re: As we approach 20 years since Katrina, a reminder that it wasn't just New Orleans

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Around 1100 or so, I woke up to the sound of someone whispering, "If you need to use the latrine, go down the stairwell until get to the flooded part

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Where was this?

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The first Gulf landfall was near Buras, LA and then the final landfall was schmack dab on the Louisiana/Mississippi border

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All that's right, but the OP is accurate when he suggests Mississippi got the "bad" side of the storm. He is also accurate when he says "90%" of the focus is on New Orleans.

Where he is wrong is that, whereas the damage was acute and stark in Mississippi, the damage was just as acute, stark and then chronic in New Orleans for a shite ton of rational and irrational reasons.

There will never be a legit cost estimate of what happened in New Orleans. It just isn't possible. Mississippi is easy - figure out the total insurance pay outs and then government relief costs. That won't be exact, but that will give you a decent estimate. It will be reasonable.

No way to do that with New Orleans and St. Bernard. Not a reasonably possible thing to do.

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Where was this?

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Jackson Barracks, Building 35.

Those maps are very scary. Pass Christian was not the place to be.

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One could make a case that Houston got it much worse.

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I’ll take the most underrated post of 2025 goes to for a 1,000 please Alex.

Was stationed at Keesler AFB during and after Katrina. Horrible experience.

New Orleans was run, and still is, ran by dumbasses. That is why

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I remember early on Katrina was supposed to go into the panhandle

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I was red fishing Saturday morning south of Morgan City when they called for a mandatory evacuation

I never made it back home until Sept 9th when the water finally went down and I was the first person to get down my street

This is my standard post about recovery from Katrina and how things were a lot different from normal hurricane and flood event…

One thing I hate about outsiders commenting about Katrina is how people lack perspective on family dynamics and how so many families of several generations lived near each other in Nola. It isn’t like a flood in other parts of the country where you can pack up and go stay with a relative and return a few days later.

Then you have to think about how large of an area the destruction was. From Nola all the way to Mobile and then inland for a long ways. It wasn’t like you could just find contractors, insurance adjusters, or even hardware stores open or stocked up so you could get to work on repairs.
Oh and then there is that little issue of water in Nola staying around for three weeks or the areas of MS where nothing was left but slabs.

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And just imagine if the strength had held and not dropped off to a strong Cat 3 at the last minute...

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Things would have actually been better for most involved, "better" being a relative term.

It is true that the EWRCs that Katrina went through weakened the storm as far as max wind was concerned, but it also significantly broadened the wind field and slowed the storm down. That's how Katrina grew to be so huge. That broadened wind field pushed a ton more water than the storm would have as a Cat. 5. The reality is, Katrina weakening when it did, in the manner that it weakened, was a worst case scenario. It ended up pushing a lot more water over a much broader area than it would have otherwise.