I lived through Andrew...in deep South Florida...Andrew was like a nuclear bomb that went off in the middle of the night in the middle of a tornado outbreak. Katrina was a weakening storm going through a ERC in colder shallow waters when hitting MS. She was all surge....deadly for sure but Andrew was a compact bomb.
I remember Andrew, as well. I visited the area a year later, and downed trees were growing sideways.
Katrina had a 35 foot surge. The deadliest storm before that was Camille, which had an 18 foot surge. Not to mention that it took 24 hours for Katrina to clear the area.
The aftermath of Katrina looked like a nuke had been dropped on the entire MS coast. They haven’t fully recovered yet.
BTW, in MS, almost half of the state was declared a disaster area. In my hometown, 150 miles inland, they had curfews and were without power for quite a while, and that county was declared a national disaster area.
I remember a thread you posted about the fatalities. I’ll leave it at that.