Hurricane Center Issues Final Report on Katrina

Katrina hit the Gulf Coast as a Category 3 hurricane, not a Category 4 as first thought, and New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain likely were spared the storm’s strongest winds, the National Hurricane Center said.

New Orleans’ storm levees were generally believed to be able to protect the city from the flooding of a fast-moving Category 3 storm. But Katrina was generally a slow-moving storm, said Jim Taylor, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers.

Katrina made landfall Aug. 29 with top sustained winds of about 125 mph, not the 140 mph that was calculated at the time, the hurricane center said in its final report on the storm.