In all, Hurricane Katrina killed nearly 2,000 people and affected some 90,000 square miles of the United States. Katrina exacerbated these conditions, and left many of New Orleans’s poorest citizens even more vulnerable than they had been before the storm. Before the storm, the city’s population was mostly black (about 67 percent) moreover, nearly 30 percent of its people lived in poverty. Katrina pummeled huge parts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, but the desperation was most concentrated in New Orleans. For instance, some people tried to walk over the Crescent City Connection bridge to the nearby suburb of Gretna, but police officers with shotguns forced them to turn back. Meanwhile, it was nearly impossible to leave New Orleans: Poor people especially, without cars or anyplace else to go, were stuck. Morial Convention Center complex, but they found nothing there but chaos. Tens of thousands of people desperate for food, water and shelter broke into the Ernest N. City leaders had no real plan for anyone else. At the Superdome in New Orleans, where supplies had been limited to begin with, officials accepted 15,000 more refugees from the storm on Monday before locking the doors.

Getting my hurr did