Hour By Hour: When Katrina Struck New Orleans

Where were you on August 29, 2005, as Hurricane Katrina barreled into the Gulf Coast? For residents of New Orleans and the surrounding areas, those memories are marked by first warnings, rising panic and a surreal mix of preparation and disbelief as the city experienced one of the deadliest storms in American history.

For the meteorologists tracking the storm, police officers and nurses preparing for the worst and community members trying to make sense of it all, those days became an intensely personal ordeal, shaped by both duty and survival.

This oral history traces the last hours leading up to Katrina’s final landfall, from the Gulf Coast’s first alerts to the catastrophic levee failures. Based on hours of interviews with survivors and officials, some of whom have never shared their stories publicly, this timeline captures the fear, courage and chaos that unfolded.

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Friday, August 26, 2005: Three Days Before Final Landfall

Robert Ricks, Lead Forecaster, National Weather Service New Orleans: We were tracking it several days out. We knew it was going to definitely be a threat for Florida at the time.

Bernie Cullen, Chairman, Waveland’s Ground Zero Hurricane Museum: I think nobody expected it. I mean, that was the sad thing. You know, we kept hearing it was going to Florida. It was going to Florida. Then all of a sudden, you know, she had a mind of her own. Katrina did.

Robert Ricks: Models started showing it, becoming an increasingly more likely threat for the middle Gulf Coast region, New Orleans. But Mississippi-Gulf Coast region.

BreArd Snellings, New Orleans area native: For kids who grew up down here, hurricanes are, it sounds crazy to say, but, like, a good thing, a cool thing. It's a couple of days off of school.

Bernie Cullen: My husband and I live here in Waveland, Mississippi, but we both worked in New Orleans as nurses. We were preparing like we always do, you know, what are we going to do? When are we going to call it? When are we going to have staff come in?

Tim Bayard, Retired Captain, New Orleans Police Department: I was working the Saints-Baltimore Ravens preseason football game. At the end of the game, I walked into the roll call room and the TV was on, and there was Katrina.

BreArd Snellings: I was actually, coming out of, going to a Saints preseason game for my birthday when we started to hear about it. The storm's coming a couple of days from now. And so, having to make sure my friends would get home to their parents, they were looking into ideas, what they might do, would they evacuate, how would they handle the storm?

Tim Bayard: I turned around and told the chief, I said, if that's coming at us, we better have a lot of high water vehicles, food and water and a lot of body bags.

Saturday, August 27, 2005: Two Days Before Final Landfall

Robert Ricks: Saturday comes and we see it emerging off the Florida coast, getting into the Gulf.

Bernie Cullen: She basically went back in the Gulf, intensified, became a monster storm and filled the entire Gulf.

Joshua Lee Nidenberg, Louisiana lifestyle photographer: I had an appointment to deliver a life insurance policy to a woman. And I was calling to confirm the appointment, and she answered the phone and she said, ‘I'm almost to Mobile and I'm on my way to Pensacola.’ I said, ‘Really, why are you doing that?’ She says, ‘are you not aware there's a storm in the Gulf?’ And I remember muttering under my breath, ‘what a sissy.’

Little Freddie King, New Orleans Blues Master: I was living back on Lafitte Street near Bayou Saint John, back there in Mid-city. And so, some friends of mine at the Monteleone Hotel, they called me up and say, 'There's a bad storm coming through here. So I want you to come out here and stay with us in the hotel.' I told them, I said, no, no, I said, I'm all right. I said.

Bernie Cullen: Then you've got people having to make the hard decision of, do I get on the road and get stuck in my car? When should you leave? What should you take? When do you come back?

"Wacko" Wade Wright, New Orleans-based drummer and manager: When I heard the storm was in the Gulf and it looked pretty, it looked pretty big. But to me, it was just a normal hurricane coming. So I said to myself, I'll just ride it out because you never think of water. You never think of flooding.

Robert Ricks: My concern sort of growing when the satellite imagery showed what was originally a covered eye, eyewall that was covered by cloud cover. The cloud cover parted, and we saw this massive eye of one I've never seen in my professional career before.

Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown, New Orleans-based musical artist: People around me are getting more serious about it. My mother's calling me. Asking me what are my plans? Do I plan to evacuate?

Robert Ricks: We all knew that we were dealing with what was going to eventually be a catastrophic storm.

Sunday, August 28, 2005: One Day Before Final Landfall

Robert Ricks: Sunday comes. It's time to start issuing warnings 24 hours out prior to landfall. At that point, it was also being rated as a Category 5 hurricane.

Tim Bayard: The day before the storm, I called all the guys and said, hey, bring clothes for 3 or 4 days, make sure you got food, and then we'll meet at the office and we go from there. And that's pretty much what we did.

Joshua Lee Nidenberg: The news started coming, and all of a sudden everybody's like, oh, we should probably roll out of here.

