Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall , devastated the New Orleans area and much of the neighboring Mississippi Gulf Coast. Here are some key facts and figures:
Death toll: The number of people who died in Katrina has been continually puzzled over, with researchers attempting to determine what should and should not be attributed to the storm. The official National Hurricane Center death toll , down substantially from an earlier estimated 1,833 deaths. The took into account findings from medical logs.
Costliest in history: Katrina remains the , largely because of the accompanying levee failures that inundated New Orleans. Damage has been estimated at $125 billion in 2005 dollars, or $201 billion in today’s dollars.
Levee breaches: The New Orleans area levees when Katrina hit have been described by the Army Corps of Engineers as a “system in name only,” incrementally funded and using insufficient design standards. The result was a manmade tragedy. The levee system saw 54 breaches, which caused 80% of New Orleans to flood. The system has since been replaced with a of levees, floodwalls, gates and pumping stations that is widely viewed as a vast improvement. It remains the Corps’ biggest project of its kind.
Number of displaced: More than a million people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama are estimated to have been displaced.
Population change: New Orleans’ population dropped by more than half in the aftermath of the storm, from 484,674 in 2000 to an estimated 230,172 in 2006, Census data from 2020 showed the city’s population recovery had and begun to decline again, mirroring pre-Katrina trends. The 2020 census put the number at around 384,000. The decline has been accompanied by stark demographic shifts, with 53% of residents now identifying as Black compared to two-thirds before Katrina.
Sources: The Data Center, the National Hurricane Center, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Times-Picayune staff reports.
