This month, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) adjusted Hurricane Katrina’s official cost of damage to $186.3 billion making it the costliest hurricane on record.

Also, the death count for the 2005 storm was adjusted from just over 1800 to just under 1400.

Despite the downward adjustment, Hurricane Katrina remains the deadliest storm in the past 50 years.

According to the data that the NHC relied on for its update, Katrina, “stands apart not just for the enormity of the losses, but for the ways in which most of the deaths occurred.”

Levee failure.

“…levee failures allowed water to fill parts of the New Orleans area to great depth, leading to the deaths of hundreds of people…”

This is why the exact truth and circumstances about the August 2005 event need to be put in front, and kept in front, of the American people.

What many people call “Hurricane Katrina” was in fact, a calamitous engineering failure. And the responsible party is the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Environmental reporter Mark Schleifstein wrote this good story about the NHC updates.