New Orleans And Katrina, 20 Years Later

0:072005 was one of the busiest hurricane seasons ever recorded. In late August that year, Hurricane Katrina grew in intensity in the Gulf of Mexico, quickly reaching Category 5 status with 175-mile-per-hour winds and pushing a massive storm surge. Hurricane Katrina is now a Category 5 hurricane. Category 5, which are the strongest hurricanes we know of, only three times before in U.S. history have Category 5 storms hit the U.S. mainland. This thing is a very strong Category 5, 170-mile-an-hour wind. Two days before the storm hit on August 26th, then New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin declared a state of emergency and called for a voluntary evacuation.

0:52Roughly 20 percent of the local population stayed behind, most of them poor and elderly. The mayor's order was followed by a mandatory evacuation order less than 24 hours before the storm's landfall, a decision some call too late and ineffective. Katrina made landfall in New Orleans as a Category 3 storm. The massive storm surge broke through levees and flood walls, leaving entire neighborhoods completely wiped out and underwater. 80 % of the city, a disaster. People were stranded for days, many of the city's most vulnerable residents. The official death toll, nearly 1 ,400 people. and New Orleans changed forever.

1:29This is unreal. I mean, usually a lot of things don't amaze me. It takes a whole lot to amaze me or to really, really make me grief over. But this is really there are no words. This is unbelievable. I mean, how is this property to move? I ain't never seen a house move from its foundation. The federal emergency response to the storm also forced difficult discussions about race and the government's responsibility to all its citizens in the face of disaster. Today on 1A, we mark 20 years since Hurricane Katrina hit. We take you back to that time, look at what rebuilding has meant for New Orleans and what lessons were learned.

2:09I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A podcast. We'll be back with a conversation after this short break. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get to.

2:21Joining us in studio is Tyrone Turner. He's WAMU's visuals editor. He covered Hurricane Katrina in 2005 for National Geographic, and he is from New Orleans. Tyrone, welcome. Oh, thank you. So you grew up in New Orleans right off the 17th Street Canal, and you weren't in your hometown when Katrina hit, but you did fly over the city and surrounding areas shortly after taking aerial photos. What did you see? Yeah, I got as far as Jackson, Mississippi the night before, and the storm was already starting to hit. And so I kind of stayed there. And then we were arranging helicopters and planes to be able to do aerials.

2:58And so when we went over the city, it was just amazing that you just saw water all over the place. It was really unbelievable. And And we went from the city and then we also flew along the Gulf Coast. And that was just obliterated. It was miles and miles and miles of just destroyed houses, just that tidal wave had come in. And I have to say that it was kind of strange is that when we were flying over New Orleans and looking at the water, having been a photographer that covered hurricanes in the past, you were looking for where the damage hit. And here, all the roofs were there because the storm wasn't as strong there, but it was just water.

3:43And so you're like, oh, it's just water. It won't be as bad. And that was totally false. It was just like I couldn't wrap my mind around exactly what was happening. But you just saw water all over the city. And I could see where the neighborhood where I grew up. I could see my high school. well, you know, it's all just surrounded by water. So it was really crazy to see that landscape like that. An entire swath of the Gulf Coast from Mobile, Alabama to Grand Isle, Louisiana was demolished by Katrina. More than 235 people died in Mississippi and nearly 130 ,000 homes were heavily damaged or destroyed.

4:24We got this email from journalist Kathleen Koch. I grew up on the Mississippi Gulf Coast an hour east of New Orleans and was reporting live for CNN from Mobile, Alabama 20 years ago. There were areas of downtown covered in 11 feet of flood water. The next day, I headed west and covered the utter devastation brought in Mississippi by the sustained 125-mile-per-hour winds, hopscotching tornadoes, and nearly 30-foot storm surge. It looked like a bomb had been dropped. When you were growing up in the city, the benchmark hurricanes for New Orleans had been Betsy that hit in 1965 and Camille in 1969.

