Hurricane Katrina

June 28, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

On the early morning of August 29, 2005, a father in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans stepped outside to grab supplies from his truck. The winds of Hurricane Katrina were ferocious, but the worst seemed to have passed. Then he heard a low rumbling explosion followed by a gushing roar. At the end of the block, a wall of gray water was rolling toward him, moving fast enough to lift a parked car and slam it into a house. The levees had breached. Within minutes, the street was a river eight feet deep. The man got his daughters onto the roof, but their home sheared from its foundations and began to float down what was once their road, slowly splintering and sinking. This was not just a hurricane. It was a catastrophic infrastructure failure that turned a natural disaster into a man-made one.

A City Built on Borrowed Time

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What you'll learn

1 (00:58) **The Storm Arrives** - A father in the Lower Ninth Ward braces as Hurricane Katrina batters New Orleans; the levees breach and a wall of water floods the neighborhood.
2 (05:30) **Why New Orleans Was Vulnerable** - The city’s geography as a below-sea-level basin, its levee and pump system, and the social inequality mapped onto elevation.
3 (11:35) **Katrina Forms and Intensifies** - A tropical depression becomes a Category 5 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, heading straight for New Orleans.
4 (17:30) **Evacuation Chaos and the Superdome** - Highways jam; tens of thousands without transport are left behind; the Superdome opens as a shelter of last resort.
5 (20:08) **Landfall and the Levee Breaches** - Katrina hits as a Category 3; the city initially seems spared, then the levees fail and water pours in.
6 (24:21) **The Humanitarian Crisis Begins** - Tens of thousands are trapped; rescue is improvised and slow.
7 (28:09) **Hospital Evacuations** - A nurse and staff carry patients up dark stairwells to the roof for helicopter extraction, one at a time.

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Show Notes

In August 2005, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico barrelled toward the United States. When Hurricane Katrina finally struck land, it devastated hundreds of miles of shoreline, but the disaster that captured the world’s attention unfolded in one place above all: the city of New Orleans.

Within hours of the storm passing, the flood defence levees meant to protect the city broke, and it began to fill with water. What followed the natural disaster was a crisis that raised profound questions about preparedness, inequality, and the ability and willingness of a modern nation to protect one of its own great cities.

But why was New Orleans so vulnerable in the first place? What was the response in the wake of the hurricane and flooding? And what did the disaster reveal about the systems of engineering, government and society that were supposed to protect it?

This is a Short History Of Hurricane Katrina.

A Noiser podcast production. Hosted by John Hopkins. With thanks to Jed Horne, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City.

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