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Hurricane aftermath louisiana12/29/2023 Bush, seemed unaware of just how bad things were in New Orleans and elsewhere: how many people were stranded or missing how many homes and businesses had been damaged how much food, water and aid was needed. Officials, even including President George W. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) took days to establish operations in New Orleans, and even then did not seem to have a sound plan of action. Yet the government–particularly the federal government–seemed unprepared for the disaster. The Coast Guard rescued some 34,000 people in New Orleans alone, and many ordinary citizens commandeered boats, offered food and shelter, and did whatever else they could to help their neighbors. Many people acted heroically in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Crowds of refugees driven from their homes by Hurricane Katrina had gathered in hopes of being evacuated. Quintella Williams feeds her 9-day-old baby girl, Akea, outside the Superdome as she awaits evacuation from the flooded city. Eventually, nearly 80 percent of the city was under some quantity of water. Bernard Parish and the Ninth Ward were under so much water that people had to scramble to attics and rooftops for safety. Water seeped through the soil underneath some levees and swept others away altogether.īy 9 a.m., low-lying places like St. When the storm surge (as high as 9 meters in some places) arrived, it overwhelmed many of the city’s unstable levees and drainage canals. Some 10,000 had sought shelter in the Superdome, while tens of thousands of others chose to wait out the storm at home.īy the time Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans early in the morning on Monday, August 29, it had already been raining heavily for hours. (For example, some 112,000 of New Orleans’ nearly 500,000 people did not have access to a car.) By nightfall, almost 80 percent of the city’s population had evacuated. He also declared that the Superdome, a stadium located on relatively high ground near downtown, would serve as a “shelter of last resort” for people who could not leave the city. The day before Katrina hit, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued the city’s first-ever mandatory evacuation order. Neighborhoods that sat below sea level, many of which housed the city’s poorest and most vulnerable people, were at great risk of flooding. On August 30, 2005, water spilled over along the Inner Harbor Navigational Canal.īefore the storm, officials worried that surge could overtop some levees and cause short-term flooding, but no one predicted levees might collapse below their designed height. ![]() 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. 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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