Hurricane Katrina: 10 years later

Ten years ago, Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans’ failed levees forced hundreds of thousands from their homes and left 80 percent of the city under water. This week, Yahoo! journalists remember the disaster, and take a fresh look at both New Orleans and its residents.

STORY: Katrina anniversary brings tears, gratitude to tiny Mississippi town
The running joke among residents of this state line community has long been “Mississippi don’t want us, and Louisiana won’t claim us.”
That feeling of being snubbed only got worse when Hurricane Katrina hit 10 years ago Saturday.
Read more by Jason Sickles >>

VIDEO: New Orleans jazz musician Jon Batiste on Hurricane Katrina anniversary
Growing up in Kenner, La., a suburb of New Orleans, Jon Batiste, the new bandleader for The Late Show, has deep roots in the Crescent City. He and his family left New Orleans ahead of Hurricane Katrina and lived in Texas for a couple months.

Batiste talked to Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric about his experiences.
Watch the video >>

STORY: New Orleans is missing one key ingredient for its big business renaissance: Big businesses
New Orleans is playing catch-up. A decade after Hurricane Katrina decimated the city, causing more than $135 billion in damage and leaving 80% of the area under water, New Orleans leaders are fighting to reinvent the “The Big Easy” as a destination for something other than Mardi Gras, beignets and big bands — big business.
Read more by Mandi Woodruff >>

VIDEO: Morial, Brinkley, & Ward mark Katrina 10 Years Later
In a special edition of “Yahoo News Live” Yahoo news and finance anchor, Bianna Golodryga, looks back at Hurricane Katrina and looks forward at all that has transpired in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast since 2005. Guests include Marc Morial, President of the Urban League and former mayor of New Orleans; Douglas Brinkley, noted historian and author of The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast; and Jesmyn Ward, a Mississippi native who survived Hurricane Katrina with her family and is now a celebrated writer and professor at Tulane University.
Watch the video >>

STORY: Reporting Hurricane Katrina: How covering the story swept journalists into the drama
Journalists are observers. We are trained to help others by reporting stories, not by becoming part of them. Hurricane Katrina, however, tested those boundaries for many of us.

A decade ago, I was a producer for the CBS Evening News when the worst natural disaster in modern U.S. history changed New Orleans forever.
Read more by Jason Sickles >>

PHOTOS: Obama in New Orleans ahead of 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina
Visiting on tidy porch stoops and dining at a thriving corner eatery, President Barack Obama paid tribute to New Orleans on Thursday as an extraordinary example of renewal and resilience 10 years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. On his ninth trip to the city that made worldwide headlines in 2005 after a devastating flood and slow government response, Obama toured a neighborhood of colorful new houses and a new school and community center.
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PHOTOS: Hurricane Katrina, 2005
Hurricane Katrina’s powerful winds and driving rain bore down 10 years ago, on Aug. 29, 2005. The storm caused major damage from Texas to central Florida and powered a storm surge that breached the system of levees meant to protect New Orleans from flooding. Hellish scenes of death, damage and chaos wracked the Gulf Coast as overwhelmed authorities tried to rescue the living and count the dead amid the destruction.
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VIDEO: Race and its role in New Orleans’ recovery 10 years later
10 years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Yahoo News goes back to explore how far the city has come, what remains to be done and whether race has played a part in the recovery.
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STORY: Recalling Katrina: Saving the Weakest From the Storm
If there’s a memory Marirose Bernard will never forget, it’s the day the helicopters came for what may have been New Orleans’s tiniest evacuees.

