Hurricane Katrina

0:28Hey, I just Venmo'd you for rent. It is the early morning of August the 29th, 2005, in New Orleans. For hours now, Hurricane Katrina has been battering the city, bringing huge storm surges of water from the Gulf of Mexico and dumping massive volumes of rain amid winds of more than 80 miles per hour. In the Lower Ninth Ward, a father of two in his early 30s braces himself before rushing out of his house to grab a box of supplies from his truck. It's just a few steps, but he has to work for them, with the furious gusts threatening to knock him off his feet. All around him is evidence of the massive Category 3 hurricane that has caused hundreds of thousands to evacuate over the last few days.

1:17Loose roofing sheets of corrugated metal flap and squeal, barely hanging onto the houses they once protected. Trees have fallen and scattered debris lie everywhere

1:30He grabs the box and closes the trunk Then nods a greeting to a neighbor who is waving to him from her house across the street They exchange a gesture of relief that they are both safe And in truth, they were both expecting much worse The warnings had said it would be bad, and they weren't wrong But the eye of the storm has passed a little way off from the city and the houses are mostly still standing. For now, they seem to have avoided the flooding they had feared. But as he locks the trunk, the man now suddenly looks up at the sound of a low, rumbling explosion, followed by a deep, gushing roar.

2:10His neighbor turns, head tilted, trying to place the sound. Suddenly her eyes widen, and she claps her hand over her mouth. because at the end of the block, a huge surge of grey water is rolling towards them, moving at terrifying speed, filling the street from one side to the other. The man watches in horror as the water slams into the furthest houses, splintering wooden porches, tearing fences from their posts. A parked car lifts and begins to float sideways on the rapidly rising tide of floodwater. The surge can only mean one thing. The levees have breached. With the flood protection gone, the neighborhood will soon be underwater.

2:57And since no one in his family can swim, there is no choice but to get his daughters to the highest point possible. The man sprints inside, hurrying the girls up the stairs as the torrent hits the house with a splintering roar shaking its foundations. The whole building shudders as water pushes against the walls and a drifting car slams into the side, peeling away on its rebound and slowly disappearing as it sinks. Looking back down the stairs, he can see the water flooding in under the door, rising quickly. He hurries the girls to an upstairs window, helping them out onto the narrow sill and then up onto the roof.

3:38Outside, the street is a river, with the water already around eight feet deep. His children cling to him, crying, and he sings gently to them to quell their fear, trying to hide his own. But as he reassures his terrified little girls that everything will be okay, their home shears from its foundations, the wood unable to withstand the pressure. Helpless to do anything but pray, they hold tight to the house as it floats down what was once their road, slowly splintering and sinking ever further into the flood.

4:22In late August 2005, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico barreled towards the United States. When Hurricane Katrina finally struck land, it devastated hundreds of miles of shoreline. But the disaster that captured the world's attention unfolded in one place above all, the city of New Orleans. Within hours of the storm passing, the flood to fence levies meant to protect the city broke, and it began to fill with water. What followed the natural disaster was a crisis that raised profound questions about preparedness, inequality, and the ability and willingness of a modern nation to protect one of its own great cities.

5:06But why was New Orleans so vulnerable in the first place? What was the response in the wake of the hurricane and flooding? And what did the disaster reveal about the systems of engineering, government and society that was supposed to protect it. I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is a short history of Hurricane Katrina.

5:34The city of New Orleans sits in a location that has always been both a gift and a risk. Tucked into a hook shape of land above the Gulf of Mexico, it's also hemmed in by the Mississippi River to its south and west. and immediately to its north lies Lake Pontchartrain, a vast, shallow, brackish body of water covering some 630 square miles. In the early 1700s, the settlement was founded as a port because this was where the riches of the continent could be gathered, traded, and sent out into the world. The river has shaped the city's fortunes from the beginning. Jed Horne was city editor of the Times-Picayune in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit and the author of Breach of Faith, a book about the disaster that followed.

