Hour By Hour: When Katrina Struck New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina left scars across Louisiana and Mississippi that are still evident 20 years later.

Katrina claimed at least 1,392 lives — both during the storm and in its aftermath — and was America's deadliest hurricane in 77 years. Its $201 billion damage toll remains the nation's costliest storm in history, by over $40 billion.

Katrina also burned vivid memories in the minds of meteorologists who covered the hurricane, before, during, and after landfall.

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In late August 2005, I was a meteorologist and weather producer at The Weather Channel for a morning program called Your Weather Today.

Here are the aspects to Katrina I'll never forget.

2005 Was Already Hyperactive

Hurricane fatigue was real by August 2005.

First, we had to endure the previous hurricane season, in which four hurricanes — Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne — all struck parts of Florida in 2004.

Then in July 2005, two hurricanes — Cindy and Dennis — already made Gulf landfalls. Dennis clobbered the Florida Panhandle at Category 3 intensity less than one year after Ivan hit that same area.

Less than a week after Dennis, Emily became the first July Category 5 hurricane of record in the Atlantic Basin before it struck Cancún, then northeast Mexico. (Beryl would later eclipse the earliest Category 5 Atlantic Basin hurricane in 2024.)

And we were just heading into what's typically the heart of hurricane season.

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The Day The Forecast Shifted

On Aug. 25, Katrina first became a hurricane, plowed through South Florida and maintained its structure while moving west across the Everglades.

In hindsight, that should have been an omen.

On the morning of Aug. 26, the center of Katrina's forecast path in the National Hurricane Center's forecast was pointed toward the Florida Panhandle. We couldn't believe an area just hit by Dennis and Ivan could get clobbered yet again.

But just 12 hours later, the center of that cone shifted almost 200 miles west, moving the Mississippi Gulf Coast, southeast Louisiana and New Orleans from the edge of the cone to squarely in the center of the cone.

This remains one of the two most memorable forecast shifts I've seen in my 28-plus year career in meteorology, along with Sandy. It illustrates how vital it is to check back frequently for updates to forecasts, whether for hurricanes, winter storms or severe weather outbreaks.

States of emergency were declared based on this forecast shift by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour and Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

Stu Ostro, a former senior meteorologist with The Weather Channel, said, "The atmospheric die had been cast. This time, the models had grasped the meteorological reality."

(MORE: What The Forecast Cone Means)

The Chaotic Day Before

Katrina then intensified and grew into a giant.

On Aug. 28, it became a Category 5 hurricane with 175 mph maximum winds, the strongest in the Gulf since Hurricane Allen in 1980 and a top 10 Atlantic Basin hurricane for lowest pressure (902 millibars).

The Weather Channel meteorologist Jeff Morrow was doing live shots from the Riverwalk in New Orleans that morning.

"When we heard that it was a Category 5, the whole mood changed," Morrow told weather.com. "We started telling tourists to get out ASAP. Some homeless people had nowhere to go. It started to be somewhat of a panic vibe."

"Around midday, we made the decision to pull back across Lake Pontchartrain to Mandeville and passed by the Superdome witnessing thousands of people trying to get in as a shelter of last resort. Unforgettable."

By that time, you couldn't avoid comparisons with Hurricane Camille 36 years earlier in Mississippi, one of the nation's only Category 5 landfalls.

Except Katrina was bigger.

By that Sunday afternoon, Katrina's hurricane-force winds were just over 200 miles wide, an immense size roughly the distance from New Orleans to Lake Charles. Its tropical storm force winds covered a diameter of over 430 miles, roughly the entire length of Interstate 10 across north Florida.

Not only did this ginormous hurricane mean a more widespread damaging wind threat, but also a higher storm surge threat along arguably the most storm surge-prone part of the U.S. coast. America's standing storm surge record at the time was 24.6 feet was in Mississippi (Pass Christian) in Camille.

Mandatory evacuations were issued in the city of New Orleans and in Mississippi. The Louisiana Superdome was opened as a "shelter of last resort".