5:03When did you know this time was different? When did I know that it was different? It was when I was up in the air, really. I was on assignment for National Geographic when the storm was approaching, but I was up in Massachusetts. And they said, you know, can you get down there? And I got as far as I could. But it wasn't until really I was up in the air and you could see the miles of devastation. And I flew over past Christiana, Mississippi, where we had just been on vacation with my family. And that was the place where we were was just wiped out. And I can remember we were actually on the Gulf Coast for Camille.

5:46You know, I was small. We were on the Gulf Coast. We evacuated back to New Orleans. And the place where we were staying was wiped out. But Camille was kind of compact. And so the devastation wasn't as large, the scale. But Katrina, it just went on and on and on. And it was just unbelievable, the miles of devastation that you saw. I would imagine, Tyrone, as a photojournalist, there's the reaction you have in the moment that you take the photo. Right. And then there's the reaction you have when you go back and look at the photos you took. Can you take us to that second part of your process? I think when you're going back to look at, you know, you're back to edit photos and you're looking at, you know, what you have and kind of evaluating this and kind of reliving that experience and looking at, at that point you're looking at like evaluating photos and, you know, is this one better or this one worse?

6:46But they all show something. They all show something, either from the air or I was also down on the ground, and people dealing with the devastation and trying to make do with not having anything. And so you look at it, and it does prompt you to relive those experiences in the moment. Ten months before Hurricane Katrina hit, the October 2004 issue of National Geographic magazine featured an article called Gone with the Water. And it warned of an impending catastrophe in the New Orleans area, a catastrophe most likely to be caused by a major hurricane. You worked on that story with journalist Joel Bourne taking photos of the wetlands in what would be some of the worst hit areas of New Orleans.

7:31That article ended up being strangely prophetic, and it was something other environmental journalists warned about. Were residents of low-lying neighborhoods aware of the dangers they faced? I think that, you know, growing up there, you always knew of this danger, you know, from the hurricanes and everything. But I don't think that we realized how critical the wetlands were to dampening the storm surge, to, you know, like really how bad could it get. And there are a number of structural failures and structural weaknesses in the New Orleans system, the way that the canals are structured, just the geographic position of New Orleans and the way it catches the water from the hurricane's storm surge.

8:23But it's like you – I don't think that we really understood like exactly how bad it could get that the whole – that 80 percent of the city could be flooded by the storm surge and the weaknesses of the levees. You've done a lot of work documenting rebuilding New Orleans after Katrina, and there were a lot of questions about how or whether the city should be rebuilt at all. What do you want people to know about rebuilding New Orleans and what it takes and what it means to the people who call it home? There's such a richness in New Orleans. It is a really – it is a unique place. And the ties that people have to the culture there, the ties that they have with each other is really special.

9:08And I talk to people who, you know, they evacuated. They were living in another place. It's okay. They were safe and everything, but they just wanted to be home. They wanted to be around the culture that they were part of. They wanted to be near family and friends, and that is so valuable. And in the years since, they actually have structurally improved the structure around New Orleans in terms of the levees. And there's a storm protection barrier in Lake Bourne. But it really, people have a special relationship with this city. And that has to be, you know, I think that you really need to pay attention to that.

9:54That's Tyrone Turner. He's WAMU's visual editor. He covered Hurricane Katrina in 2005 for National Geographic. Tyrone, thank you. Thank you. Coming up, Katrina remains one of the costliest tropical cyclones in U.S. history with an estimated$200 billion in damages. Failures in engineering, planning, and emergency response contributed to the loss of life and widespread devastation. But rebuilding has been complicated and remains ongoing. Two decades later, residents of New Orleans continue to share the lessons they learned in 2005 with other people who faced similar natural disasters. We'll be right back.

10:32Let's get back to our conversation and add another voice. Joining us now is Clint Smith. He's staff writer at The Atlantic and author of the 2021 book, How the Word is Passed, a reckoning with the history of slavery across America. He's also the author of two poetry collections, Counting Descent, which was published in 2016, and Above Ground, which was published in March 2023. He's also a New Orleans native. Clint, thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me. So you say New Orleans is everywhere in your work, and Hurricane Katrina is the thing that bifurcates your life. What do you mean?

