Katrina Revisited: Hurricane Makes Landfall

Let's not rewrite history.

Let's read it.

One year ago today, Hurricane Katrina pounded Louisiana and Mississippi.

I recall the early morning reports from New Orleans. Reporters stood on rain-soaked streets and spoke of how the city had dodged a bullet once again. The Category 5 storm, the predicted devastation, didn't happen. The media seemed disappointed that the story wasn't bigger.

Relieved New Orleans residents were interviewed, expressing their excitement over their good luck that the monster storm had spared them.

Remember?

The weakened yet still powerful Katrina veered toward Mississippi just before making landfall and spared New Orleans a direct hit.

This story was published in The New York Times on August 30, 2005.

Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast with devastating force at daybreak Monday, sparing New Orleans the catastrophic hit that had been feared but inundating parts of the city and heaping damage on neighboring Mississippi where it tossed boats, ripped away scores of roof tops and left many of the major coastal roadways impassable.

Packing 145-mph winds as it made landfall, Katrina left more than a million people in three states without power and submerged highways even hundreds of miles from the center of the storm.

Officials reported at least 35 deaths, with 30 deaths alone in Harrison County, Miss., which includes Gulfport and Biloxi. Emergency workers feared they would find more dead among people believed to be stranded under water and collapsed buildings.

While Katrina proved to be less fearsome than had been predicted, it was still potent enough to rank as one of the most punishing hurricanes ever to hit the United States. Insurance experts said that damage could exceed $9 billion, which would make it one of the costliest storms on record.

In New Orleans, most of the levees held but the storm breached one and flood waters rose to rooftops in one neighborhood. Katrina’s howling winds stripped 15-foot sections off the roof of the Superdome, where as many as 10,000 evacuees were sheltered.

Some of the worst damage reports came from east of the historic city of New Orleans with an estimated 40,000 homes reported flooded in St. Bernard Parish. In Gulfport, Mississippi, the storm left three of five hospitals without working emergency rooms, beachfront homes wrecked and major stretches of Mississippi’s coastal highway flooded and unpassable.

“It came on Mississippi like a ton of bricks,” the state’s governor, Haley Barbour, told a midday news conference. “It’s a terrible storm.”

...Katrina was downgraded from Category 5 — the worst possible storm — to Category 4 as it hit land in eastern Louisiana just after 6 a.m., and in New Orleans, officials said the storm’s slight shift to the east had spared them somewhat. The city is below sea level, and there had been predictions that the historic French Quarter would be under 18 or 20 feet of water.

Still, no one was finding much comfort here, with 100 mph winds and water surges of 15 feet. Officials said early in the day that more than 20 buildings had been toppled.

In short, it was reported that New Orleans weathered the storm, with Mississippi bearing the worst of Katrina's wrath.

One year ago today, I wrote:

Thankfully, the storm weakened before landfall. New Orleans is NOT under water. The catastrophe that was feared hasn't happened.

That's not to say that there isn't tremendous damage. However, it could have been worse.

Now, Katrina has been downgraded to a Category 3.

Photos were picked up by many news outlets to illustrate the damage in New Orleans.




Debris from a fallen building covers several buildings in downtown New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina battered the Louisiana Coast on Monday, Aug. 29, 2005.

What's notable about the first photos out of New Orleans was that the scenes of Katrina's damage were caused by wind, not rain.

The problem was bricks, not water.