August 29 · This Day in America
Just after dawn, Hurricane Katrina comes ashore in southeast Louisiana as a Category 3 storm, then strikes again near the mouth of the Pearl River in Mississippi. The wind is brutal, but the catastrophe is the water. By mid-morning the levees protecting New Orleans begin to fail — the Industrial Canal, then the 17th Street Canal — and the city built below sea level begins to fill like a bowl. Within a day roughly eighty percent of New Orleans is underwater. People wave bedsheets from rooftops. Thousands wait at the Superdome and the Convention Center for help that comes too slowly. More than eighteen hundred people die across the Gulf. Katrina is remembered as a hurricane, but its hardest lesson was not about weather. It was about who a country sees, and who it does not, when the water rises. The Gulf rebuilt. The questions did not wash away.
Source: www.weather.gov
Also on this day · 1786
Hundreds of armed farmers and Revolutionary War veterans, crushed by debt and taxes and threatened with losing their farms, block the county court at Northampton so it cannot foreclose on them. Led by former Continental captain Daniel Shays, the uprising terrifies the young nation's leaders and exposes how weak the government under the Articles of Confederation truly is. Within a year, delegates would gather in Philadelphia to write something stronger — a Constitution.
Source: constitutioncenter.org