Hurricane Katrina

Hurricane Katrina was the first Category 5 hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It first made landfall as a Category 1 hurricane just north of Miami, Florida on August 25, 2005, but four days later it turned into a devastating Category 4 hurricane when it hit land again along the Central Gulf Coast near New Orleans, Louisiana. Its storm surge soon breached the levee system that protected New Orleans from Lake Pontchatrain and the Mississippi River. Most of the city was subsequently flooded mainly by water from the lake. This and other major damage to the coastal regions of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama made Katrina the most destructive and costly natural disaster in the history of the United States.