Soon after they arrived, officials enacted contraflow, shutting down all roads leading in and opening up every lane out of the city.ĭoug dropped his wife off at their home in the affluent Lakewood South neighborhood of New Orleans, right near the levee at the 17th Street Canal, and drove to the Louisiana Superdome.Īs general manager of the facility since 1997, he had been through this several times before. They drove four hours from Bossier City - where Doug, an executive with SMG, managed a facility - back to New Orleans, a lone car on the inbound side of the highway as thousands upon thousands of cars sat in traffic on the outbound lanes. A storm worth worrying about had entered the gulf. Inside the Dome, though, a small group of women and men fought to retain whatever order they could.ĭoug and Denise Thornton woke early to drive back to New Orleans. With limited power, no plumbing, a shredded roof and not nearly enough supplies to deal with 30,000 evacuees, it became a symbol of how unprepared the city and country had been for a storm experts knew could arrive. Over the next several days the Dome would sink into chaos. In the hours before the storm hit and then after it left - when the levees failed and everything changed - the people who remained in New Orleans streamed toward a place where usually they would go to watch football, the massive structure at the city’s heart, the Superdome.

In all, 1,833 people would lose their lives. The massive hurricane exposed major issues with the city’s infrastructure, left thousands upon thousands of people without any place to stay, destroying their homes and leaving their neighborhoods in ruins. It has been 10 years since Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed the city of New Orleans.

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