KATRINA STARTED OUT as a blip. A few clouds in the Atlantic.

She debuted as a Category 1 hurricane with the potential to ruin the MTV Video Music Awards in Miami, where Eva Longoria emerged on stage in a bathing suit, saying that a "little hurricane" wasn't going to stop her fun.

But Katrina skipped across South Florida and into the Gulf of Mexico, the warmer water powering her up like rocket fuel. She grew and raged, becoming one of the strongest storms of the past century. Then she headed north.

Members of Pastor DeBruce Nelson's Lighthouse Apostolic Church, in Biloxi, Mississippi, gather for Sunday service on September 4. (Larry Towell)

She hit southeastern Louisiana, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast on the morning of Monday, August 29, with sustained winds of 140 miles per hour and a storm surge 200 miles wide and 25 feet high. She was a Category 4, officially less powerful than the legendary Camille, a Category 5 that hit the coast in 1969 with nearly 200-mile-per-hour winds. But Katrina was larger and meaner, with a more destructive storm surge and hurricane-force winds extending out 120 miles from the center. She sliced across three states and 250 miles of coastline.

Before it was all over, Katrina had killed more than a thousand people and wrecked three large cities and dozens of smaller communities. More than half a million homes and businesses were destroyed, and 1.4 million people were displaced. The storm swept entire towns out to sea and let America know that poor people really did live in New Orleans. She broke through reinforced concrete with the power of a dozen locomotives, the surge hitting the coast like a giant hand, scraping everything away.