United States of America (the): Hurricane: 2005/08/25

Period	2005/08/25
Country or District	United States of America (the)
Event Type	Hurricane
Outline	Hurricane Katrina has stricken the southern coastal areas of the United States as a Category 4 storm, forcing hundreds of thousands to flee their homes and as many as ten thousand people are feared dead. This is the Katarina's second landfall on the U.S. after it lashed Florida causing severe flooding and seven deaths.

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Report/Articles

Reuters AlertNet 2005/09/16
Lt. Gen. Carl Strock, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, told a Pentagon briefing that some breaches in the levees protecting the city still had not been repaired and future high-tech flood protection could cost at least $2.5 billion and take years to build. The official death toll from Katrina climbed to 795 on Thursday after Louisiana officials raised the number of confirmed fatalities in that state to 558. There were 218 dead in Mississippi and another 19 deaths confirmed in Florida, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee.

Reuters AlertNet 2005/09/14
Residents of towns in Louisiana returned on Wednesday to inspect their damaged and destroyed homes, as the Port of New Orleans so vital to the nation's economy resumed operations for the first time since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the region. As the Gulf Coast struggled to recover from the Aug. 29 hurricane, the death toll rose to 652. Most died in Louisiana and Mississippi and a handful in Florida, Georgia and Alabama.

Reuters AlertNet 2005/09/13
Homicide charges were filed on Tuesday against the operators of a nursing home where 34 patients trapped by floodwaters died, as the death toll from Katrina, the third deadliest hurricane in U.S. history, hit 648.

Reuters AlertNet 2005/09/13
The head of the U.S. disaster agency resigned on Monday amid a storm of criticism over Washington's response to Hurricane Katrina as the confirmed death toll from the calamity passed 500, including 45 victims found inside one abandoned New Orleans hospital. Michael Brown quit as chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency while President George W. Bush was winding up a two-day visit to New Orleans and other devastated areas. Three days earlier Brown had been removed from direct control over recovery efforts on the U.S. Gulf Coast as complaints mounted that he came to the emergency too late with too little.

Reuters AlertNet 2005/09/12
The official death toll from Hurricane Katrina climbed past 400 on Sunday as President George W. Bush arrived in beleaguered New Orleans, where soldiers were breaking into flooded houses looking for bodies. The confirmed death count from the Aug. 29 storm, which has displaced a million people, was far lower than initial projections that ran into the thousands.

Reuters AlertNet 2005/09/06
Victims of Hurricane Katrina returned to pick through their battered homes on Monday and President George W. Bush promised to fix bungled rescue efforts after a disaster in which the mayor of New Orleans said as many as 10,000 may have died. Rescuers in boats, helicopters and military vehicles went house to house looking for stranded survivors of one of the worst natural disasters to hit the United States.

Reuters AlertNet 2005/09/02
Troops roll into chaotic New Orleans bringing aid The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it may need up to 80 days to drain the floodwaters from the city after Katrina struck Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama on Monday with 140 mile per hour winds and a huge storm surge.

Reuters AlertNet 2005/09/04
New Orleans collects its dead in 'ugly' search New Orleans turned to the gruesome task of collecting its dead on Sunday with rescue teams scouring flooded streets and homes to find survivors and recover thousands of corpses. Six days after Hurricane Katrina ripped up the U.S. Gulf Coast and sent flood waters pouring into New Orleans, no one knows how many people were killed, but government officials say the number is surely in the thousands.

Reuters AlertNet 2005/09/04
New Orleans collects dead as officials dodge blame New Orleans began the gruesome task of collecting its thousands of dead on Sunday as the Bush administration tried to save face after its botched rescue plans left the city at the mercy of Hurricane Katrina. Except for rescue workers and scattered groups of people, streets in the once-vibrant capital of jazz and good times were all but abandoned after a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of refugees into neighboring Texas and other states.

Reuters AlertNet 2005/09/03
Troops bring relief to stricken New Orleans Military convoys rolled into New Orleans on Friday, carrying troops to try to stamp out lawlessness and supplies for desperate survivors of Hurricane Katrina after days of delays and broken promises. President George W. Bush, facing fierce criticism over the government's slow response to the one of the worst disasters in U.S. history, signed a $10.5 billion measure late on Friday to speed federal aid to Gulf Coast areas devastated by the storm. Earlier, Bush toured the stricken area and vowed to fix relief efforts he admitted had been "not unacceptable."

