Hurricane Katrina — 1,833 Killed; Levee Failures Flood 80% of New Orleans

Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005 as a Category 4 storm. New Orleans levee failures flooded 80% of the city; over 1,833 people died and more than one million were displaced. The federal government's catastrophically slow response — FEMA Director Michael Brown's 'Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job' moment — became a defining failure of the Bush administration, exposing deep racial and economic inequalities in disaster preparedness and federal emergency management.