It was the day after Hurricane Katrina, and the levees had breached. Surging floodwaters surrounded Memorial Medical Center with 8 to 12 feet of toxic floodwater, leaving staff with no way to get outside food, water, or medicine — or to escape.
Read more by Della Hassle >>

STORY: 5 Must-See Documentaries About Hurricane Katrina
This week marks a decade since Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city of New Orleans, flooding the Louisiana mecca’s streets, destroying its homes, and displacing thousands of its residents. It was a crisis of historic proportions, and ten years later, the home of Mardi Gras, Dixieland music, the Saints and gumbo is still picking up the pieces from this natural — and national — disaster.
Read more by Nick Schager >>

STORY: Escape from New Orleans: As waters rose, a white suburb across the Mississippi closed a key bridge to fleeing residents
A little past noon on Tuesday, August 30, 2005, the first RTA employees and their relatives—who had been sheltering at the agency’s headquarters on Canal Street—dropped into the dark, murky waters that were chest high on a six-foot man. Around two-thirds of their group—two hundred people—chose to walk rather than remain. Children were hoisted on air mattresses, along with most everyone standing under maybe five feet five inches tall. Those tall enough to walk sloshed through the smelly, oily water, guiding the others on the makeshift rafts.
Read more by Gary Rivlin for Yahoo News>>

STORY: Meet Hurricane Katrina’s ‘Youngest Survivor’
Eight-year-old Noah Benton Markham is known for his powerful imagination and storytelling prowess. However, Noah himself may be the most breathtaking story of all: born 16 months after Hurricane Katrina to a mother who evacuated and a police officer father who stayed, from a frozen embryo that underwent its own dramatic rowboat rescue.
Read more by Sara Hudson >>

VIDEO: Hero: This Hotel Manager Saved 300 People During Katrina
When many people think of Hurricane Katrina, they think of New Orleans — but the Big Easy wasn’t the only place devastated by the storm. Ten years ago, right as the hurricane came ashore, it made a sharp right turn and headed straight for the Mississippi Gulf Coast — plowing into towns like Pass Christian, Ocean Springs, and Biloxi.

Few people in Ocean Springs, Miss., expected Katrina to be so strong.
Read more by Paula Froelich>>

STORY: What I saw visiting post-Katrina New Orleans with President Bush
You never forget the sight — or the smell — of an entire city under water. A few feet away from me, even President George W. Bush looked stunned.

It was Sept. 2, 2005— five days after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, wiping out communities in Alabama and Mississippi and sending fatal floods into the streets of New Orleans. As a White House correspondent for Newsweek, I was among the small group of reporters accompanying Bush for his first on-the-ground visit to the region amid criticism of his administration’s slow response to the storm.
Read more by Holly Bailey>>

STORY: Model Brittani Bader on Surviving Katrina & Coming to NYC With Only $300
Ten years ago Brittani Bader’s parents put their children in a car with relatives to escape Hurricane Katrina. They all thought they would be separated for only two days. Instead, the then 13-year-old stayed with relatives in Florida for weeks. She watched the TV coverage in horror as the storm devastated her city. Even worse, Bader didn’t know for 14 days if her father had survived. Despite getting his children to safety, Bader’s father tried to leave the flood zone too late and ended up having to ride out the storm. When his home became flooded at the height of the hurricane, he put his children’s birth certificates in a bag, punched a hole through the roof to escape, and swam to safety. “It was unbelievable they made it out. So many of our neighbors didn’t,” recalls Bader.
Read more by Sara Bliss>>

STORY: Healing New Orleans: Apothecary Spots in the Creole City
New Orleans has always been a site of healing — even before the French Mississippi Company officially founded the Louisiana city in 1718. After Hurricane Katrina devastated the area 10 years ago in August 2005, many people — and not just NOLA natives — journeyed to the city to volunteer, and ended up staying for good, falling in love with the city. To celebrate NOLA’s rich history of healing, past and present, we uncovered four apothecary-themed spots seeped deep into the multicultural energy of the southern city.
Read more by Noël Duan>>

