We wont be able to feed these folks. Revisit the timeline, impacts, controversy, and disaster recovery of August 2005's Hurricane Katrina, the costliest Atlantic hurricane on record. [39] However, that number also counted four bodies that were near the dome. The office asked him if he could open up the Superdome as a refuge of last resort for the city of New Orleans. The heavy death toll of the hurricane and the subsequent flooding it caused drew international attention, along with widespread and lasting criticism of how local, state and federal authorities handled the storm and its aftermath. The emergency generator later failed, and engineers had to protect the backup generator from floodwaters by creating a hole in a wall and installing a new fuel line. This story has been shared 120,685 times. At noon, he boarded a helicopter. WATCH: Cities of the Underworld: Hurricane Katrina on HISTORY Vault. 2. But the day before the hurricane hit, with the roads jammed with the vehicles of a million fleeing residents, the city of New Orleans decided to house people in the Superdome temporarily. Our editors will review what youve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. We are like animals, Taffany Smith, 25, told the Los Angeles Times, while she gripped her 3-week-old son in her arms. 25% were caused by injury and trauma and 11% were caused by heart conditions. After a traffic jam kept buses from arriving at the Superdome for nearly four hours, a near-riot broke out in the scramble to get on the buses that finally did show up. According to National Geographic, "some argue that indirect hurricane deaths, like being unable to access medical care, should be counted in official numbers.". My instincts as a building manager are to evacuate, he said. Out of 60 nursing homes in New Orleans, 21 had evacuated their residents in advance of Katrina. It had barely risen at all maybe an inch. In New Orleans, where much of the greater metropolitan area is below sea level, federal officials initially believed that the city had dodged the bullet. While New Orleans had been spared a direct hit by the intense winds of the storm, the true threat was soon apparent. [25][26][27], On September 7, speculation arose that the Superdome was now in such a poor condition that it would have to be demolished. [2] Approximately 10,000 residents, along with about 150 National Guardsmen, sheltered in the Superdome anticipating Katrina's landfall. However, tens of thousands of residents could not or would not leave. Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005. Outside, there was anarchy. They knew what that meant: The Superdome was now running on its backup generator, which could power the lights but not much more. There is no particular person for whom Hurricane Katrina was named. A helicopter rescues a family from a rooftop on September 1, 2005. After Hurricane Katrina, which damaged more than 100 school buildings, the state seized control of almost all urban schools and turned them over to independent charter groups. Thornton and Mouton just needed to find a way to keep things under control for 20 hours before it could be enacted. The Katrina survivors who fled devastation only to freeze in Texas Thats been the history. Thornton felt the seconds ticking, each one more dangerous than the last. At least 1,833 died in the hurricane and. https://www.britannica.com/event/Hurricane-Katrina, LiveScience - Hurricane Katrina: Facts, Damage and Aftermath, Hurricane Katrina - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up). Robert Fontaine walks past a burning house fire in New Orleans' Seventh Ward on September 6, 2005. Thornton recruited off-duty NOPD officers to come grab sandbags and carry them from the parking lot, through the loading dock, and back to the generator room from the inside. And despite the fact that this was meant to be a temporary shelter, they ended up being stranded in the stadium for a week. Is everyone here? . - Numerous failures of levees around New Orleans led to catastrophic flooding in the city. The buildings air conditioning system would no longer run, nor would the refrigeration system keeping massive amounts of food from spoiling. All of our employees had left town with the mandatory evacuation, he said. It looks like we cant stop the levee breaches and were being told there could be as much as six to eight feet more of water, Thornton recalls Compass saying. Though leaving in the light of day would be easier, it could also cause hysteria from those left behind in the Dome. On May 12, 2015, rubble remains at what used to be the B.W. No one knew what would happen. They were taken to the Lamar Dixon Expo Center in Baton Rouge. Despite the fact that the Superdome became the city's "refuge of last resort," it was woefully inadequate for housing the thousands of evacuees. In fact, the first hurricane-related deaths occurred the day before Katrina struck when three residents died whilst being evacuated to Baton Rouge. It continued on a course to the northeast, crossing the Mississippi Sound and making a second landfall later that morning near the mouth of the Pearl River. [34] However, after a National Guardsman was attacked with a metal rod, the National Guard put up barbed wire barricades to separate and protect themselves from the other people in the dome, and blocked people from exiting. Never did we think wed be here for nearly a week.. Several hundredof Thorntons part-time employees had shown up as well, unable to evacuate, and hed placed them in one of the club lounges along with the families of some New Orleans Police Department officers. President George W. Bush looks out the window of Air Force One on August 31, 2005, as he flies over New Orleans. The men found a weak spot in the wall, a metal panel around head height, and punched a hole through it. She had heard a lot, from the National Guard, from her husband, from rumors among the employees. Refuge of last resort: Five days inside the Superdome for Hurricane