Hello, everyone. Welcome to a special edition of CNN 10. Today, August 29th, marks 20 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans.

 

It was the deadliest and costliest hurricane in recent U.S. history. We want to reflect on this topic, especially for those of you who may not have been born yet or who want to learn more about it.

 

We will take a look at the why's and the how this powerful storm unfolded, as well as what our nation learned, because many of those lessons can minimize risks and tragedy during the inevitable natural disasters of the future.

 

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeastern Louisiana as a powerful Category 3 hurricane just after 6 a.m. local time. The storm then continued on to Mississippi, leaving a trail of destruction from Biloxi to the Florida Panhandle.

 

An estimated 1 million people left New Orleans before the storm in the city's first ever evacuation order, but many stayed or were unable to leave.

 

The aftermath was like nothing the country had ever seen.

 

From New Orleans, many reports are coming in stating total structural failure in the New Orleans metro area. More than 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater after the levees that were designed to protect the city failed.

 

levee [ˋlɛvɪ] n. 堤坝，堤岸

 

Those who sheltered in place and survived the storm were suddenly stranded, stuck in their attics or on their roofs, surrounded by putrid floodwaters, and forced to endure sweltering temperatures without electricity.

 

attic [ˋætɪk] n. 顶楼，阁楼；顶楼房间

putrid [ˋpjutrɪd] adj. 腐败的；放出恶臭的

 

Both the National Guard and Coast Guard rescued tens of thousands of stranded survivors, including at the city's iconic Superdome.

 

Nearly 25,000 sought shelter at the stadium, which faced heavy storm damage, leading to deteriorating conditions.

 

The losses from Katrina were staggering. More than 1,800 lives were lost, the majority of those in Louisiana. And for those who survived, many had little to go home to.

 

Homes were flooded, swept off their foundations, or completely destroyed. Sections of roads and bridges were washed out. More than 1 million people in the Gulf region were displaced from their homes.

 

The population of New Orleans alone decreased by over 50 percent in the year after Katrina.

 

And despite record-setting insurance claims, many who returned home still found it too costly to rebuild.

 

The storm also highlighted long-standing flaws in disaster preparedness systems and brought to the forefront deep-rooted issues of race, class, and inequality that persist to this day.

 

inequality [ɪnɪˋkwɑlətɪ] n. 不平等；不平衡

 

Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government. And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility.

 

And it's in our national interest that we find out exactly what went on and so that we can better respond.

 

As the world was still struggling to comprehend the full scope of Katrina's destruction, the unimaginable was unfolding at New Orleans' biggest hospital.

 

Some of the city's most vulnerable populations, too sick, maybe too injured to evacuate, were now stranded inside Charity Hospital. And then they lost power.

 

That is when this storm's biggest heroes emerged, doctors, surgeons, nurses, and administrators who refused to leave their patients and worked around the clock to keep them alive.

 

CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta was inside the hospital as the crisis unfolded. Doc, thank you so much for being here with us today.

 

Thanks for having me, Coy.

 

I want to start from the beginning. What was going through your mind when you first learned that CNN was going to deploy you to New Orleans where this tragedy had just happened and then you heard about what was happening at Charity Hospital?

 

I wanted to go immediately.

 

And I'll tell you what had happened that was so interesting, as often happens in natural disasters.

 

The initial reports were that Charity Hospital had been completely evacuated, that there were no patients there.

 

But at the same time, I was getting text messages and emails from friends of mine who worked at Charity Hospital on dying phones because they had no power, and they were sending me messages saying, hey, we have been forgotten.

 

No one thinks that we're even here, and this is a disaster. This is some of what I saw.

 

I love you, I need you to survive.

 

Any hospital would have a difficult time in a disaster like this one, even one with the name Charity.

 

At New Orleans' largest public hospital, the goal of the staff today, that nobody dies.

 

We are their only hope, and we are trying as hard as we can to get them some help.

 

What's going to happen to some of these patients if you don't get them out of here?

 

Two of them have already died here on this ramp waiting to get out, on this very spot.

 

There's no electricity, no water, no food, but more than 200 patients, and it's been this way for days. So this is what a Charity Hospital looks like in the middle of a natural disaster.

 

We're in downtown New Orleans. This is actually an auditorium that we're standing in now. At one time held up to 40 patients all around this place.

 

auditorium [͵ɔdəˋtorɪəm] n. 会堂，礼堂

 

Several patients still remain here as well.

 

We are at the point where it's developing nation medicine, probably without the power, without light.

 

It's like a third world country. We know the risks, and we're just doing the best we can.

 

But this is the United States. Tuesday, the governor said this place would be evacuated.

 

Three days later, we watch as medical personnel at Tulane, right across the street, were picked up by helicopters.

 

While Charity's patients, some on ventilators being worked by hand pumps, waited in this parking garage. Last night, this hospital had a good night, because nobody died.

 

Fortunate, because the morgue, which is in the basement, is flooded. The dead have to wait in the stairwell.

 

morgue [mɔrg] n. 停屍房; 太平間

stairwell [ˋstɛr͵wɛl] n. 樓梯井

 

Joy today is mine.

 

At the hospital named Charity, it takes good doctors, quick thinking, and a lot of faith.

 

Because victory today is mine.

 

Powerful stuff, Doc.

 

Now, that hospital, as we just saw there, it did have generators, but they didn't work. Do you remember the why? What happened there?