6:24The river swells, the river floods, the river throws huge tidal waves into the city's center, but it has also been the basis of the economy, the slave economy. Let us not mince words, back in the day when it was a very, very rich city, the richest per capita in America, and it to this day is a scene of passing cargo infrastructure. Huge ships pass through here or stop and offload their cargo before proceeding on out into the Gulf or on up into the middle of the United States. Known as the Big Easy, the city has a distinct multicultural identity bound up in music and the annual Mardi Gras Festival of Parades.

7:10With its strong sense of community, there is a feeling among its residents and visitors that New Orleans is a place unlike anywhere else in the United States. It's a small town, relatively speaking. Above all, as most people know, it's the city of jazz. It's the city where a great many wonderful jazz artists set their roots, lived sometimes generations of their families together, the Neville's, the Marsalis's, the Baptiste's and all of that, which makes it just a living cauldron of invention and cultural advancement. By July 2005, the city's population stands at just under 500 ,000, large enough to matter and small enough, as locals often say, to feel like a town.

8:00I might add the population base is as complex as can be imagined in a small town. We have a huge black-white divide. It's a majority black city. But we also have the Cajun people who were French-speaking and came down from Canada a long time ago. We have a huge Latino population these days. It's quite a melting pot. New Orleans has been shaped by the legacies of French and Spanish colonial rule, slavery, segregation, and migration. Though it's layered and diverse, race and class have been written deeply into not only its culture, but also its geography. Sitting in a saucer-shaped basin, much of the city is close to sea level or even below it.

8:43The higher ground hugs the old natural levee beside the Mississippi, while lower-lying areas stretch up towards the lake and into the land that was once swamp or marsh. Over time, those differences in elevation have become part of the inequality in the city. The higher land is home to those who have money or power, while the rest occupy the cheaper, more flood-prone districts. The main problem with anything saucer-shaped is that it holds water. As such, long, raised embankments of earth and concrete, known as levees, have been built alongside the river to keep the water where it's meant to be when it rises.

9:24Well, levees are huge, for the most part, huge earthen mounds, 20, 30 feet high along the river. You can walk up onto them. You can throw a frisbee. You can walk your dog. They are very accessible and of paramount importance in keeping the river in the riverbed. And then within them are further fortifications, the so-called sheet piling, which are just sheets of metal, sometimes 20, 30 feet deep, driven through the tops of the levees all the way down into the subsoil. With the exception of the easternmost part, almost all of Orleans Parish is ringed by levees. Behind them sits an intricate system of pumps, largely built and expanded in the decades after the Second World War.

10:14They work constantly, lifting out rainwater and pushing it back into the surrounding canals, lakes and waterways, while flood walls reinforce the weakest points. Without this infrastructure, much of the city could not function as it does By the time hurricane season rolls around in 2005, there have been warnings for years that parts of it are inadequate Upgrades are behind schedule, adding to the fear that a truly powerful storm could overwhelm the whole thing The city's relative isolation in the Deep South only sharpens that vulnerability When extreme weather approaches, outside help does not arrive quickly, if at all.

10:54And for many residents of this relatively poor city, leaving isn't straightforward. And when a sizable storm now starts to brew, the combination of these geographical, social, and political realities really starts to matter.

11:12On Tuesday, August the 23rd, 2005, a tropical depression forms over the warm waters of the Bahamas. around 900 miles to the southeast of New Orleans. Though it's unremarkable at first, it is then fueled by warm ocean water and rising air, and within a day its wind speed passes the 39 miles per hour mark. Reclassified as a tropical storm, it is given the name Katrina. By August the 25th, it's upgraded to a Category 1 hurricane, and makes landfall in Florida with winds of around 80 miles per hour. There is damage in Florida with flooding and power outages, but it's not extraordinary for the region or the season.

11:55But Katrina now moves out over the Gulf of Mexico, where it stays for 48 hours, growing ever wider as it rapidly intensifies. Forecasters issue increasingly urgent warnings, with projections showing it to be on course towards the Louisiana coast and the low-lying city of New Orleans. Aside from concerns about the strong winds, there are fears about storm surge and what might happen if the levees are overtopped. But for many in the region, this is not unfamiliar territory. They've weathered big storms before. New Orleans was inured to panic by the frequency with which we experience hurricanes. And, you know, they have a way, and this one did the same thing, of hooking to the east ever so slightly at the last minute.