Chilling statements from the National Weather Service in New Orleans warned "Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks...perhaps longer" and "Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards."

After all that, I had a pit in my stomach that night, fearing the worst case scenario and praying as many as possible got out of there.

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August 29

When driving to work early that Monday morning, I heard on the radio "Katrina has been downgraded."

Yeah, right.

Katrina was still a giant hurricane. While it did go through some last-hour structural changes, No step down in its maximum winds — even to Category 3 — was ever going to significantly change its potential for devastating storm surge.

First came the southeast Louisiana landfall and the white knuckle concern for New Orleans. You can watch The Weather Channel's coverage in the half hour leading up to its first landfall, here.

After its first landfall near Buras, Louisiana, Katrina's center passed about 25 miles east of New Orleans, keeping its strongest winds over water east of the city.

There was a brief time during which we were hopeful New Orleans had miraculously dodged a bullet.

At 8:14 a.m. CT, everything changed.

That's when the first National Weather Service flash flood warning mentioning a levee breach was issued. It turned out to be the most chilling warning of my career.

An already busy news desk was frantically working to find out what was happening on the ground in New Orleans. Was this the worst case flood scenario envisioned during FEMA's Hurricane Pam exercise in 2004?

But the MIssissippi landfall still was ahead.

While Category 5 was off the table, I couldn't get the Camille record storm surge out of my head. Meteorologist Jim Cantore and several production staff were in Gulfport, Mississippi. For the first time, I was frightened for our live crew.

Producer Simon Temperton phoned in live from Gulfport as Katrina's worst was lashing them, describing in rather calm and graphic detail what he saw and where the crew ended up. It's in the YouTube video below if you skip to the 11:53 mark. Cantore also described the experience riding out Katrina in an armed forces retirement home in this interview.

The Terrible Aftermath

Entire sections of a city were flooded up to 20 feet deep. Whole families were on roofs shouting for rescue. Thousands of residents sweltered without electricity and with little or no food or water. The feared massive Mississippi Gulf Coast surge happened. It was hard not to feel like a failure as a meteorologist.

While there were logistical and socioeconomic factors at play, for days I couldn't stop asking, "What more could we meteorologists have done?" or "What could we do better in the future?"

Compounding that was my trouble "unplugging" once work was over, something other meteorologists struggle with covering major weather events.

I remember crying myself to sleep several nights in a row after spending a full shift at work hearing about and watching the catastrophic aftermath and feeling powerless to do anything, except donating to charities.

A city that captured my heart long before Katrina — including celebrating my 30th birthday watching their beloved Saints beat my Green Bay Packers — was in dire shape.

While the city was flooded by Hurricane Betsy in 1965, I feared it would never be quite the same again.

Rita, Wilma Would Still Lie Ahead

A part of being a meteorologist is always looking ahead.

After Katrina's landfall, we still had the typical peak month for hurricane season, September, and two more months in what had already been a horrific season.

Little did we know there would be 10 more hurricanes that would follow Katrina, totaling 15 hurricanes, an all-time record for any single hurricane season.

Less than a month after Katrina, Hurricane Rita would be more intense than Katrina's peak, give the Houston metro an evacuation scare, then rake southwest Louisiana in what I considered the most severe, yet most overshadowed modern-era U.S. hurricane.

Then in late October, Hurricane Wilma shattered the most intense Atlantic hurricane record before crawling through Cancún, then lashing South Florida.

We actually ran out of Atlantic hurricane names for the first time, which forced the use of the Greek alphabet for additional six storms. The final of those — Tropical Storm Zeta — lasted into early January 2006.

Katrina, Rita and Wilma's combined U.S. damage — adjusted for inflation to 2024 — topped a quarter of a trillion dollars.

I'll never forget Katrina, but much of that historic 2005 hurricane season will remain etched in my memory.

Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. His lifelong love of meteorology began with a close encounter with a tornado as a child in Wisconsin. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on X (formerly Twitter), Threads, Facebook and Bluesky.