I thought Katrina hit the Louisiana coast as a Cat 3 and lost strength as it moved up to Mississippi. What caught New Orleans residents off-guard was the tremendous flooding from all that rain finally sluicing down the Mississippi River three days later. That overwhelmed the mismanaged and dilapidated system of levees around the city. Residents thought the danger had passed with the hurricane but didn’t reckon on the floods.
“I thought Katrina hit the Louisiana coast as a Cat 3 and lost strength as it moved up to Mississippi. What caught New Orleans residents off-guard was the tremendous flooding from all that rain finally sluicing down the Mississippi River three days later. That overwhelmed the mismanaged and dilapidated system of levees around the city. Residents thought the danger had passed with the hurricane but didn’t reckon on the floods.”
No, that’s incorrect. Katrina hit Mississippi, not Louisiana, specifically the eye came ashore right around Pass Christian MS. It pretty much wiped the Mississippi Gulf Coast off the map with a storm surge of 28’. It had come across a marshy portion of a peninsula in southeast Louisiana but the real landfall was in Mississippi. What happened in New Orleans was the storm pushed a wall of water into Lake Borgne and Lake Pontchartrain which overwhelmed the levees and flooded the city, New Orleans wasn’t actually hit by the hurricane itself. It was a Cat 3 by wind speed but the storm was massive and that’s what drove the big storm surge that did most of the damage. The hurricane rating system is flawed, a big Cat 3 can do a lot more damage than a small Cat 5. It just goes by wind speed which doesn’t tell you everything about a hurricane’s power.