DISASTERS

AP PHOTOS: A look at areas hit by Hurricane Katrina and how they look a decade after storm

Associated Press
Published | Updated

This combination of Aug. 30, 2005 and July 29, 2015 aerial photos shows downtown New Orleans and the Superdome flooded by Hurricane Katrina and the same area a decade later. Katrina's powerful winds and driving rain bore down on Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005. The storm caused major damage to the Gulf Coast from Texas to central Florida while powering a storm surge that breached the system of levees that were built to protect New Orleans from flooding. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip, Gerald Herbert) (The Associated Press)

In this combination of Wednesday, Aug. 31, 2005 and Thursday, July 30, 2015 photos, patients and staff of the Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans are evacuated by boat after flood waters surrounded the facility, and a decade later, the renamed Ochsner Baptist Hospital. Nearly 2,000 people died because of the storm, mostly in New Orleans, 80 percent of which was flooded for weeks. One million people were displaced. (AP Photo/Bill Haber, Gerald Herbert) (The Associated Press)

This combination of Aug. 30, 2005 and July 29, 2015 aerial photos show the Mid City and Palmetto areas of New Orleans flooded by Hurricane Katrina and the same area a decade later. The storm went down in history as the costliest natural disaster to strike the U.S., with $150 billion in damages to homes and other property. It was also one of the deadliest - nearly 2,000 died. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip, Gerald Herbert) (The Associated Press)

When Hurricane Katrina ripped through the Gulf Coast nearly 10 years ago, it left a mammoth trail of damage in its wake.

Storm surge and winds ripped the top off a church steeple in Mississippi, left a tangle of fishing boats sitting in the middle of a Louisiana highway, and ripped holes into the New Orleans Superdome's roof.

Flooding caused by breached levees in New Orleans stranded tens of thousands of people in horrific conditions at the football stadium and convention center, flooded houses in Lakeview to the eaves and left a parking lot full of waterlogged school buses.

This is a collection of photos by Associated Press photographers of many of those locations showing how they looked in the days after the storm and how they look now.