STORY: Young people, startups fuel New Orleans’ recovery — will it be enough?
A decade after Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, the city has unexpectedly emerged as one of the fastest growing hubs for entrepreneurship in the country. New businesses are launching at twice the rate they were before the storm. Between 2011 and 2013, the rate of new business growth was 64% higher than the national average. Venture capital funding, virtually nonexistent pre-Katrina, rose to $15.51 per capita by 2010 and has doubled since then, according to the Data Center, an independent research firm covering Southeast Louisiana.
Read more by Mandi Woodruff>>

STORY: ‘Katrina Washed Away Our Gigs’: How New Orleans Got Its Groove Back
In the decade since the levees failed after Hurricane Katrina, nearly drowning New Orleans, there were concerns that the Big Easy’s unique, crucial music culture had been swept away with the neighborhoods that the storm surge demolished.

But despite the city’s laissez-faire nickname, music’s climb back from the near-death experience hasn’t been easy.
Read more by Tristram Lozaw>>

STORY: 10 Years Post Katrina, NOLA’s House of Dance & Feathers Dances Back to Life
Tucked away in the Lower Ninth Ward, just blocks from where the levee broke, is a unique museum, even for New Orleans. Located in a building in the back of 1317 Tupelo Street is the House of Dance & Feathers — a rough-and-tumble museum dedicated to the Mardi Gras Indian tribes. Founded by Ronald Lewis, the head of the Choctaws, the museum is full of feathered headdresses, intricately beaded chest plates, glittery costumes and, in the corner, a case of water worn shoes, that, despite the wear, still hold their fabulousness.
Read more by Paula Froelich>>

STORY: After fleeing Hurricane Katrina, Doris Banks has returned to New Orleans. Was it a mistake?
Doris Banks was born in New Orleans. Her mother and father were born here, too, and she is pretty sure all four of her grandparents were as well, though the family history gets murky any further back than that.

Until 10 years ago, it had never occurred to any of her relatives — a wide and complicated web of siblings, nieces, nephews, partners, spouses and exes — that any of them would ever live anyplace else. Even as Katrina’s waters rose in the public housing project most of them called home, some, at first, refused to leave. They eventually had to, of course, scattering around the country for a few years. Then, one by one, they came back.
Read more by Lisa Belkin >>

PHOTOS: New Orleans after Katrina: then and now
August 29th marks the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which killed at least 1,836 people and is considered the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history. Devastation was widespread throughout the city with water approximately 12 feet high in some areas. Getty Images photographer, Mario Tama, takes a look back at New Orleans, revisiting locations he photographed ten years earlier.
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STORY: Hurricane Katrina forced their church from New Orleans, but a congregation’s remarkable journey kept them together in Texas
In the wee hours of Aug. 28, 2005, New Orleans native June Lemon grabbed her church phone directory and hastily dialed more than 50 households with an urgent message.

“Pack your clothes for three days, not more than three days, one bag per person,” Lemon said, then told them to be at the church no later than 8 a.m.

A Category 5 tropical cyclone was set to hit New Orleans in less than 24 hours. Anxiety spread. Would Hurricane Katrina be the “big one” that flood-prone New Orleans had forever dreaded?
Read more by Jason Sickles >>

VIDEO: New Orleans Church finds salvation in Texas
Ten years after Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, a modern day deliverance story has emerged deep in the heart of Texas.The Smoking for Jesus Ministry and its members fled New Orleans in advance of the storm and settled more than 500 miles away in the Lone Star State- we take a look at how the church members have rebuilt their lives.
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STORY: In post-Katrina New Orleans, black men lift each other up
On a Tuesday morning inside a dank, carpeted room at the New Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office, Patrick Carter is waiting patiently. At a quarter past 10 a.m., a handful of men and women trickle in, sliding back plastic chairs and taking seats at oblong tables that wouldn’t look out of place in a school cafeteria.
Read more by Mandi Woodruff  >>

PHOTOS: Hurricane Katrina: Ten years on
Reuters photographer Carlos Barria returned to New Orleans after documenting events in 2005 and found a city much rebuilt and renovated, although abandoned homes show Katrina’s lingering impact.
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