The Louisiana Superdome became one of the most harrowing scenes of Hurricane Katrina, housing an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 people for nearly a week in conditions that deteriorated from uncomfortable to dangerous. Opened as a “shelter of last resort” on August 27, 2005, the stadium lost power, its roof partially failed, and its plumbing collapsed, leaving thousands stranded in heat, darkness, and filth until evacuations were completed on September 3.
Why People Were Sent There
As Katrina intensified in the Gulf of Mexico, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation. But tens of thousands of residents had no car, no money for a hotel, or nowhere else to go. City officials designated the Superdome as the shelter of last resort for those who could not leave. It was never intended to be a comfortable refuge. The plan was simply to keep people alive through a Category 5 hurricane in a reinforced concrete structure.
The Louisiana National Guard began arriving at the Superdome on August 28, the day before landfall. About 2,500 evacuees were already inside by that evening. Supplies had been pre-positioned: roughly 43,776 MREs (military ration meals) and 90,000 liters of water. Louisiana had actually requested 109,440 MREs and 180,000 liters of water from FEMA, but trucks were forced to turn back as winds picked up. What made it inside was less than half of what officials knew they’d need.
The Roof Fails
Katrina made landfall on the morning of August 29 with sustained winds of 125 mph. The Superdome’s roof, a single-ply membrane covering 9.7 acres, began peeling away under wind uplift. Approximately half of the membrane was eventually torn off. With the outer layer gone, wind forces punched through two sections of the underlying metal roof deck, each measuring roughly 20 feet by 5 feet, opening holes 13 stories above the stadium floor.
Rain and humidity poured through these gaps. Water cascaded onto the field and into seating areas. The crowd, which had swelled to between 10,000 and 12,000 people, was pushed into drier corridors and concourse areas, compressing everyone into tighter and tighter spaces. The building held structurally, but it was no longer sealed from the storm.
Power Loss and Rising Temperatures
When the city’s electrical grid failed, the Superdome switched to backup generators. But those generators were only designed to power basic emergency systems. They could not run the air conditioning, the main lights, or the water pumps that served upper-level restrooms. The interior went dark except for dim emergency lighting. By August 30, with no air conditioning and New Orleans summer humidity trapped inside the punctured dome, temperatures climbed into the 90s.
Food rotted inside hundreds of unpowered refrigerators and freezers throughout the building. The smell of decomposing food mixed with the growing stench from failed plumbing. People fanned themselves with whatever they could find, and those with medical conditions, particularly the elderly, began deteriorating rapidly.
Sanitation Breakdown
The plumbing failure was one of the defining horrors of the Superdome experience. Every toilet and urinal in the building stopped functioning. With no running water and no way to flush waste, people were forced to use garbage cans, sinks, and corners of the building. Feces and blood covered walls in parts of the facility. Some people wore medical masks in an attempt to manage the smell, which survivors consistently described as overwhelming and inescapable.
The combination of extreme heat, no ventilation, tens of thousands of unwashed bodies, rotting food, and raw sewage created conditions that were physically sickening. Dehydration and heat-related illness spread, particularly among children, the elderly, and people with chronic health conditions who had arrived without adequate medication.
Security and Order Inside
The Louisiana National Guard maintained a presence throughout the crisis, with a Special Reaction Team assigned to provide security. By August 30, roughly 700 Guard members had relocated to the Superdome after their own base at Jackson Barracks flooded. An additional 100 personnel from the 159th Fighter Wing were deployed specifically for security operations.
Despite the Guard presence, conditions made maintaining order extremely difficult. Tensions rose sharply as hunger, thirst, and fear deepened. In the first days after the storm, media outlets reported widespread violence inside the Superdome, including murders and sexual assaults. Many of these early reports were later found to be exaggerated or unverified. The chaos was real, but some of the most extreme stories circulated by news organizations turned out to be rumors amplified in the information vacuum that followed the storm. This misinformation had real consequences: it shaped public perception of the survivors, many of whom were Black and low-income, and influenced the pace and tone of the government response.
That said, the situation was genuinely dangerous. People were frightened, desperate, and crammed together with no information about when help would arrive. Fights broke out. The darkness made it impossible to monitor all areas of the enormous building.
Deaths in the Superdome
When the National Guard and FEMA teams finally cleared the Superdome on September 3 and 4, they recovered six bodies from the building. The Louisiana Department of Health tracked Katrina deaths by location but grouped the Superdome together with other public places like streets, the Convention Center, and parking lots, making an exact Superdome-specific count difficult to isolate from official records. The total for all public locations was 100 deaths, with disease being the leading cause (52 deaths), followed by drowning (34), trauma (8), suicide (1), and unknown causes (5).
The confirmed deaths inside the Superdome itself were far fewer than early media reports suggested. Initial accounts claimed dozens or even hundreds had died. The actual number, while tragic, reflected deaths primarily from pre-existing medical conditions, heat exposure, and dehydration rather than the mass violence that had been reported.
Five Days to Evacuation
For those trapped inside, the most agonizing element was the wait. The storm passed on August 29, but the evacuation did not begin until September 1 at 10 a.m., a full three days later. The delay was caused by catastrophic flooding throughout the city, which made road access nearly impossible and overwhelmed every level of government logistics. Buses that were supposed to arrive didn’t. Communication systems were down. No one inside the Superdome had reliable information about when, or whether, help was coming.
Once the evacuation finally started, it ran around the clock using both ground vehicles and air assets. People were transported primarily to the Houston Astrodome and other shelters across Texas and Louisiana. The evacuation was completed by 1 p.m. on September 3. The following day, FEMA teams conducted a final sweep and confirmed the building was clear. On September 6, control of the Superdome was handed over to the 82nd Airborne Division and civil authorities.
Rebuilding the Superdome
The damage to the Superdome was extensive but repairable. Renovations cost $184 million, with FEMA covering $115 million. The building reopened 13 months after Katrina for a Monday Night Football game on September 25, 2006, when the New Orleans Saints returned home to play the Atlanta Falcons. The game became a nationally televised symbol of the city’s recovery, though for many Katrina survivors, the Superdome remained a symbol of something very different: a failure of government at every level to protect its most vulnerable residents.