New Orleans marked the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina on Friday with wreath-laying ceremonies, performances and a brass-band “second line” parade through the Lower Ninth Ward, the neighborhood hit hardest when federal levees failed in 2005. Survivors, local officials and faith leaders observed a minute of silence at 11:20 a.m., and city leaders urged Louisiana lawmakers to designate 29 August as a state holiday of remembrance. Katrina came ashore on 29 August 2005 as a Category 3 storm with winds near 145 mph and an 18-foot storm surge. The resulting levee breaches left about 80 % of New Orleans under water, killed roughly 1,400 people across five Gulf Coast states and caused damage now estimated at more than $200 billion, the costliest U.S. hurricane on record. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has since spent $14.5 billion reinforcing flood defenses, yet swaths of the Lower Ninth Ward and other neighborhoods remain pocked with vacant lots and unrepaired homes. Community advocates and engineers warn that rising sea levels and longer hurricane seasons threaten to outpace those improvements. Nearly 200 Federal Emergency Management Agency employees have urged Congress to reverse recent budget and staffing cuts, saying diminished capacity delayed rescues during July’s Texas floods and could hamper the response to future storms. They argue that, two decades after Katrina, the United States still risks repeating the failures that turned a natural disaster into a humanitarian crisis.