hurricace

hurricace

The weather channels were trying to warn the city of New Orleans, the people were helpless and nature was angry. The residents of New Orleans felt the wrath of a Category 5 hurricane. Hurricane Katrina destroyed the city of New Orleans. It caused 81 billion dollars of damage, took the lives of 1,800 unfortunate souls and left thousands of others scarred for life. It devoured everything from the city of New Orleans to the people that lived in it. One of the many things that were demolished were the levees that were built to protect the city from flooding.
The levees that protect New Orleans today date from the 1960s. They were built in response to earlier floods that had severely damaged the city, and were considered state of the art at the time. Journalist John McQuaid says the engineers who designed that system of levees did so without the benefit of today's advanced technology. "They didn't really know, since they didn't have computers up and running that could model storm surges and the like, exactly what level of protection it afforded, in terms of how likely it was to be over-topped, but they were pretty proud of it and thought it would last a long time."   "It was a fast-moving Category 3 storm. Anything stronger than that, the levee system could not be guaranteed to protect the city." And the levees were no match for Katrina which came off the Gulf of Mexico as a much stronger, category 5 storm, one of the most powerful hurricanes to hit the United States in years. It was heading straight for New Orleans but veered off at the last minute. The city was spared a direct hit. But a storm surge in its wake pushed water from Lake Pontchartrain over the floodwalls and levees, eating at their foundations until large sections collapsed.