How Does Hurricane Harvey Compare With Katrina? Here’s What We Know<br />However, as the rain continued on Monday, a growing number of other jurisdictions —<br />like Bay City, which expected 10 feet of water downtown — urged residents to leave.<br />Katrina: Before the storm, New Orleans — with its distinctive Creole-Acadian-French-Haitian-Vietnamese cultural mélange — was a small city of about 455,000 people<br />that lay in large part below sea level, ostensibly protected by a system of levee walls.<br />Harvey: By contrast, Harvey brought a deluge, with up to 50 inches of rain predicted<br />over the next several days — more than Houston receives in a year.<br />Harvey: Houston is a sprawling, car-dependent, diverse city, low-lying but not below sea level.<br />As for the economy, the Gulf region’s capacity as an oil and gas hub — Houston accounted for 2.9 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product in 2015 — does not appear to have been seriously compromised, and economists were predicting<br />that the storm’s cost would be less than half that of Katrina’s.<br />It has a population of more than two million people, with a system of bayous and waterways to manage flooding.<br />Harvey: It made landfall in Rockport, Tex., on Friday as a Category 4 storm, measuring 200 miles across, but was quickly downgraded.<br />Harvey: Local officials have reported at least 10 deaths in Texas since the storm began, and the number could rise.<br />A few weeks later, in another chaotic evacuation, more than 100 people died leaving the Houston area to escape Hurricane Rita.
