Wednesday, December 15, 2021
On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina came ashore near New Orleans; failed levees flooded the city and about 1,800 people died in one of the costliest disasters in U.S. history.
On this day in 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast as a powerful storm, and within hours the greater danger was the water. Levees protecting New Orleans failed in more than fifty places, and roughly eighty percent of the city flooded. About 1,800 people died, tens of thousands were stranded, and the recovery stretched on for years, making Katrina one of the deadliest and costliest disasters in American history.
What Katrina taught preppers was less about the wind than about the gap before help arrives. Families who left early, who kept a full tank and a packed bag, and who had a plan for where to meet fared very differently from those who waited for an official order that came too late or never came. When a city's systems go under all at once, the first days belong to whoever prepared for them.
The takeaway is the same one that holds for any coastal storm: know your evacuation trigger and leave before the roads clog, and keep enough water, food, and cash to stand on your own for a week. A little hurricane preparedness is the difference between escaping ahead of a storm and being trapped behind it.