11:07Yeah, so Hurricane Katrina struck when I was 17 years old. And in many ways, it, as you said, sort of bifurcates childhood and adulthood. It is the thing that demarcates a sort of innocence and clarity. as I think some of the previous listeners who've called in have alluded to. It also was a moment for me in which that illuminated more fully the sort of systemic and structural inequalities that exist in this country, even when I didn't necessarily have the historical context or the sociological language with which to name it. I was able to see it and understand it in a profoundly different way.

11:56What do you remember about your life in New Orleans prior to Katrina? I grew up in a neighborhood called Gentilly, and it was an amazing place to grow up. I remember these massive oak trees that hung over the street providing respite from the heat that was also ubiquitous in New Orleans. I remember me and my friends playing basketball and going from one driveway or one court or one park to the next looking for an open game, a hoop, a place to play. I remember music from people's cars, from people's porches, from people's stereos. I remember the sound of squirrels, the sound of the birds, riding bikes with my friends.

12:40It was a really idyllic place to grow up. And it's not to say that New Orleans doesn't have its issues. It certainly does like any other city. But it was a place that is unlike any other place in the world. And I think you don't fully appreciate the landscape of culture and art that is a sort of omnipresent force in your life until you leave. Nikki Napoleon is a New Orleans native and poet. Her neighborhood flooded during Katrina. And she sent us this message. So New Orleans to me means love. It's the kind of love that tastes like a big pot of gumbo. And it sounds like a mixture of jazz and blues.

13:23But it also it's about loss. And when I think about loss, I think about the devastation and the images during Hurricane Katrina, you know, when my family and I had to evacuate. it was just watching the images and the bodies floating in the water. And one that I, you know, kind of remember the most was the little girl with the ribbons in her hair. And body bloated and precious baby just floating in the water. You evacuated Houston, Clint, with your family, evacuated to Houston. What was it like leaving your home knowing something so momentous was going to happen to your city, though you may not have understood the scale as you were evacuating, but this was going to be something you were going to witness via a TV screen?

14:20Yeah, so something that's important to know is that for my family, as is the case for many New Orleans families over the years, over the decades, evacuation has been a sort of normal part of the cadence of our lives. A hurricane season would come, a tropical storm or a hurricane would come almost every year, and we would be told to varying degrees that we should evacuate, we should leave. And I'd often go to Houston. Sometimes I'd go to Jackson, Mississippi. Sometimes we'd go to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a little further north. And what would typically be the case is that you come back after a few days, you pick up some branches, you take the wood planks off your windows that you put there to protect it.

15:02and you go about your day. And it was always kind of, for me, a way of, you know, I got a few extra days to study for my math test. I got some time to visit my cousins. Got a few days off from school. But Katrina, obviously, was different. You know, Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation, and that was the first in the city's history. And Hurricane Katrina, it became evident, I think, at some point that it was going to be different than previous storms had been for many, many, many years. And so we left, but many people didn't have the opportunity to leave. Many people didn't have the means to leave.

15:41Many people didn't have the capacity to leave or to leave their loved ones. It's difficult to explain how logistically difficult it is to pack things up, to leave, to bring your family. and I think that when I got to Houston, we were at my aunt and uncle's house. I was watching CNN, NBC, all of these different TV channels and I saw the church that I went to underwater. I saw the grocery store we went to underwater. I saw the school I had gone to underwater and you later learn that 80 % of the city was underwater and so I didn't see my home but I saw all these things that were proximate to my home, and it allowed me to understand what had happened even before I got a chance to go back.

16:34Here's a message we got from one of you. Katrina is a horrifying memory, a nightmare recognition that our government could sit back and let people die because they were not rich or white. Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. We'll ring in my ears until the day I die. And listener, they're referring to then-President George W. Bush visiting the disaster area in Mobile, Alabama, praising then-FEMA director Michael Brown's performance in managing the disaster. Let's hear again from New Orleans poet Nikki Napoleon. I think about now, 20 years later, how Hurricane Katrina exposed so much. It exposed the brokenness of the economy.

17:15It exposed racism. It exposed oppression. It exposed the tale of two cities and how you had the images of black people and, you know, and they were trying to survive and they were going to Walmart and trying to get pampers and they were described as thieves and refugees. But yet the same images of white people and they were they were survivors. They weren't considered to be looters. And Clint, 20 years on, with the wealth of experience you now have, what do you think Katrina revealed about the country? Yeah, you know, it's interesting because Katrina came, you know, about a decade before the Black Lives Matter movement sort of began in earnest.

