John Mutter remembers seeing the roofs of single-story homes poking above the water level in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans.
John Mutter remembers seeing the roofs of single-story homes poking above the water level in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans. Houses in poorer, lower-lying parts of town, he said, were cleared off their foundations and plopped across the street.
Mutter, a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, visited the Gulf Coast after the storm and spoke with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials responsible for determining the death toll. “You can always figure out [roughly] who died of what,” he said. “But the circumstances and detailed causes are very hard to come by.”
This week marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s historic landfall on August 29, 2005, when 125 mph winds and 30-foot storm surges devastated the Gulf Coast. Although the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) built a network of levees and flood walls to shield New Orleans from inundation, over 50 structural failures along the system—last updated after 1965’s Hurricane Betsy—triggered widespread flooding and left 80 percent of the city submerged. Katrina remains the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, with 1,392 fatalities (a figure determined by the National Hurricane Center in 2023).
Read More: Columbia Climate School
View of flooded New Orleans, Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Credit: Commander Mark Moran, of the NOAA Aviation Weather Center, and Lt. Phil Eastman and Lt. (Photo Credit: Dave Demers, of the NOAA Aircraft Operations Center, via Wikimedia Commons)