Reuters AlertNet 2005/09/01
New Orleans makes 'desperate SOS' relief plea New Orleans' mayor issued an urgent plea for relief of his flooded city on Thursday as gunshots and looting hampered the evacuation of desperate crowds trying to escape Hurricane Katrina's destruction. "This is a desperate SOS," Mayor Ray Nagin said in a statement read by CNN. Some of the thousands of hungry, thirsty storm survivors outside the city's convention center chanted similar pleas. "Right now we are out of resources at the convention center and don't anticipate enough buses. Currently the convention center is unsanitary and unsafe and we are running out of supplies for 15,000 to 25,000 people," Nagin said.

Reuters AlertNet 2005/09/04
After a week of silence on Hurricane Katrina's death toll, Louisiana officials announced a partial count on Sunday and said U.S. mortuary teams that identified victims of the Sept. 11 attacks had been brought in to help. They said 59 people had been confirmed as storm victims but said they were only counting bodies they had in their possession.

BBC News 2005/09/01
According to the White House, about 90,000 sq miles (234,000 sq km) has been affected by the hurricane - an area roughly the size of the UK. Earlier, medical evacuations from New Orleans' Superdome stadium were disrupted after reports that a gun shot was fired at a rescue helicopter. Similar reports have come from the city's hospitals.

Reuters 2005/09/01
Rotting bodies littered the flooded streets of New Orleans on Thursday and mounting violence threatened to turn into all-out anarchy as thousands of survivors of Hurricane Katrina pleaded to be evacuated, or even just fed. The historic jazz city has fallen prey to armed looters since Katrina tore through and it now more closely resembles Haiti or another Third World trouble spot in a refugee crisis than one of America's most popular vacation centers. Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco warned rioters and looters late on Thursday that National Guard troops were under her orders to "shoot and kill" if needed to restore order.

CNN 2005/09/01
Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco said Thursday she has requested the mobilization of 40,000 National Guard troops to restore order and assist in relief efforts in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans.

BBC News 2005/08/31
Emergency teams in the southern US are battling to reach survivors of Hurricane Katrina, the most destructive storm to hit the country in decades. Hundreds of people are feared dead in Mississippi, and the Louisiana city of New Orleans is badly flooded.

CNN 2005/09/01
As New Orleans authorities worked to plug the breaches in the city's levees, and search and rescue teams headed to devastated areas of the Gulf Coast, President Bush promised a national effort on behalf of Hurricane Katrina victims. "The recovery effort will take a long time," he said. "The recovery will take years."

Reuters AlertNet 2005/08/31
Helicopters plucked frantic survivors from rooftops, debris-fouled water flooded historic New Orleans and hundreds were feared dead on Tuesday after Hurricane Katrina's rampage across the U.S. Gulf Coast. Authorities made plans to remove thousands of storm refugees from the Superdome stadium and other shelters in New Orleans and drop giant sandbags to plug breaches in the city's protective levee system, which allowed water from Lake Pontchartrain to swamp the streets.

BBC News 2005/08/30
A huge rescue operation is under way along the US Gulf Coast after a hurricane killed up to 80 people in a single county and swamped New Orleans. Harrison County in Mississippi bore the brunt of Hurricane Katrina as it slammed into local towns Biloxi and Gulfport before heading inland. Mississippi media earlier recorded a death toll of 54 for the state. Thirty people are said to have died in one block of flats in Biloxi which was hit by a 9m (30ft) water surge. The town's actual death toll may be "in the hundreds", municipal spokesman Vincent Creel told Reuters news agency.

CNN 2005/08/30
Hurricane Katrina left at least 56 people dead Monday, 50 of them in one Mississippi county, according to The Associated Press, and the toll was expected to climb following one of the most powerful hurricanes to hit the northern Gulf Coast in a half century.

BBC News 2005/08/29
Hurricane Katrina has unleashed howling winds and heavy rain upon southern coastal areas of the United States. The storm has wrought extensive damage in Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, where it swept ashore after moving across the Gulf of Mexico. Katrina submerged neighbourhoods in New Orleans and tore part of the roof of a stadium where many had sought refuge.

Reuters 2005/08/26
After being downgraded to a tropical storm as it churned across the swampy Everglades, Katrina strengthened rapidly back into a hurricane as it moved over warm water in the Gulf of Mexico. It was projected to become a dangerously powerful storm before smacking into Florida for a second time by Monday.

CNN 2005/08/26
Hurricane Katrina will make a "big shift" to the west on its way across the Gulf of Mexico and is expected to reach dangerous Category 4 intensity before making landfall Monday afternoon in Mississippi or Louisiana, the National Hurricane Center said Friday.

BBC News 2005/08/27
Florida's north-west is steeling itself against the impact of Hurricane Katrina, which killed seven as it swept across the southern coast.

Geographycal Data

Tropical Storm Risk (TSR)
Current data, forecast data and past and forecast track of tropical storm Katrina.

Pictures

BBC News 2005/08/30
In pictures: Katrina hits US

BBC News 2005/08/30
Hurricane Katrina