A muted battering from Hurricane Isaac

The slow-moving Category 1 hurricane was downgraded to a tropical storm and came ashore with 80-mile-an-hour winds.

What happened

New Orleans’s strengthened defenses withstood a battering by Hurricane Isaac, whose fierce winds and torrential rains caused serious flooding throughout the Gulf Coast this week, but did not devastate the city as Hurricane Katrina had seven years ago. The slow-moving Category 1 hurricane, later downgraded to a tropical storm, lumbered ashore in southeastern Louisiana late Tuesday with 80-mile-an-hour winds, knocking out power to more than 725,000 homes and businesses across the coast. Earlier in the week, the storm battered the Caribbean, killing 29 people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and pummeled South Florida with winds and heavy rain, prompting Republicans to cancel the first day of their national convention in Tampa.

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