How Levee Failures Made Hurricane Katrina a Bigger Disaster

By the time Hurricane Katrina made landfall near Buras, Louisiana in the early morning of August 29, 2005, flooding had already started.

At 5 a.m., an hour before the storm hit land, the US Army Corps of Engineers, which administers the levee and levee system in and around New Orleans, received a report that the levees the 17th Street canal, the city’s largest drainage canal, had been breached. To the east of the city, massive storm surges sent torrents of water over the levees along the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MRGO) and into the parish of St. Bernard, located just southeast of New Orleans.

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