Hurricanes are increasingly breaking records for intensity and the destruction they leave in their wake. Here we look at some of the most powerful storms in history.

It is 20 years since Hurricane Katrina barrelled into south-east Louisiana, killing 1,833 people and creating a calamity on a previously unimagined scale. The storm hit on 29 August 2005, leaving most of the city underwater and its population without power, food and shelter.

"My city, New Orleans, has fallen into utter chaos," resident Windi Sebren told the BBC at the time. "My life in New Orleans is over for the time being – I have to start over completely."

Katrina is undoubtedly one of the worst disasters to have hit the United States in living memory. Here we revisit pictures from Katrina and some of history's other powerful and destructive hurricanes.

On the night of 9 October 1780, after a balmy day on the Caribbean island of Barbados, rain began to fall. The next morning a breeze picked up – and by 6pm a hurricane slammed into the island at full force. Known as the Great Hurricane, it remains the deadliest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. Estimates of the death toll range between 20,000 and 27,500.

The hurricane whipped across the land, with winds of likely more than 200mph (322km/h) that were so loud people couldn't hear their own voices. Little was left but "mud, debris, dead cattle and rotting corpses".

Leaving Barbados, the Great Hurricane moved past Martinique, Saint Lucia, and Sint Eustatius. Waves reaching 25ft (7m) high washed whole villages into the sea and entire fleets of British and French naval ships – along with the thousands of people aboard – were lost to the bottom of the ocean.

The deadliest storm in US history was the Galveston hurricane of 1900. It passed over the Gulf of Mexico in early September 1900, strengthening to a category four hurricane before slamming into Galveston, Texas, on 6 September.

"We kept running into so many dead bodies that I had to go forward with a pike and shove [them] out of the way… it was the most horrible thing I have ever seen," a surviving fisherman is reported to have said. The storm is estimated to have caused between 6,000 and 8,000 deaths.

More deadly storms still have taken place outside the Atlantic basin, where these storms are known as cyclones or typhoons rather than hurricanes. The Bhola Cyclone of 1970 collided with north-east India and what was then East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). It brought with it a devastating storm surge of 35ft (10.5m). In total, as many as 500,000 people are thought to have been killed by cyclone.

How you measure the damage caused by hurricanes is a matter of perspective. For the people who lose property, livelihoods and loved ones, the storm that has just swept over them was devastating. But if you examine it purely in terms of the number of properties destroyed, two hurricanes stand out – Katrina and Mitch.

The main reason why Hurricane Katrina ranks as the costliest hurricane in history........

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