At 7 a.m. local time, the mayor of New Orleans announces the Superdome will be open as a refuge of last resort.

Robert Ricks: That did not surprise me any. What became a surprise was the fact that it was necessary to begin with, because really, this was a storm that probably deserved greater response and getting out of the area entirely.

At 10 a.m. local time, a mandatory evacuation order is issued for New Orleans.

BreArd Snellings: The city was a mandatory evacuation. The North Shore was a recommended evacuation.

Joshua Lee Nidenberg: We had evacuated a couple of times before and nothing happened. So we were going through the motions. Did the checklist things.

Bernie Cullen: We tried to discharge as many patients as we could.

Robert Ricks: From what we were looking at, we knew the storm was going to be massive, just based on the size of the eye.

At 10:11 a.m. local time, the National Weather Service office in Slidell issues a Hurricane Warning.

Robert Ricks: So the warning went out at 10:11 in the morning on Sunday.

Robert Ricks: It is pretty prophetic. That's what was playing in my head is what the outcome would likely be.

BreArd Snellings: More and more people, you know, started to evacuate. Family members were leaving. You could feel as a kid: something's different here.

Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown: You know, we do hurricanes all the time. I didn't think about it anymore, and I was going to stay. And then my mom called me again. Same thing: Leon, this is a big storm. This is going to be bad. I'm coming to get you to pack a bag.

Joshua Lee Nidenberg: Got in the van and packed all the stuff we needed for three days, like everybody else, and rolled out to Mississippi.

At 6:00 p.m. local time, a curfew is put in place for the city of New Orleans.

Little Freddie King, retelling a conversation: They got a curfew on, and I didn't know what that was, you know. I said, man, it ain’t no time to play, I said, what you doing trying to pull my leg talking about a curfew? He said 'you don’t know what that is?' I said no, I don’t. 'If you inside at 6:00, they're not going to let you out. And if you're outside and try to go back in, they ain't going to let you back in.' I said, okay, well, I better get out of here.

Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown: I jumped in the car and rode with my mom to Shreveport.

Joshua Lee Nidenberg: We were in the last wave. So there was this huge bottleneck.

BreArd Snellings: Seeing the highways closed and streets abandoned. Started to really settle in that, oh, something's happening this time.

Little Freddie King: I didn't have no time to wait, you know.

Tim Bayard: We were instructed to hunker down and hustle, which meant we had no place to stay. So we had to go get room and board for our folks. We were given a case of water. I got 40, 50 people working for me. So you get one case of water that didn't work, right? We had no fuel. Only fuel we had was the fuel we put in the cars knowing that we were going to need fuel. We feel we topped off every tank that we had.

Robert Ricks: The night prior to landfall, I had just finished a 12-hour shift operationally, went home, knew I had to take care of personal things, which included my wife, my two kids, packing up and leaving.

Tim Bayard: My wife knew that when the bell rings, I'm going to work. She knew that. But before I left, I made sure that my wife and my daughters and my mother were not in harm's way, and that they were safe.

Bernie Cullen: Get rid of your family, make sure they're safe, and then you can do your job.

Robert Ricks: I did not sleep at home, and the only thing I took was my rosary. And my thinking was that there's a great chance I won't be coming back to this house. I go into the office, pull up a cot, and I'm sleeping in the computer room.

Monday, August 29, 2005: Hurricane Katrina Makes Louisiana Landfall At 6:10 a.m.

Robert Ricks: The morning of the 29th, Hurricane Katrina is making landfall at Buras, Louisiana. It's 125 miles an hour peak wind, with gusts higher than that.

BreArd Snellings: There would be moments where it would look like torrential downpour, and then you would hear the wind pick up and it would go almost opaque. The water was flying by so fast and so violently that you really couldn't see. It almost looked like looking through a dense fog.

Little Freddie King: When it hit and, oh, it was dynamite. I mean, it really tore up things. I mean, it tore things up.

"Wacko" Wade Wright: Every hotel on there, all their windows broke. The glass was in the street. You couldn't even see the concrete. And the water started coming in and the glass kept sticking me.

BreArd Snellings: And you just hear the sound like toothpicks snapping. Where there once was a forest, you'd see 20 or 30 trees missing.

Bernie Cullen: Communication goes spotty. Everybody's like, well, what are we going to do now?

BreArd Snellings: Large amounts of debris and things fly through windows and fly through open doors that we couldn't keep shut.

Bernie Cullen: This was a catastrophic storm.

Robert Ricks: No electricity. No services whatsoever.

BreArd Snellings: Cell towers are down. Communication is limited. You're hearing things on radio channels.

Robert Ricks: Somebody picked up the phone and sure enough, it was dead. Then that's when we realized that we were out of the game at that point. The only thing we had to see the outside world was our security camera that was pointed out in the parking lot.

BreArd Snellings: Makes you feel a lot like the little piggies from the Three Little Pigs, where you're like, you know, built my house of bricks, but my house of wood, built my house of straw. Whatever it may be, nothing's as powerful as that. That big wind.

