Home Safety Zone - Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina was our first major hurricane to make landfall in the US during the 2005 hurricanes. A few had come before her in the year, but they could not come close to the destruction that was left in hurricane Katrina's wake. As we watched the devastation and the aftermath of that horrible storm on the television, many of us had a hard time believing that it was the United States, it looked too much like another one of the problems in the world that belong to someone else, but this time it was ours and we did not know how to handle it. It came on too hard and fast for any last minute preparations to do any good.

The stats on hurricane Katrina

There were only 10 named storms before Katrina. She was also the 4th hurricane of the 2005 hurricane season and the 1st category 5 of 2005. She was so powerful that only hurricane Rita and hurricane Wilma were more so. In fact, there have been only 5 others storms ever reported in the Atlantic basin that were stronger than she was. As we all know now, it was her storm surge that caused the levees in New Orleans to be breeched as the waters of Lake Pontchartrain flooded the streets of the city.

Many hurricane safety measures were futile in the face of such a powerful storm and in the end 1,302 people died as a result of her ferocity. Damages have been estimated at around $70-$130 billion. Katrina caused so much damage and destruction that she stands out as the most destructive and the costliest natural disaster that the United States has ever seen. After she moved on, Katrina left upwards of 5 million people without power, more than a million people were displaced and many of those have yet to return or nothing at all to return to. The force of a storm may be something that none of us can do anything about, but we can control how much preparation goes into our weather safety plans.

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