Twenty years later, Katrina still among Atlantic’s most deadly, costly

(The Center Square) – Twenty years ago this Friday, Hurricane Katrina – once a Category 5 beast – made landfall as a Category 3 first in southeastern Louisiana and then again on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

The National Hurricane Center, an arm of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, calls Katrina “one of the most devastating natural disasters in United States history.” More than 1 million were displaced, the death toll has fluctuated between 1,833 and 1,392, and the damage estimate was $125 billion.

In today’s dollars, it would be $226 billion.

“Katrina was an extraordinarily powerful and deadly hurricane that carved a wide swath of catastrophic damage and inflicted large loss of life,” the report from the Hurricane Center says. “It was the costliest and one of the fiv