 

You know, if you look at New Orleans as a city, as you probably know, Coy, it's sort of a bowl, right? So when water flows in, it goes down, and it floods. That's what happens.

 

This still surprises me to this day, that the generators and the backup generators, they were all in the basement.

 

So this was a problem that probably could have been anticipated, but they just didn't have any sources of power that were higher up out of the flood zone, and that led to a catastrophic problem.

 

There was no fixing this, because the generators were literally underwater.

 

Do you think that maybe there are some other lessons that hospitals or cities or communities might have learned, and so that those lives weren't lost in vain?

 

You know, I've thought about this a lot, because you hate to be too critical of people who are trying to do the right thing and institutions and organizations trying to do the right thing.

 

I think it's really important to remember, whether it's a conflict zone or a natural disaster, places of care, in this case hospitals, they are oftentimes inside those zones as well.

 

So how do you harden their walls? How do you make sure? We couldn't even communicate.

 

harden [ˋhɑrdn] v. 使变坚固; 变坚固

 

I mean, the phones were down, and we had no power, so eventually your cell phones, everything stopped working.

 

How do you protect against that? And obviously this generator problem. I mean, again, this was probably something that could have been prevented, but I think if you go to hospitals now in areas that are flood-prone, those generators and those backup power systems, they're up high.

 

You've got to protect them.

 

You know, I value your wisdom and perspective, Doc, and you witnessed how physically, mentally, emotionally distressed so many people were.

 

value [ˋvælju] v. 尊重；重视，珍视

 

What would be your advice out there to any people who might be facing some sort of challenging time in their life?

 

I would say this, that, you know, if you would ask some of the people who really rose up and did remarkable things during Hurricane Katrina, if you asked them a week before, hey, are you going to be the guy that's going to rise up? They would have probably said, no, not me.

 

I'm not that guy. Then all of a sudden, these remarkable heroes, unsung heroes, stepped up. So I would say, you know, it was inspiring.

 

You know, incredible things come out of terrible things, and you never know just how much you can rise to the challenge until you're in a situation like that.

 

But we see heroic stories all over the world, and I think this was another example of that.

 

Through our struggles, we can learn strength.

 

Absolutely. And our tough times can make us tougher. Thanks a lot.

 

Thanks for having me.

 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, estimates Hurricane Katrina caused more than $160 billion in damages to the Gulf Coast.

 

Days ahead of the storm, the National Hurricane Center issued warnings to Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, all directly in its path.

 

The eye of the storm was forecast to pass right over New Orleans. Our Allison Chinchar is here to help explain what made Hurricane Katrina such a powerful storm and give us some of the science behind its catastrophic impact on the Gulf Coast. Allison, what made New Orleans and the surrounding region so vulnerable to a storm like Katrina that that levee system eventually just failed?

 

It did. And unfortunately, for New Orleans' sake, they sit below sea level. This means when all the water rushes in from a storm like Katrina, it has to just go into the city. Now, here's a look at Katrina.

 

All of that water from the very strong winds of the storm just got pushed into the city. Now, let's pretend this colander is the levee system that is in New Orleans, okay?

 

colander [ˋkʌləndɚ] n. 滤器；滤锅

 

Essentially, when the levee system works properly, all of the water that comes in drains out through the levees, or in this instance, the holes in the colander. However, when the levee system does not work, all of that water comes in, and the city acts like a bowl.

 

It basically fills up with all the water, and that's why we ended up having so many flooding problems in the city.

 

All right, Allison, Katrina actually made landfall all the way in South Florida as a Category 1 hurricane days before it hit New Orleans. How and why did it intensify so rapidly?

 

Yeah, so the interesting thing about Katrina, people often forget that it actually made landfall over Florida.

 

So take a look at the graphic we have behind us. This is actually going to show you the actual track and pass. You can see it start to form right through there.

 

It crosses over South Florida as a Category 1 hurricane, but then it goes back out over the open Gulf. This is when it intensifies, gets all the way up to a Category 5 storm, and the reason for that is the Gulf at the time was a boiling pot of water. It was filled with incredibly warm sea surface temperatures, and that's fuel for hurricanes like this.

 

But then also notice that we can back down to a Category 3. That's because it was undergoing something called an eyewall replacement cycle. In theory, that's supposed to help make them stronger. It just didn't get to complete the cycle long enough before it made landfall.

 

eyewall replacement cycle 眼墙置换循环

 

This was good news in terms of winds. It made them weaker for the actual system at landfall, but it allowed for much more water to be pushed into the city, leading to a lot of the flooding problems that that city had.

 

You mentioned New Orleans being like a bowl.

 

Scientists say that New Orleans is actually sinking even further. How do city officials protect a place like New Orleans?

 

Right, so after Katrina happened, there were a lot of advancements put in place. For example, we tried to make advancements in things like the levees, floodgates, other precautions like that that we put upgrades into to try to prevent another Katrina from happening in the future.

 

Allison, thank you so much for your expertise, your insight, helping us understand this tragic incident that happened two decades ago. I know I learned a lot, so thank you.

 

You're welcome.

 

We hope you learned something, too, and hope you might be able to reflect on the impact this historic storm left on the United States.

 

We hope this feature might help us all have more empathy for people who, God forbid, might ever have to live through a natural disaster. As Dr. Gupta said earlier, incredible things can come from terrible things, and it's up to us as individuals to rise up and help where we can.

 

Hope you have a great weekend, and we'll see you right back here for a regularly scheduled 10 Minutes of News, I'm Coy Wire, and we are CNN 10.