Oh goodness, don’t reconsider because of that!! No, they are not quite frequent. My D was there for 4 years, there was one tropical storm that knocked the power out for a couple of days. It was a hurricane earlier in its life (I forget the name) but had died down some time before it hit NOLA. She just spent the summer in Taipei Taiwan and went through 2 typhoons!! No problems though, Taipei is built for it. The countryside not so much, it is mountainous and they has some serious landslides. Anyway, back to NOLA. Katrina aside, the damage is usually limited to a lot of debris and branches everywhere, and losing power for 1-3 days. Of course you get the occasional tree that falls on a house or car, but that happens everywhere where there can be high winds. That isn’t limited to hurricane areas. In fact tornadoes are much scarier, and NOLA doesn’t get those. Northern Louisiana does sometimes, but that is hundreds of miles away.
Also, Tulane has very detailed and well rehearsed plans, in case of a real hurricane, that takes everyone to safety. But as a lot of people either don’t realize or are starting to forget, Katrina actually didn’t hit NOLA that hard as far as the direct winds. That was a bit further east. It was the failure of the levee system from the water pressure that was the true disaster. Those have been rebuilt and as you might imagine, were rebuilt to be much stronger than before. So while Katrina was the cause in terms of water, it was not in terms of the violent winds plus rain. In fact, if the levees had held, hardly anyone would have been talking about NOLA and all the attention would have been on the outer bayous and parishes and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where the storm actually hit full force.
Not that hurricanes cannot happen, of course they can. But the frequency is actually low as compared to the Florida coast or even the Texas coast. Lots of students go through all 4 years with no actual hurricanes and maybe one tropical storm. Can’t predict the weather, but history says you might be overreacting quite a bit. Not sure what you read, but it sounds really off.
It dos rain a lot though, especially early in the school year and again starting in mid-March or so. Kind of a tropical pattern where it warms up during the day and around 2-4 PM you get the showers, making it feel kind of steamy, especially in August/September and in April/May. The rest of the summer too, but most students are not there after about the first week of May. So you are experiencing about 5 hot weeks to start the school year, and about 4 to end it, although fairly often it doesn’t get really hot until close to finals in May. And everything is air conditioned extremely well. Too well, some would say.