Hurricane Katrina by the Numbers: 10 Years Later

In 2005, the Category 3 hurricane slammed the Gulf Coast, destroying more than 600,000 homes.

Once catering nearly exclusively to black customers, the flooded grocery finally reopened past year , responding to an influx of Hispanics and whites by adding tamales and organic produce to New Orleans staples like Camellia red beans.

Visualizing the interiors of storms helps predict how big they’ll get and where they might go – important information when lives and livelihoods are at stake.

The city of New Orleans looked like it could take a direct hit.

While the city auctions off formerly blighted property, the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, or NORA, is trying to drive reinvestment in long-neglected neighborhoods. She said the mayor had made himself virtually “unavailable”, only stepping out of his quarters to do short press conferences.

I arrived in New Orleans the day before the storm hit, sent there to cover the story for the Philadelphia Inquirer. So the challenge is for leaders at all levels to find new ways to coordinate their disaster plans – and to accept that climate change, a booming world population and other forces are causing more large-scale disasters.

From the hardscrabble Lower Ninth Ward to middle-class Gentilly, thousands of abandoned homes still litter neighborhoods in New Orleans, a glaring reminder of the mass exodus of residents that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Ten years later, the problems continue in New Orleans. “And since then, the Corps has applied those lessons”, Hansen said.

But with the improvements, Landrieu admitted that even a decade later, trust is still something that has to be built along with the levees. The group, which brings in 10,000 volunteers over the course of a year, is still going. Even with failing schools shut down, too many students still spend their days in C- and D-rated classrooms and then go home to high-poverty, high-crime neighborhoods. “(No) matter how bad things get, (it’s) still part of you”.

But the real issue is one of control: The Orleans Parish School Board, the entity elected by the citizens – many of them parents of schoolchildren – has lost control of education in the city, ceding it unwillingly to state-appointed administrators and private companies that run charter schools for profit. “It catalyzed people who stuck around to really care about the city”. “So we wound up up the street on the roof of our house”. Water and food became scarce.

The confirmed death toll stood at 1,836 – the deadliest hurricane since Okeechobee in 1928.

A decade later, he marvels at the city’s culinary renaissance, a major draw for the 9.5 million tourists who visited past year . The Crescent City is the birthplace of jazz and a mecca for gospel and R&B. When the signs indicated the storm was strengthening and would likely head for the Louisiana coast, Blanco got word that her executive counsel, Terry Ryder, wanted to speak with her.

Commemorating 10 years since the disaster, the above video from IBTimes UK compiles archive video footage of the hurricane and the subsequent turmoil the city of New Orleans suffered in the subsequent days, weeks and months as residents struggled to rebuild their lives.

There are countless others who have played a role in this region’s recovery over the past 10 years. At the Superdome, people were lined up in the blazing Louisiana heat to wait for buses that never came.

New Orleans is a national treasure almost three centuries old, mixing African-American, French, Spanish and Caribbean traditions to create unique forms of music, food and fun found nowhere else in America.

So those who say that everything is a lot better will sound very different than the other people who will talk about how things are so much worse, and they may both be right.

-The Weather Channel is looking ahead, not back, with a special, “Katrina 2065”, that airs at 8 p.m. EDT on Thursday, August 27.