Hurricane Katrina - a nightmare of a hurricane with 140-mile-an-hour (225-kilometer-an-hour) winds and a storm surge nearly two stories tall came ashore at the mouth of the Mississippi River near New Orleans.

Katrina is the hurricane that emergency-management and government officials have long feared would strike New Orleans. Many of the Louisiana city’s 500,000 residents live below sea level and were surrounded by the waters of the Mississippi River, Lake Pontchartrain, and several bays.

Hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents evacuated as the forecasts for Hurricane Katrina became more ominous. All kinds of evacuations were going on, and shelters were filling up. There were shelters as far away as southeast Texas and all over central Louisiana.
Residents in the Florida Keys, which lie to the south of the peninsula, were caught off guard by Katrina’s intensification.