History Book: The storm that changed New Orleans

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, September 1st. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next, the WORLD History Book. Hurricane Katrina, 20 years ago, when levees broke, a city drowned, and America faced hard questions. WORLD’s Emma Eicher reports.

CNN RAY NAGIN: I am this morning declaring that we will be doing a mandatory evacuation…

EMMA EICHER: In late August 2005 tropical storm Katrina rips through the Gulf of Mexico, threatening to make landfall in the Deep South. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issues emergency orders on CNN.

NAGIN: Every person is hereby ordered to immediately evacuate the city of New Orleans, or if no other alternative is available, to immediately move … to a refuge of last resort.

Thousands of people evacuate, but many stay behind. Some don’t have any means of transportation to leave, while others believe they can ride out the storm.

Audio from NewsNation.

NEWSNATION: This hurricane is gonna be so strong and so large that by the time it gets up the coast that wherever it hits, it’s going to have a big impact over a very large area.

On August 27th, Katrina comes ashore in Florida, swelling from a tropical storm to a category 1 hurricane.

Within 24 hours, Katrina transforms into a cat 5. 150 mph winds blast through the Gulf of Mexico, the strongest hurricane ever recorded there at the time.

Then, Katrina shrinks back to a cat 3 as it hits the state of Louisiana on the morning of August 29th. Here’s Nagin again.

NAGIN: Ladies and gentlemen, I wish I had better news for you. But we are facing a storm that most of us have feared.

Residents head to the Superdome, a New Orleans stadium that can hold up to 80,000. WWLTV interviews a woman waiting outside for three hours.

WWLTV: INTERVIEWER: Why did you decide to come out here?

WOMAN: Because we had no other way, I was in a car accident, my car is ruined so this the only best way I can get into a shelter, my house was too deep in water…

As many as 25 thousand people hunker down while Katrina sweeps over the city. The National Guard maintains order, distributing food and water. The hurricane moves northeast, weakening over Mississippi in the late afternoon.

People are trapped in flooded homes or standing on rooftops, waiting for rescue. Southern cities are plunged into a complete blackout. Audio from CNN.

CNN: Thousands and thousands of families have been going for days now without food, without water, they’ve had no communication with the outside world, and to make matters worse, they’re scared …

Emergency response teams from local, state, and federal agencies venture out to lend aid, but they’re slow to arrive. In all, more than 1300 people die from Hurricane Katrina.

CRAIG COLTEN: Katrina really exceeded even the worst kind of forecast of what could happen.

Craig Colten is a retired Louisiana State University professor of geography. He lived in Baton Rouge at the time, an hour and a half away from New Orleans, and also lost power.

COLTEN: We'd get the newspaper, which was day old news, basically, and I had to go read it out under a street light that was working. I'd go out 5:30 in the morning, read the paper on the street corner to get yesterday's events.

Nature left devastation in its wake, but New Orleans had its own infrastructure problems.

It sits between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River, and at least half of the city is at or below sea-level. More than 350 miles of levees and floodwalls keep the water out, under normal circumstances.

COLTEN: The pressure was so great on the levee walls along those canals that the levee walls collapsed, where water would rush through neighborhoods, demolishing houses and wiping out the urban landscape.

By August 31st, 80% of the city is submerged in floodwaters, and failed levees are the main cause.

COLTON: Katrina really was a massive test.

Many criticize the lack of preparedness within the federal government. They argue lives might have been saved if the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, had a quicker response.

Former President George Bush promises to examine FEMA in the days following Katrina and implements reforms a year later. From AP News.

BUSH: When the federal government fails to meet such an obligation, I as president am responsible for the problem … and for the solution.

New Orleans is slow to recover. The African-American neighborhood of the Lower Ninth Ward is the poorest area and the hardest hit.

COLTON: Truly, one of the most revealing things about the aftermath of the hurricane was the racial and social inequities, economic inequities that existed in the city that had been sort of not readily apparent to the wider public beyond New Orleans.

Former New Orleans resident Alf Nelson was on the ground after Katrina, helping rebuild homes.

ALF NELSON: When you could finally get into houses … everything was covered in mold. The walls were covered in mold. And just everywhere you looked, everything was destroyed.

While government agencies lagged behind in uncoordinated aid efforts, local churches took the lead.

NELSON: If you ask the people of New Orleans, they would tell you, it was the churches that saved the city. All of these churches just kept coming and serving and helping in, you know, extraordinary ways. And it really created opportunities to have conversations that had not been open before in New Orleans.

20 years later, New Orleans sticks to old habits. The city replaced many old buildings and systems, rather than improving infrastructure. A lot of residents accepted federal dollars to rebuild homes on swampy land, instead of finding a better location.

But in other ways, the city improved. Evacuation and transportation methods have been reformed for the better, and the levees rebuilt. Here’s Craig Colten again.

COLTEN: There have been some major improvements to the hurricane protection system, but they no longer call it a hurricane protection system. They call it a risk reduction.

New Orleans still struggles to recapture the vibrant culture it used to have. One born-and-raised resident says that for him, Katrina is like a scar that never healed. And Colten shares the same feeling.

COLTEN: I still love New Orleans, but it's not the city that I really became enchanted with and infatuated with many years ago.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Emma Eicher.

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