Katrina's Aftermath Flood chaos in the southern United States
Most of downtown New Orleans is flooded. The city's 480,000 residents were told to evacuate before the hurricane hit Monday, but close to 20 percent chose to stay during the storm.
Housing blocks near downtown New Orleans are almost completely submerged in floodwaters. As the waters continued to rise, many areas, including the famous French Quarter, were threatened. Rescue workers in boats and helicopters plucked residents from the roofs of their homes. Bodies were seen floating in the city streets.
Canal Street, New Orleans' famous promenade, is now inundated with water. The ferocity of Katrina caused levees to break and water from nearby Lake Ponchartrain to fill the low-lying city.
This aerial photograph shows some of the devastation caused by the high winds and heavy flooding in the greater New Orleans area.
A residential section of Gulfport Mississippi was left strewn with shipping containers, RVs, and boats that washed ashore on Monday following Katrina's high winds and waves. At least 100 people were feared dead along the coast of southern Mississippi, where glitzy casinos, plush homes and shrimp fishing businesses lay in ruins.
The Palace Casino in Biloxi, Miss. now lies partially underwater.
A span of Highway 90 leading into in Biloxi, Miss. is now totally destroyed.
A heavily damaged casino barge now sits among residential homes north of Biloxi's Highway 90.
Biloxi's Treasure Bay Casino, which once looked like a pirate ship, now is little more than a skeleton.
A car dealership in Slidell, La. has turned into a vehicle graveyard. The cars are now afloat in dirty swampwater.
The flooded Shell Oil refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi had to halt production to a minimum in the wake of Katrina. The US government said it was considering an oil industry request to open up its Strategic Petroleum Reserve after Hurricane Katrina battered crude production sites in the south.
Floodwaters surrounded the Superdome arena in New Orleans, where close to 30,000 people took shelter from the storm.
Emergency personnel at the foot the St. Claude Street Bridge prepare to rescue New Orleans residents on Tuesday.
