Twenty-one years ago this morning, Hurricane Katrina came ashore in southeast Louisiana. The record of the days before is a record of decisions and their timing: a state of emergency declared in Louisiana on 26 August, a federal emergency declaration the following day, and on the morning of 28 August the first mandatory evacuation order in the history of New Orleans, with the Superdome named a shelter of last resort for those who could not leave. Hundreds of thousands did leave. Many thousands could not.
The storm's winds did much of their damage along the Mississippi coast. In New Orleans the water came afterward, through levees and floodwalls that failed in more than fifty places, until roughly four-fifths of the city lay under it. Along the Gulf Coast 1,392 people died. The damage came to about $125 billion, the costliest of any American tropical cyclone.
The satellite image below sets Katrina beside Camille of 1969, the storm many along that coast had measured every other storm against. What the official record holds less well is the smaller traffic of that week: men and women who put their own fishing boats on trailers, drove toward the water instead of away from it, and pulled neighbours and strangers off porch roofs one at a time. They kept no minutes. They are in the count of the saved.
One quiet piece of the record, Marguerite: the coastal marsh that once slowed storm surge had been going for decades, tens of square kilometres a year lost to subsidence, canals and saltwater. Every few kilometres of marsh takes something off a surge before it reaches a levee. The wetland was already thinner in 2005 than in 1969.
Marguerite, the cooking went on for weeks after the water went down — church halls and neighbourhood kitchens in Baton Rouge and Houston running hot lines for evacuees, feeding strangers three times a day for as long as it took. Plain food, in quantity, made by people who simply started.