12:45and plowing up into Mississippi, which, you know, has much less infrastructure, much less urbanity. And the assumption is, okay, it's going to be tough. There's a long tradition of, hey, let's barbecue some chickens out here on the street and have ourselves a party. And that certainly was going on. Even as Katrina gathers size and strength out in the Gulf, there is still a lingering hope that this storm may curve away or weaken. People are reluctant to leave yet. Besides, in a city where evacuations leave homes exposed There is another quieter concern that makes staying put a sensible option There's an inclination to just kind of hope it doesn't really get awful And see what happens Hunker down, make sure your house isn't going to get raided or looted Let's just see what happens I've got a shotgun, you've got a shotgun Let's just hunker down And a lot of people chose to do that And so the city waits.

13:44Its occupants board up windows, fill bathtubs, buy supplies, call relatives, and watch the forecasts with growing unease. Though many of those with the means to get somewhere safer choose to leave, with no organized evacuation underway, plenty have no choice but to stay put. On Sunday, August the 28th, Katrina's wind speed peaks at 175 miles per hour, making it a Category 5 hurricane, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded in the Gulf. And there is little doubt that it's heading straight for New Orleans.

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17:10By Sunday morning, officials are urging people to leave New Orleans while there is still time. Mayor Ray Nagin issues the city's first ever mandatory evacuation order. It is a dramatic step, but also a late one. The mayor has been chided for not having ordered an evacuation before the very last day, that Sunday. It was almost pointless to order that evacuation, but he finally did, and the reason he hadn't to that point. An evacuation is an enormously chaotic and difficult thing to pull off intelligently. Highways immediately jam, even if they're made one way out of town. And I'm sure that there was a reluctance on Nagin's part to go to that extreme.

17:54He finally did. Chaos didn't ensue. It had already ensued just from people acting on their own initiative. Those who have waited to leave until the evacuation order is given find themselves on clogged one-way highways. Petrol runs low and tempers fray, with evacuees fearing they'll be still stuck on the road when the storm hits in just a few hours. Though more than a million people leave the wider New Orleans area, tens of thousands cannot. Some have no transport, are elderly or in hospital, or have nowhere obvious to go. There is no comprehensive public transport operation to carry everyone out either.

18:32In practice, evacuation is left largely to individual means and personal networks. If you have a car, cash, relatives, friends, and somewhere to aim for, you go. If you do not, you stay. A lot of mistakes in the evacuation. Where were the school buses? With umpteen school buses, this whole city might have been evacuated in an orderly fashion, but that isn't what happened. It was calamitous, and people had no clear idea of how they were going to support themselves, feed themselves, where they were going to sleep. For those unable to get out, the city opens refuges. Most famous is the downtown home of the NFL New Orleans Saints, the Louisiana Superdome.

19:19It opens at noon and begins receiving thousands of people ahead of landfall, expected in the early hours of the next morning. By nightfall on Sunday, those who can leave have mostly gone Those who cannot are either trapped in traffic, heading west into uncertainty Or settling in to face the storm where they are By dawn on Monday, August the 29th, the waiting is over Just before sunrise, Hurricane Katrina makes landfall near Burris, Louisiana As a Category 3 hurricane At well over 100 miles per hour, winds are ferocious. But it is the water that poses the gravest threat. A huge wall of seawater, known as a storm surge, is being driven towards the coast and into the wetlands, canals, and waterways of southern Louisiana.

20:14Along the Gulf Coast, that surge rises to more than 25 feet in places. It uproots trees and tears homes from their foundations. entire stretches of coastline are left in ruins. In New Orleans itself, at first, the picture seems less catastrophic than many had feared. The city is battered by wind and rain, but avoids the full force of the storm. For a short while, there is a hope that the nightmare everyone feared may not happen after all. But soon, that illusion begins to collapse. The first reports now come in that some of the levees have failed. What had already become clear that afternoon, we're talking Monday afternoon after an early dawn assault on the city by that storm, was that the levees were breaching and that water was pouring into the city.

