Katrina latest in a long history

Hurricane Katrina, which battered cities and leveled outlying communities from Louisiana to Florida with winds as high as 145 mph, likely will rank as one of America’s most deadly natural disasters — and certainly one of its most costly.

Katrina, fed by the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, slammed Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, leaving in its wake what city and state officials, along with rescue crews, have estimated will be a death toll reaching into the thousands.

With entire communities leveled, businesses in shambles, highways and bridges destroyed, thousands of vehicles ripped apart and essential services ruined, the property damage is inestimable.

The United Nations this week characterized the cataclysmic storm as one of the world’s worst natural disasters in terms of property damage, even outstripping the December tsunami in Asia that killed 180,000 people and caused $10 billion in destruction.

“This is one of the most destructive natural disasters ever measured in the amount of homes destroyed, people affected, people displaced,” said Jan Egeland, the United Nations’ undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs.

While Katrina certainly has earned her deadly reputation, the storm’s destructive catwalk through America’s underbelly is not the first time the unfettered fury of nature — or even mankind’s own doings — has drowned, burned or buried people in their own homes, schools and workplaces, or spawned legions of refugees desperately seeking rescue, shelter or a drink of water.

The nation has been ravaged in the past 100 years by both natural and man-made disasters, including hurricanes, tornadoes, fires and explosions, floods, earthquakes — and attacks by terrorists on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed nearly 3,000 people and caused $21 billion in damage.

Even New Orleans, which continues to reel from Katrina and the surge of murky and corpse-littered waters it left behind, has been subjected to devastation before — suffering through nine major hurricanes since 1909.

Disasters of catastrophic consequence are no stranger to the Big Easy, whose bizarre love affair with death and the pageantry of funerals has been born amid a continuing onslaught of natural and man-made disasters — probably beginning as early as 1853, when, at a time of exploding financial prosperity and community rebirth, the scourge of yellow fever killed more than 8,000 of its residents.

Residents of the Gulf states and those along the Atlantic Coast also know about potentially disastrous hurricanes.

More than 90 million people — from Texas to southeastern Massachusetts — live within 50 miles of the Gulf of Mexico or the Atlantic Ocean and, according to government estimates, face the probability of at least one major Category 3 or Category 4 hurricane every four years.

Since 1900, those regions have been hit 37 times by what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Hurricane Center classifies as a “major” hurricane, meaning that more than 25 people were killed. Those hurricanes resulted in 15,522 deaths, with the most frequently hit states being Florida, Texas, Louisiana, North Carolina and Mississippi.

Seeking to make the country more secure against such disasters, Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican and chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on terrorism, technology and homeland security, has scheduled hearings “once the Katrina crisis has stabilized” to ensure federal, state and local authorities are prepared to properly respond to future incidents.

“We know there will be more natural disasters, and it’s almost as certain that there will be additional attempts by terrorists to attack major American cities and do as much damage as possible,” Mr. Kyl said. “If we can learn from this experience, there will be at least one positive result of the disaster of Hurricane Katrina.”

The most devastating hurricane on record in terms of fatalities, according to the National Weather Service, occurred in 1900 when an unnamed Category 4 storm slammed ashore in Galveston, Texas, killing an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 people. That treacherous storm struck with little warning on Sept. 8, 1900, leveling a dozen city blocks — about three-quarters of the city.

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