Hurricane Katrina hit America's Gulf coast on Aug. 29, 2005, killing more than 1,800 people, driving 2.16 million from their homes and causing $75 billion of damage.

Winds of up to 130 mph (210 kph) lashed Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia and Alabama, affecting an area roughly the size of Britain. Many of the same places were hit by another strong hurricane, Rita, on Sep. 24, 2005, compounding the misery.

Katrina swelled the coastal waters with a storm surge of more than 20 feet (6 metres), flooding large areas of Biloxi and Gulfport, Mississippi, and causing terrible damage up and down the coast.

The surge put intolerable strain on flood defences surrounding New Orleans, and more than 75 percent of the historic city was under six to 20 feet (two to six metres) of water within hours of the hurricane making landfall.

Tens of thousands of people who were unwilling or unable to leave the stricken city had to be rescued from their rooftops. Authorities issued a mandatory evacuation as the storm approached, but failed to provide transport for people without vehicles or the resources to leave. Several days after the storm, buses and planes finally took people out of the stricken city, which had a population of about 485,000 before Katrina.

The evacuees were spread across the country, and many of those flooded out of their homes have yet to return, scattered in far-flung places like Houston and Dallas in the state of Texas and Atlanta in Georgia.

DEATHS	1,833 (Belgian University of Louvain International Disaster Database)
SURVIVORS
Louisiana families living in trailers in December 2007	Almost 40,000 (Brookings Institution)
Number applying for federal assistance by March 2006	1.2 million (FEMA)
Number evacuated	2.16 million (Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA)
New Orleans chool enrollment three years after the storm	76 percent of pre-Katrina levels (Brookings Institution)
New Orleans population three years after the storm	87 percent of pre-Katrina levels (Brookings Institution)
Rents three years after the storm	46 percent more than pre-Katrina (Brookings Institution)