Joshua Lee Nidenberg: I mean, what am I going back to?

Robert Ricks: We're starting to see reports of storm surge coming in at the mouth of the Mississippi River, and it’s pretty decent. It’s about 13 to 15 feet.

"Wacko" Wade Wright: Lo and behold, when the water started coming up and I saw it rising in the street, and because of going off, all the alarms in the cars were going off at the same time, and I knew we were in some deep trouble.

Bernie Cullen: Our house was a tri-level house, and we had water all the way up to half of the second floor.

Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown: Seeing the streets that I'm used to riding down and walking down and seeing those streets covered with water.

BreArd Snellings: Then you start to hear reports on the radio of, oh, no, there's all this flooding and all this is happening and this has gone down.

Tim Bayard: We knew the city was going to flood.

"Wacko" Wade Wright: It started pounding against those levees and the walls over there. That's when all the excitement started.

On Monday morning, the city’s levees begin to fail.

Tim Bayard: An NOPD communications supervisor got in touch with me and said, Captain, you need to get in the Lower Nine. The levee broke. And that's when I knew it was time to get in gear.

"Wacko" Wade Wright: That's when the water broke through and all heck broke loose.

Bernie Cullen: The levees break in New Orleans and pandemonium happens.

Tim Bayard: I grew up in the Ninth Ward, I know. I knew what was going to happen, and the people needed us. Go wherever you can, find boats. Hook them up. Let's go. We got to go to work.

Robert Ricks: You don't see the types of water that was generated by the storm the size of a Katrina that generated such a large storm surge that it really challenged and overwhelmed the levee system.

Tim Bayard: Captain Jeff Wynn called a rally point at Harrah’s Casino, and that’s when Jeff informed me that the 17th Street Canal levee broke. So now we’re dealing with two fronts.

Aaron Wilkinson, New Orleans-based musician: We found out the levees had broken and the water was coming up. And that was the problem. And, from there, it was like 48 hours, 72 hours, just glued to a screen.

"Wacko" Wade Wright: That water came up fast; it was about 12 or 13 feet high.

Tim Bayard: We started immediately. Nobody told us what to do. We just knew that the people of the city were looking for us to come save their lives. I mean, that's the bottom line. We immediately started rescue operations. We were not instructed to do it. We just did it. We knew what had to get done. I made the decision to put my men and women in harm’s way, and every one of them showed up.

Bernie Cullen: Every four hours, the directors of the nursing units would get together every four hours and say, okay, what did we have to do? You know, who needs relief? How do we handle this?

Tim Bayard: We’re cops. We were never trained in water rescue in our life, but we went and did it anyway because the people depended on us to do our job, to be there and save them.

Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown: To this day, the only word that I can associate with it is surreal.

Aaron Wilkinson: Looking around to see if I could see a helicopter shot of my neighborhood because all the cell towers are out. There was no one you could call. There's no way to get any information.

BreArd Snellings: Downed power lines. They didn't know if we're still active or not. And it's traversing was very hard. So you were truly isolated.

Joshua Lee Nidenberg: A lot of damage, you know, cars on roofs and piles of trash.

Aaron Wilkinson: It was so dark in the city at night. Armed, you know, troopers, National Guard troops everywhere, curfews.

BreArd Snellings: It felt like being somewhat in an active war zone. You had military personnel handing out MREs, designated locations. There were, you know, curfews. It was very much a limited access to power, limited access to resources.

"Wacko" Wade Wright: This is the Twilight Zone. There's nothing living here.

Tim Bayard: We were in the midst of a complete disaster.

Tuesday, August 30, 2005: 24 Hours After Landfall

"Wacko" Wade Wright: I slept on a roof, you know, all night. And the next morning, it was hot as blazes. It was August and the sun was out.

Tim Bayard: The mold, the mildew, the muck. There's a body in that house. You know, as soon as you crack that door, you know. And you'll never forget that.

Bernie Cullen: You gotta remember, this was August. You know, it's hot here in August, and when there's no breeze, it's really hot.

Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown: A lot of people still weren't getting any assistance and were having a really hard time just getting food, just eating.

BreArd Snellings: Water and toilet paper had never been so important.

Joshua Lee Nidenberg: They had to get the sheriff in there because of the buses and the people fighting to get on the buses. There was a lot of conflicting information. It was clear that we weren't going back in three days.

Leon “Kid Chocolate” Brown: I was planning to come right back home after the storm passed, but you know, Mother Nature had something else in mind.

It took six days for buses to arrive and evacuate stranded residents, more than one month for floodwaters to recede from the city and nearly seven weeks for power to be restored for some areas. 20 years later, the full restoration of New Orleans remains in progress.

Editor’s note: Interviews have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Weather.com lead editor Jenn Jordan explores how weather and climate weave through our daily lives, shape our routines and leave lasting impacts on our communities.