Katrina [48] Overall, the team used six different stadiums for their six home games, including Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge, Cajun Field in Lafayette, Joe Aillet Stadium in Ruston, Malone Stadium in Monroe, and LaddPeebles Stadium in Mobile, Alabama. Despite the planned use of the Superdome as an evacuation center, government officials at the local, state and federal level were criticized for poor preparation and response, especially Mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin, President George W. Bush, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director Michael D. Katrina made landfall that morning as a Category 4 storm with sustained winds in excess of 135 mph. The streets were still flooded, perhaps even worse than before. In the bathrooms, every toilet had ceased to function. Hurricane Ivan it was less than that. The line to get in was already a quarter-mile long. By 7 p.m. everyone was inside and had been checked. [33], During the evening on August 31, about 700 elderly and ill patients were transported out by military helicopters and planes from Louis Armstrong International Airport to Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base in Houston. A man pushes his bicycle through flood waters near the Superdome in New Orleans on Aug. 31, 2005. Corrections? Updated [33] False reports of gunshots also disrupted medical evacuations at the dome. A FEMA employee told Thornton and Mouton they expected to find lots ofdead bodies, and had decided to bring them here, next to the place where those left in the city were fighting to live. And then thenext morning, more bad news: The buses had been rerouted and delayed, sent to a highway overpass where people were stranded. Initially, the Superdome was described as a "lawless, depraved, and chaotic" place, with reports of numerous murders. Families torn apart by the storm wouldnt re-connect for months in some cases. Governor Blanco herself stated, "They have M-16s, and they are locked and loaded. In addition, according to the journalSocial Science & Medicine, there were also long-term mental health consequences of Hurricane Katrina. Although there was a "maintenance regime" theoretically in place for the levees, the Senate committee found that it was "in no way commensurate with the risk posed to these persons and their property." Nothing.. NOAA report- Direct deaths: 520 - Indirect deaths: 565 - Indeterminate cause: 307- Total number of fatalities: 1392. When they got back to the Dome, they arrived to chaos. [13][35] The attacker was later jailed. Residents of Saucier, Mississippi, line up to get gas on August 31, 2005. It has been 10 years since Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed the city ofNew Orleans. 4:23 PM EST, Mon January 16, 2023. Twenty-five thousand miserable people - many of whom lost their homes to Hurricane Katrina - hunkered down with little food and little water, overflowing toilets, stifling heat and the. And cars were overturned on Poydras Street.. Most of the tragedies associated with Hurricane Katrina could have been avoided, but due to a variety of reasons, the hurricane quickly became one of the worst disasters to ever occur in the United States. The men sat in stunned silence. Emergency lights worked intermittently as engineers struggled to keep backup generators running as the area around the dome flooded. Daylight could be seen from inside the dome, and rain was pouring in. This death was one of only six deaths at the Superdome: one person overdosed and four others died of natural causes. [13], When the serious flooding of the city began on August 30 after the levees had broken, the Superdome began to fill slowly with water, though it remained confined only to the field level. Photo credit: AP Photo/Eric Gay. The moonlight was shining on the water., She paused. Its tenants, the New Orleans Saints, were talking about an open-air stadium on the Mississippi river or moving to another city. Doug and Denise Thornton woke early to drive back to New Orleans. After levees and flood walls protecting New Orleans failed, much of the city was underwater. Hurricane Katrina reached Category 5 strength in the Gulf Coast, and although it was a Category 3 when it made landfall, it was still one of the "worst disasters in U.S. history," according to World Vision. Hurricane Katrina: 10 Facts About the Deadly Storm and Its Legacy And it's possible that the deaths may have even numbered as high as 10,000. Hurricane Katrina, tropical cyclone that struck the southeastern United States in late August 2005. The food inside the freezers had soon rotted, and "the smell was inescapable.". The hurricane and its aftermath claimed more than 1,800 lives, and it ranked as the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. Blanco declined to seek reelection in 2007, and died in 2019. Thornton and Mouton found this odd, but figured the drains in the city had been backed up. This is a national disgrace, he said. When buses finally arrived yesterday, a desperate group of refugees broke loose from a cordon of National Guardsmen, but were stopped by heavily armed police toting machine guns. The Superdome was, as far as Thornton was concerned, completely destroyed. People wade through high water in front of the Superdome in New Orleans on August 30, 2005. And as the media portrayed New Orleans as a lawless place filled with violence with overblown and unverified reports, police and rescue efforts were redirected against the imaginary violence. [49][50] Grambling State University beat Southern University, 5035.[51]. The mass exodus from the Gulf Coast and New Orleans during and after Katrina represented one of the largest and most sudden relocations of people in U.S. history. The skies darkened, and the wind started to pick up. They mulled it over. With the failure of the air conditioning, temperatures inside the Superdome reached the high 90s, with heavy humidity.
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