18:07And it was because of the Black Lives Matter movement that I think our country gained a new language, a more sophisticated understanding of how racism is not just an interpersonal phenomenon, but a systemic one, a structural one, a historical one, an intergenerational one. And I think Katrina, it's not to say that moments of structural racism had not revealed themselves to the American public in recent decades, because they certainly had. But I think Katrina revealed it on a different scale. And it is, you know, certainly for me, over the last week or so, I've been revisiting many of the videos and documentaries, sort of documenting what happened 20 years ago.

18:52And it's just so striking to see people on their rooftops, people at the Superdome, people at the convention center, people on bridges, bodies floating in the water. And that 95 % of the time, they're poor and working class black folks who are at the center of those images. And what it demonstrates is that this natural disaster, which was in fact in many ways man-made given the failures of the levy, is illuminated how the American project and the American dream, this idea that if you simply work hard, that you have access to all of the levers of upward mobility that can lead you to success. prosperity, the access to those levers of upward mobility aren't available to everybody and certainly weren't available to everybody.

19:54And I think that, again, it was a time before we necessarily had the collective language to understand it. I mean, the most sort of famous line of that moment that's speaking to this idea is when Kanye West was doing the Red Cross sort of broadcast and sort of blurted out that I think George Bush doesn't care about black people. And in many ways, he named the thing that so many of us were feeling. Again, even though we didn't necessarily have the specific sociological lexicon with which to outline how a history of Jim Crow, a history of housing segregation, a history of redlining, a history of school segregation, and all of these things are connected to what we were seeing, but it was something that revealed itself even before we had the language to name it in ways we do now.

20:49We're talking to author, poet, and New Orleans native Clint Smith about the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I want to turn to another message we got from one of you, because Hurricane Katrina had a profound impact on Black home ownership in New Orleans. Let's listen. Hi, this is Professor Bernadette Atuahena here from USC Gould School of Law. Just as Hurricane Katrina wiped out Black communities in the Gulf Coast, Black people in Detroit are currently experiencing a hurricane with no water. My book, Plundered, How Racist Policies Undermine Black Homeownership in America, shows that since 2009, the local government has completed the property tax foreclosure process for one in three homes, displacing over 100 ,000 Detroit families.

21:43This is the highest number of property tax foreclosures in any American city since the Great Depression. Like hurricanes, property taxes hit everyone. And the detrimental consequences for Black people have been most severe. How do you reflect on what we heard from Professor Bernadette there? I think it's such an important thing to name. In the same way that prior to Katrina, the reason that so many Black people were not able to leave is because they didn't have the means, is because they didn't have access to the levers of upward economic mobility that so many other folks of different demographic backgrounds did have.

22:27But that, I think, to the professor's point, was the wealth disparities were exacerbated after the storm because so many black people had to leave their homes. Their homes were destroyed. They weren't able to come back. They were forced to live elsewhere. and never given the means or the tools with which to return. And so they had to sell their homes for well below what they were worth. And then New Orleans has increasingly over the years become increasingly gentrified. Demographically, it has shifted pretty profoundly. And much of the wealth generation that comes from having a home and owning a home, As what we know of the American story is that home ownership is the primary means of accelerating and growing your wealth.

23:20And so if your home was destroyed and then you had to sell your home for far below what it was worth and far below what you would have gotten for it in a different context, and now years later somebody was able to buy that home at a significantly reduced price, but now that home is worth five, six, seven, ten, twenty times what it was worth. before, what that does is exacerbate a sort of wealth disparity, again, that had already existed prior. And again, the thing about Katrina is that this was happening on a scale that was so different than other places. It's not to say it wasn't happening in other cities for various reasons and in various contexts, but the scale at which it happened in New Orleans was something unlike what we've seen elsewhere.

