Hurricane Katrina 20 Years Later: Who Gets to Move On?

When people talk about Hurricane Katrina, they talk about the wind, the heat, the water, the levees, the Superdome, the Ninth Ward. But it wasn’t just water that devastated the community—though a wall of water did, in fact, wash away entire blocks of homes—it was everything that followed, too. When Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast on August 29, 2005, it exposed the broken systems beneath the surface of American life. It changed the world, not only through the scale and cost of its destruction, but by forcing the questions, “What does recovery mean?” and “Who gets to move on?” Dr Calvin Mackie: I talked to a lot of people about Hurricane Katrina and they know about Hurricane Katrina, but very few people understand Hurricane Katrina. The level of devastation. It wasn’t one disaster. It was a natural disaster caused by man-made errors that eventually turned into a political disaster, an education disaster, an economic disaster. When you realize that 93 million square miles was impacted, the area impacted in the city of New Orleans was seven and half times the size of Manhattan, 200,000 houses destroyed, hundreds of thousands of people displaced. For the last 20 years, people have died trying to reclaim their lives and get their lives back together, and people still struggle. The day before the storm, mandatory evacuation orders were issued, for the first time in New Orleans’ history. But not everyone had cars, and traffic was already snarled. The Superdome had been opened as an emergency shelter. By the time Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans—at 8 AM on August 29th, as a category 3 storm, with winds of 135 mph causing storm surge up to 17 feet in some areas—25,000 people were taking refuge in the Superdome. The levee system designed to protect the city failed—fast. Within 14 minutes, breaches were reported. By 2 PM thousands were trapped in their homes by the rising waters. The next day, the water was still rising. Overwhelmed police, fire, and rescue personnel called on private citizens with boats to save people trapped on roofs and in attics. By August 31st, the Superdome was cut off and out of food, water, and power. The bathrooms had failed. Days of garbage piled up in 90-degree heat. Meanwhile, FEMA turned away critical supplies and medical staff. Amtrak and airlines offered to help with transit—and their offers were rejected in the bureaucratic chaos. On September 2nd, the federal government approved one of the first multi-billion-dollar aid packages for rescue and relief. By then there were bodies in the streets. By September 5th, the U.S. Army Corps had repaired some levee breaches. The city was still 60 percent underwater on September 6th. Pumps ran nonstop, draining 380,000 cubic liters every second. All told, 250 billion gallons of water were removed—nearly as much water as the entire population of the U.S. uses in a day. The hurricane cut the population of New Orleans in half. In Louisiana, nearly 1,200 people died, and more than 650,000 were displaced. Damage extended to Florida, Mississippi, and Alabama too, where hundreds more died and millions more were left homeless. The conversation—and the rebuilding—continues, even though scientists have found that people typically only remember the impact of a hurricane for seven years. But forgetting isn’t an option in New Orleans, where half the city sits below sea level. For many, the storm never ended. Laura Paul: We’re not really recovering from a hurricane. There have been category 5 hurricanes since Karina and the damage from them has been significantly less. It isn’t necessarily about a “natural disaster” If you refer to it as a natural disaster here, people will correct you quickly. And they’re not wrong to do that. Laura: Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans is a two-square-mile area that is completely separated from the rest of the city geographically by a body of water called the Inner Harbor Navigation Canal. Colloquially, it’s referred to as the Industrial Canal, but it completely separates this neighborhood from all of the rest of the city. Laura: When Hurricane Katrina passed over the city of New Orleans, it caused over 50 individual levee breaches around the city, and the most catastrophic of those was on the Industrial Canal coming into the lower Ninth Ward. Every property here 100 percent of the homes here were rendered inhabitable as a result of that levee breach. 80 percent of the city of New Orleans flooded. But the flooding, the loss of life, the property damage, and so forth were more keenly felt in the lower Ninth Ward than any other section of the city. Laura: This was a low well flat neighborhood prior to Katrina. Laura: We had a 98.1% black community. Over 40% of our population live below the poverty line. More than 60% live below the average mean income. It was a working-class Black neighborhood, but we enjoyed one of the highest rates of Black homeownership in the nation prior to Katrina. Sadly, the effects of that storm and the results of some recovery programs that were put in place have decimated that Black homeownership rate. In fact, the main recovery program that was developed in response to Hurricane Katrina, the Road Home, was eventually ruled as discriminatory in federal court. Calvin: So in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and Rita, the Louisiana Recovery Authority was charged with putting together the largest home rebuilding recovery program in this nation’s history. And we had to come up with ways of distributing these federal dollars to people that we thought would be equitable. We wanted to make sure that everyone had a right to come home but also had the ability to rebuild. And at the end of the day, part of the regulations put on us by the federal government, was that we had to consider the pre-storm value of homes. The problem with considering the pre-storm values of homes was that pre-Katrina, a comparable home in the Black community was valued lower than the same home in a white community. It goes all the way back to the 1950s and ‘60s starting with redlining. There are research now that’s showing the same