21:05People went up onto the levees, and it was immediately obvious that Lake Poncho Train, which is on one side of the city, and the Mississippi River, which is on the other side of the city, were simply pouring through these breaches and would soon flood the entire metropolitan area. Across New Orleans, the flooding rises with terrifying speed. Streets disappear beneath it as cars begin to float away. In the low-lying, predominantly black neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward, where many of the houses are modest, cheaply built and closely packed together, the flooding is especially sudden and destructive Out here in the east of the city, closest to the Gulf, when the flood wall gives way, a wall of water tears through the neighborhood, strong enough to sweep some homes clean off their blocks Houses take on water room by room and floor by floor As it surges through their lower floors and up their staircases, families grab their children, pets and elderly relatives and head for their attics and rooftops.

22:11Many simply drown where the water finds them, unable to swim, too frail to climb to safety, or trapped by the speed with which it comes. By the end of the day, around 80 % of New Orleans is underwater, much of it up to 8 feet deep. This is not simply the force of nature either The scale of the devastation reflects years of weakness in the city's flood protection Coupling poor design with inadequate maintenance in a system that had long been known to be vulnerable The problem was that the levees were poorly designed, poorly maintained There's been an effort to blame only the design of them, which was a federal project when in fact the local authorities, the levee boards so-called, were wildly negligent in not looking after the areas that had dampened, the areas that had begun to erode, and as a consequence, the whole thing collapsed.

23:11The flaw is not only in how the levees were looked after, but in how they were built in the first place. The so-called sheet pilings, the metal that runs down through the middle of those otherwise earthen dirt banks was not big enough to hold them upright in the kind of weather that they experienced in 2005, and they fell apart. Different agencies and authorities begin to trade blame over who is responsible for the failure, but the human cost is already clear. With the city and a large portion of its population already drowning, Hurricane Katrina is no longer a passing natural disaster, but a catastrophic infrastructure failure.

23:55And as the floodwaters settle, a second catastrophe begins to unfold. Tens of thousands of people are now trapped inside a city that can no longer function.

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25:01In the immediate aftermath of the failure of the levies, rescue efforts are patchy and improvised. U.S. Coast Guard helicopters start lifting people from rooftops, while local police, firefighters, and volunteers in small boats try to reach those trapped by the flood. More organized military support will come later, but for now, rescue depends on who can get there first. Some stranded residents scrawl messages on sheets or bits of cardboard and hold them up to passing helicopters, or wave shirts over their heads, hoping to be plucked to safety. Others remain trapped inside attics, banging on ceilings, waiting for anyone to hear them.

25:41In neighborhood after neighborhood Those who have survived the storm and the initial flood Now find themselves marooned above it With their homes destroyed Many more make their way to the shelters of last resort Like the Superdome Where thousands of people had already gathered In the hope of waiting out the hurricane in relative safety The nearby Ernest N. Morial Convention Center Also begins to fill with people who have nowhere else to go But even these emergency refuges quickly deteriorate into humanitarian crisis. Food and drinking water run low, toilets back up, lighting falters, and the oppressive late summer heat and humidity exacerbate the growing stench, with temperatures reaching the mid-30 centigrade.

26:25It was ghastly, let's be blunt, and the people who were there would be the first to agree. The plumbing failed almost immediately, So there you have a sanitation issue with people relieving themselves in the back corridors of the Superdome. Food very quickly ran out, but to a remarkable extent, people stayed calm. There were widespread rumors of catastrophic violence, gunplay, gunfights. It was not true. That didn't happen. Outside, the picture is just as uncertain. While some higher parts of the city and more affluent areas like the French Quarter remain largely above water, entire poorer, lower-lying communities are submerged.

27:10Help from aid agencies like the Red Cross is stymied while the flooding continues, and large-scale federal assistance is still days away. So, for tens of thousands of people, rescue depends on being seen and on being reached in time. And in hospitals across New Orleans, time is already running out.