed driver get behind the wheel. Private caregiving facilities made the same mistake on a smaller scale, waiting too long to call the bus companies and ambulance services they depended on. The vehicles that could have carried thousands to safety instead sat in low-lying lots, where the same floodwaters later submerged them.
QHow many people sheltered inside the Superdome as Katrina came ashore?
About 26,000 people crowded into the Louisiana Superdome, which the city had designated a 'refuge of last resort' rather than a full-service shelter. Officials supplied food and water for several days while the storm raged outside, but the building was never equipped or stocked for a population that size. The Superdome sat alongside other last-resort refuges the city opened for residents who could not leave, a fallback plan for the people that Mayor Ray Nagin's mandatory evacuation order, issued that same morning, was supposed to have already moved out of the city.
QWhy did Katrina's brush with Cuba only rate as a footnote compared to what hit Louisiana?
Katrina brushed western Cuba on August 28 while still building toward its Gulf peak, dropping more than 8 inches of rain and knocking out phone and power lines in Pinar del Rio Province, where authorities evacuated roughly 8,000 people. Cuban television reported the coastal town of Surgidero de Batabano was 90 percent underwater. Days earlier, the storm had crossed the Bahamas as a tropical storm and produced nothing worse than 'fresh breezes' on the islands. The same system that barely troubled the Bahamas had already produced, in miniature, the flooding it would soon inflict on an American city many times Batabano's size.
