Effects of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans

The total cost of hurricane Katrina was a huge $89 billion dollars. Most of the Louisiana coastline was devastated. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans the worst because it is on low lying ground and the levees built to protect it failed. 80% of New Orleans was evacuated before the hurricane. Thousands had to sleep in the superdome a stadium in New Orleans. There were mass breakouts of flooding throughout New Orleans. In New Orleans the hurricane forced survivors to stand on their roofs and hope for rescue.

And clean water was temporarily unavailable. The hurricane destroyed thousands of houses leaving thousands homeless. The hurricane also seriously damaged the telephone connections which meant connection was lost. In the hurricane roads were badly damaged and it was hard to get aid into New Orleans because the vehicles could not drive on the roads. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, looting, violence and other criminal activity became serious problems. The rescuing of civilians became the main objective and New Orleans’s security was decreased which caused a lot of criminal activity

What and when?

Hurricane Katrina was an intense, rotating oceanic weather system.

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Its path was miles and mile across. Hurricane Katrina’s path started by the Bahamas and ended in the state of Tennessee. It started on the 23rd August and ended on the 30th August 2005. By the 25th August it had hi Miami Florida. Hurricane Katrina was a very powerful hurricane it was rated force 4 and reached 140mph in some places. The hurricane caused many problems like: Serious flooding, Destruction of property in USA mostly, A huge death toll, killing over 1200 people.

Millions were made homeless. It also costed USA billions of dollars in damage. Clean water and food was limited and many diseases were spread.

What is a Hurricane and how do they form?

Hurricanes need the following conditions: They need an ocean temperature of more than 27°c. The warm-water depths of 70 metres. It also needs high levels of heat causing violent updrafts of air. High levels of humidity. Major winds blowing in the same direction. These are the vital conditions that a hurricane needs. This is how a hurricane forms. Large thunderstorms drift over warm water. The warm air from the storm combines with the ocean surface and then they begin to rise. This creates low pressure at the surface. Trade winds blowing in the opposite direction cause the storm to start spinning. Rising warm air causes pressure to decrease at higher altitudes. Air rises faster and faster to fill this pressure then drawing warm air off the sea and sucking cooler drier air downwards. As the storm moves over the ocean it picks up warm moist air. Wind speeds start to increase as more air is sucked into the low pressure centre. It can take hours of several days for a depression to grow into a fully- formed hurricane. Hurricanes are made up of an eye of calm winds and low pressure surrounded by a vortex of high winds and heavy rainstorms. When a hurricane hits land it often has devastating effects.