On This Date: Before Katrina, There Was Hurricane Betsy Jonathan Erdman September 9, 2025 at 4:50 AM 0 Forty years before Katrina, Hurricane Betsy was the most recent modernera flood in New Orleans. On Sept.
- - On This Date: Before Katrina, There Was Hurricane Betsy
Jonathan Erdman September 9, 2025 at 4:50 AM
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Forty years before Katrina, Hurricane Betsy was the most recent modern-era flood in New Orleans.
On Sept. 9, 1965, 60 years ago tonight, Betsy roared ashore in southeast Louisiana at Category 4 intensity on a terrible northwestward path to drive storm surge up the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and into Lake Pontchartrain.
A 10-foot storm surge overwhelmed the city's protection system. Levees failed along the Industrial Canal and in the Lower Ninth Ward. Flood water covered some homes up to rooftops. It was the city's worst flooding since a 1947 hurricane sent a 16-foot surge into Lake Pontchartrain, flooding most of the downtown area.
Due to the magnitude of the flood, the federal government ordered the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to assume responsibility for rebuilding and maintaining the levee system around New Orleans.
The official death toll from Betsy in both Florida and Louisiana was 75. Betsy was the first billion-dollar hurricane in U.S. history, with total damage now estimated at $14.2 billion (2024 dollars). It still ranks among the 25 costliest U.S. hurricanes, even after 20 more damaging hurricanes in the 20th century.
Betsy struck despite a strong El Niño in place that season, a large-scale feature that usually minimizes hurricanes.
It also performed a weird pinhook loop while it was northeast of the Bahamas on Sept. 4-5.
According to NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab, some in the news media blamed this erratic path on a cloud seeding experiment while the hurricane was over the Bermuda Triangle several days earlier. But the storm's seeding was canceled, and in the early 1980s, Project STORMFURY was ended, unable to confirm any impact of seeding on hurricanes.
Jonathan Erdman is a senior meteorologist at weather.com and has been covering national and international weather since 1996. Extreme and bizarre weather are his favorite topics. Reach out to him on Bluesky, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook.
Source: "AOL General News"
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