It’s one of those "where were you" moments. For a lot of people, the late summer of 2005 is a blur of cable news tickers and grainy footage of rooftops. But if you’re asking hurricane katrina when did it happen because you’re looking for a specific date, the answer is both simple and incredibly messy.
The storm officially made landfall in southeast Louisiana on Monday morning, August 29, 2005.
But that’s just a data point. The "happening" of Katrina wasn't a single day. It was a slow-motion train wreck that started in the Bahamas and didn't really end for years. You can't just look at a calendar and say "there, that's when it happened." To really get it, you have to look at the week when the geography of the Gulf Coast was permanently rewritten.
The Week the World Watched New Orleans
Katrina didn't start as a monster. It was actually a pretty unremarkable tropical depression (Number 12, for the record) that formed over the Bahamas on August 23. Honestly, at that point, it was just another late-August swirl in a busy season.
By August 25, it had a name and hit Florida as a Category 1. It killed some people and knocked out power, but it wasn't the "Big One" yet. Then it hit the Gulf of Mexico. That’s where things got scary. The water was like bathwater—ridiculously warm—and Katrina basically drank that heat up. It exploded.
By the time Sunday, August 28 rolled around, it was a Category 5. That's the top of the scale. Maxed out.
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Mayor Ray Nagin finally issued a mandatory evacuation order that morning. If you’ve ever seen the photos of the gridlock on I-10, that was the moment. Thousands of people stayed, though. Some couldn't leave. No car. No money. Nowhere to go. Others figured they'd survived Betsy in '65 or Camille in '69, so they’d be fine. They weren't.
Monday, August 29: Landfall
This is the big one. At 6:10 AM local time, Katrina slammed into Buras, Louisiana. It wasn't a Category 5 anymore—it had weakened slightly to a Category 3—but the size was massive. The storm surge was what did the real damage. We’re talking a wall of water up to 28 feet high in some places.
A lot of people think the wind knocked New Orleans down. It didn't. It was the water.
The levees broke. Not all at once, and not everywhere, but by 9:00 AM, the Industrial Canal had breached. Then the 17th Street Canal. Then the London Avenue Canal. The city is basically a bowl, and the bowl started filling up. By the time the sun went down on Monday, 80% of New Orleans was underwater.
Why the Timing of Hurricane Katrina Still Matters
When we talk about hurricane katrina when did it happen, we have to talk about the failure of response. Because the storm happened on Monday, but the "disaster" arguably peaked on Wednesday and Thursday.
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That’s when the Superdome and the Convention Center became symbols of a complete systemic breakdown.
There were 30,000 people trapped in the Superdome. No power. No running water. No working toilets. It was 90 degrees inside. People were dying from heat and lack of medicine while the rest of the country watched it on TV. It took days for the federal government—specifically FEMA—to get a handle on the scale of it. Michael Brown, the FEMA director at the time, famously got a "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" from President Bush, even as people were waving white sheets from attics a few miles away.
The timeline is a scar.
- August 23: Formation.
- August 28: The Superdome opens as a "refuge of last resort."
- August 29: Landfall and the levee breaches.
- August 31: 80% of the city is submerged; looting and chaos reported.
- September 2: The first major supply convoys finally arrive.
The Misconceptions About the Date
One thing people get wrong is thinking Katrina was just a New Orleans story.
If you go to Waveland, Mississippi, or Gulfport, they’ll tell you a different version of hurricane katrina when did it happen. For them, it happened with the force of a nuclear bomb on Monday morning. The surge there was even higher than in Louisiana. It wiped entire blocks off the map. Gone. Just concrete slabs left.
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Another weird detail? The storm was actually over New Orleans for a relatively short time. The water stayed for weeks. It took until September 20—nearly a month later—to pump the last of the floodwaters out of the city. And even then, they had to stop because Hurricane Rita was coming.
The Long-Term Fallout
Katrina killed nearly 1,400 people. Most of them were elderly. Many drowned in their own homes because they couldn't climb into their attics fast enough.
The economic hit was somewhere around $160 billion (in 2005 dollars). But the real cost was the displacement. The "Katrina Diaspora" sent people from the 9th Ward to Houston, Atlanta, and Utah. Many never came back. The census numbers for New Orleans still haven't fully recovered to pre-2005 levels.
The engineering was the biggest scandal. The Army Corps of Engineers eventually admitted that the levee system was "a system in name only." It was a patchwork of bad design and poor maintenance. The levees didn't just fail because the storm was too big; they failed because they weren't built right in the first place.
Actionable Steps for Modern Storm Season
Looking back at hurricane katrina when did it happen isn't just a history lesson. It’s a blueprint for what not to do. If you live in a hurricane-prone area, the "Katrina Lesson" is basically this: don't wait for the government to tell you it's serious.
- Define your trigger point. Don't wait for a mandatory order. If it's a Category 3 or higher and you’re in a flood zone, have a "go-bag" ready the moment it enters the Gulf.
- Digital backups are non-negotiable. One of the biggest hurdles for survivors was losing their IDs, birth certificates, and insurance papers to the water. Scan everything to a cloud drive now.
- Understand the "Surge" vs. the "Wind." Check your elevation. Many people in 2005 stayed because they thought their house could handle 120 mph winds. They didn't realize their house couldn't handle 10 feet of standing water.
- Have a "Post-Storm" communication plan. Cell towers went down instantly in 2005. Pick an out-of-state relative that everyone in your family calls to check in. It’s easier to get a call out to a different area code than to someone in the same city.
- Check your insurance fine print. Most homeowners' insurance does not cover flood damage. You need separate NFIP (National Flood Insurance Program) coverage. If you don't have it, get it. There is usually a 30-day waiting period before it kicks in.
The legacy of late August 2005 is a grim reminder that nature doesn't care about our schedules or our politics. When the water comes, it comes. Knowing when it happened is the first step toward making sure a tragedy on that scale never happens the same way again.
The most important thing to remember is that the official timeline ended in September 2005, but for the people who lived through it, Katrina is still happening every time the wind picks up in the Gulf.