appraisal bias process still exists in this country. So we we're going to use the pre-storm value of homes we had already baked in the bias that was coming from the appraisal of those homes pre-Katrina. And what the research has shown since then, which was very disheartening, was that the people who need it the most, money, eventually had the greatest need after they got their grant from the federal government. Debbie Gordon: I applied for my grant the same day it became available on the web. It has been nine months since I started this process and I'm still waiting. I attended the required interview. I had all the documentation. I was displaced three times and it was dealing with the situation from afar. But I did my part. Katrina is still the costliest hurricane in United States history, with actual storm damage valued at more than $200 billion dollars. And that number doesn’t even include related economic fallout, like job losses and industry interruptions—problems that continued for years. But with the rate and severity of disasters increasing due to climate change, nine out of the 10 costliest hurricanes to ever hit the U.S. have happened in the last two decades. Cassandra Davis: There is a start date and there's an end date. The hurricane will come. We have a sense when that happens, it impacts communities and then it's gone. And then there's the cleanup. The problem with that is, is that the end date is always different for different groups. And we know that groups that are low income communities, communities of color, communities where English is not their first language, just because the hurricane is gone, doesn't mean that there aren't residual effects after it Laura: First responders disaster recovery tends to be relatively well taken care of in national and international attention. If it's to disaster and resources are brought to bear, and that's great, and we should continue to do that. What we shouldn't do is forget that low wealth communities, and particularly low wealth communities of color in this country, are affected in deeper and more for long ways than other communities. Cassandra: At least a quarter of our country will never be prepared for disaster. So we really have to rethink the preparedness looks like. And a study where we looked at the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew as well as Harvey. We had educators talking about months of their students still having traumatic experiences any time it rained outside. If we're not honest about the fact that if you are from a low income community, if you're a community of color, your chances of recovering from a disaster are much smaller just based on those facts alone and without being very honest about that. We then are not able to really talk about what a just recovery looks like Debbie: The size of road, how grants our community needs major infrastructure repairs, basic city services, hospitals, grocery stores and everything that goes with the quality of life we had before Katrina. My community had two hospitals before Katrina, and as of this date, we have none. FEMA has renewed the deadlines for public assistance projects and relief funds tied to Hurricane Katrina multiple times. But those ongoing federal relief efforts are expected to end for good in 2025. Laura: This is a major American city. These people were working class American citizens who had a terrible thing happen to them. Months and in the case of the Lower ninth Ward, years and years and years later, we are still struggling to get back on our feet and to get people back into their homes. Calvin: Many of the people who want to come home still to this day, never had enough dollars to rebuild. So even though the time is up on the federal dollars, they're still streets and sewer and infrastructure that needs to be put in place. So communities like the Lower Ninth Ward can live with dignity and live with integrity and live with, you know, a sense of community. Cassandra: We're 20 years out. By the books we would think that people have recovered and moved on. But that's not that's not the case. You can still see that there are places that still have boards up on them. What does recovery mean for that person who may feel like administration is telling them that they have to move, but they have five generations of folks who are buried in that ground. Many of the homes in the ninth Ward were paid off, passed down through generations. This meant freedom from mortgages, but it also meant many residents didn't have homeowner's or flood insurance, leaving them without a safety net. Trying to apply for assistance after the storm meant accessing ruined homes to search for titles and deeds. Many families had limited digital records. Verifying ownership was a complicated and often insurmountable task. What does recovery look like when your home and your history are underwater? Walter Thomas: My name is Walter Thomas, aka Tommy Tee. I reside at 2201 Fletcher Street, the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, Louisiana. My house was approximately 24 ft underwater. Since then, my house has been demolished. I'm currently residing in a FEMA Handicapped trailer. I applied for the Road Home. I called 30 to 40 times. Every time I called, I get the same answer, someone would get back to you. It never happened. I gave up. I put it in God's hand. I know we are a great city. We will survive. Cassandra: It's a it's a catchy kind of narrative that we as Americans, we we really like the thought that something terrible has happened. But then there is a good kind of happy ending saying that someone is resilient. You ignore the fact that they had limited access to supplies. They had limited access to support before the event. Resiliency glosses over the harms that disadvantaged communities face. At some point, I remember our community members were very clear. They said, I don't want to be resilient anymore, I just want to have a strong infrastructure to live in the community that my great great grandparents had lived in. And so the fear is sometimes giving this a happy a happy ending is often more harmful than just identifying the issues, creating solutions, and creating a new ending that is a just ending for for all.