24:06Katrina is an intrinsic part of your writing, Clinton. I know you brought a poem to read today. Will you read it for us? I'd be happy to. This poem is called Here Nor There. I've tried to write these poems before. You know, the ones about the infamous storm and its majestic violence. The flood water that swallowed a city and then sat still as night. I think often of the things it took from us That we'll never know we could have had Nostalgia is a well-intentioned wound Counterfactuals are a bed of thorns In a room with nowhere else to lay your head I imagine what could have been But never was The Christmases with my children In a home where I once opened presents Kicking a soccer ball with my daughter Against the same playground wall Where I imagined a life of goals and glory that home is now silent as a sky of smoke that wall is no longer a wall but a pile of wood in a lonely field I tremble at what I already know that my children will not know this city beyond the holidays and funerals that bring them here that I no longer know this city that I have always worn like a tattoo I still remember the city as something it was kept from becoming I'm still looking for a language not covered in mud.

25:36Thank you for that. You didn't return to New Orleans to live, but you maintain your roots and connections there. What does it mean to be New Orleanian to you today? You know, I always tell people that being from New Orleans in many ways kind of feels like similar to the experience of those who immigrate to the United States from other countries. And they have their children, the sort of second generation kids who they weren't themselves born in that country. They may have never been to that country. But the sort of diasporic relationship they have is profound. And so for me, my kids are not born in New Orleans, not from New Orleans, but the New Orleans diaspora, the texture of New Orleans is something that I want them to carry, to hold, to realize that it's a part of me, it's a part of them, it's a part of us.

26:32That's Clint Smith. He's staff writer at The Atlantic. He's also an author and poet. Clint, thank you. Thank you. Still to come, Hurricane Katrina ranks among the deadliest floods in U.S. history. But it was a disaster that many had long feared and predicted. Now 180 employees of FEMA say the Trump administration's actions could create another Katrina-like disaster. That's just ahead.

27:00We're revisiting the impact and lessons of Hurricane Katrina 20 years after the storm devastated New Orleans and communities along the Gulf Coast. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's response in the aftermath of Katrina is remembered as a significant failure, but it also triggered changes in disaster management policy leading to the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act in 2006. The goal of that act? To strengthen the agency and improve disaster preparedness. This week, two decades after Katrina, more than 180 current and former employees of FEMA published a letter to Congress warning that cuts to the agency risks another catastrophe.

27:39More than 30 employees who openly signed the Katrina Declaration have since been placed on indefinite leave. 155 signatories did not share their names. Here to tell us more is Brianna Sachs. She's an extreme weather and disasters reporter at The Washington Post. Brianna, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. And we want to hear from you. If you've been affected by an extreme weather event, what support did you get from FEMA? Email us at 1a at wamu.org. Now, Brianna, the letter to Congress warns that poor management and eroded capacity at FEMA could undo progress it made to improve the agency through the Katrina Reform Act.

28:15What are the demands in the letter? Yeah, so we've been seeing drastic changes at FEMA since January, February, and the employees hit a breaking point with this anniversary coming up. And they sent this letter not only to Congress, but to the review council that's deciding FEMA's future. And they first and foremost want a qualified leader. They've been operating without an appointed qualified administrator who has previous emergency management experience, which was one of the big lessons learned during Katrina and was codified into federal law after that disaster, that the person to lead this agency should have experience in this field.

29:01And they want FEMA taken out of the Department of Homeland Security and for it to operate on its own and have more autonomy. With the Trump administration, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has executed a very unprecedented tight grip on the agency and really has undercut its operations by instituting a strict budget approval process, among other changes. And they want Congress to protect FEMA employees from politically motivated firings, among other demands. And as we mentioned, 30 of the people who openly signed the letter have been placed on indefinite leave. You say in the post-Katrina era, there were concerns addressed about having a qualified person leading the agency.

29:53Michael Brown was the administrator of FEMA during Katrina. What was his experience or lack thereof around emergency management? It's interesting. I've learned a lot about FEMA and its history through the last few months of reporting. And Michael Brown actually did have some experience with emergency management, or at least within FEMA. He had been there for a few years, but he had never done a disaster like this. And so I think he really took the fall for a lot of the federal, state, and local failures of just not taking the event seriously, not having resources there, and not responding quickly enough.