A: Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, during the early morning hours. The category 3 hurricane, which also hit parts of Mississippi and Alabama, sustained winds of 100 to 140 miles per hour, killed almost 2,000 people and caused more than $100 billion in damages. read more
Katrina exacerbated these conditions, and left many of New Orleans’s poorest citizens even more vulnerable than they had been before the storm. In all, Hurricane Katrina killed nearly 2,000 people and affected some 90,000 square miles of the United States. Hundreds of thousands of evacuees scattered far and wide. read more