NEW ORLEANS — On a quiet street in the Gentilly neighborhood, a small brick house stands as a testament to one of the worst disasters in U.S. history. It's one of thousands of homes that flooded twenty years ago in Hurricane Katrina.
It's been preserved by Levees.org, a group founded by Sandy Rosenthal after the storm. She opens the gate to the house. "Come on in," she says. "As you look to the left, you'll see one of the trademark X's. These were put here by first responders. Each symbol has a meaning. This is the date, September 22nd. This is the number of people deceased in the home." If searchers find hazards like gas or a collapsed structure, they note it in the X.
A musty smell lingers inside the home, re-created by artists.
"This is actually all carefully placed, even though it looks like chaos," Rosenthal says. "This is what the survivors would have seen when they returned home," after the water receded. Furniture is turned upside down or moved, even a piano, a stuffed teddy bear covered in mud and mold is on the floor in the middle of the living room.
No one died here, but hundreds did in other homes when a massive storm surge from Katrina overwhelmed the city, breaking through levees and floodwalls. Eighty percent of New Orleans flooded and entire neighborhoods were wiped out. The official death toll, 1,400 lives was once thought to be 1,800. It was revised two years ago after a new analysis of death reports.
A few doors down from the flooded house, Rosenthal's group has an outdoor exhibit with a Hurricane Katrina timeline and a garden. A monarch butterfly sits on the milkweed. It marks the location of a major levee breach on the London Avenue Canal.
"A 20-foot section of floodwall broke, unleashing Niagara Falls into this neighborhood," Rosenthal says. "The home that was on this footprint that you see here, the entire home was picked up, carried out into the street and would have kept going. But it was stopped by two massive oak trees at each corner."
Rosenthal says that when people visit, "They are quiet, it's like visiting a gravesite, it's a place of commemoration."
On the roof, fighting for survival while hoping to be rescued
Several miles away, in another part of New Orleans, the Lower Ninth Ward, Robert Green has kept another reminder of the events 20 years ago — a short concrete staircase. "These steps are the only thing that we have from my mother's house," he says.
The home is gone, washed away when floodwalls on New Orleans' Industrial Canal, just a few blocks away, toppled over. Green says that within minutes, the floodwaters rose to the second floor.
"And if you look and see the pink line that's drawn in the ceiling, that's the water level," says Green, pointing to the line he's marked on the wall to remember how high the water rose — more than halfway up between the floor and the ceiling.
"We had five minutes to get from the inside of the house into the attic," he says. "My brother started kicking at the roof, kicked the hole in it. We get on top of the roof, so we figured we were high enough. But then the house lifted off its foundation."
Green was on the roof with his brother, cousin, mother, and three grandchildren under the age of 5 when the house began floating. It moved down the street, and his family was able to scramble onto another, more stable structure.
"We ended up on somebody else's roof," he says. "I put my granddaughter Shanai on the roof, trying to run to get her two sisters. I turned around and she disappeared. She fell in 25 feet of raging water. We were fighting the storm surge."
Officials knew lethal flooding could happen if a major hurricane hit
Hurricane Katrina ranks among the deadliest floods in U.S. history. But it was a disaster that many had long feared and predicted. In 2002, three years before the storm, Mark Schleifstein and John McQuaid with the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported a ten-part series on the conditions that made the city vulnerable to flooding. One especially chilling story was titled, "The Big One."
In a recent interview Schleifstein said, "What we explained was that this city would flood, that there would be dramatic movement of water over the levees, and it would cause 20 feet of water in the city. And it would be, you know, basically what occurred in some neighborhoods after Katrina."
Among the conditions that made New Orleans so susceptible to flooding: at least half of the city is at or below sea level. Adding to the threat, because of the loss of wetlands and coastal erosion, New Orleans had lost some of its natural protection and the Gulf of Mexico was getting closer every year. In 2005, as Katrina approached, it was protected by hundreds of miles of levees and floodwalls that even at the time many scientists thought were too low.
One of those scientists was Ivor Van Heerden, then the co-director of Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center. He raised his concerns with the Army Corps of Engineers, which designed and built the levees. Van Heerden says, "We did point out on many, many occasions that those levees are made in some places of soft soil, and there's a good chance they could erode and there could be failures. Their response to us was these are federal levees built to federal standards. They're not going to fail."
A decade before Katrina, Van Heerden ran computer storm surge models that showed the likelihood that the city would flood in a major hurricane. His work got the attention of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA. In 2004, a year before Katrina, the agency funded a disaster simulation exercise called "Hurricane Pam." It looked at what would happen if a slow-moving category 3 hurricane hit New Orleans. It predicted there would be thousands of deaths and that the entire city would be flooded.
But when he made his presentation, the South Africa-born Van Heerden says FEMA and other federal agencies didn't seem to recognize the seriousness of the region's vulnerability. "The whole idea was Hurricane Pam was to educate," he says. "But, you know, there were a lot of federal folks who were just in the back room laughing. You know, I distinctly got the feeling that I was the geek with a strange accent and that was it."
2005 was one of the busiest hurricane seasons ever recorded. In late August, Katrina blew up in the Gulf of Mexico, quickly reaching category 5 status with 175 mile-per-hour winds and pushing a massive storm surge. On Saturday, two days before the storm hit, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin declared a state of emergency and called for a voluntary evacuation.
By the next morning, former Times-Picayune reporter Schleifstein recalls Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco made it mandatory. "The state issued a mandatory evacuation," he says, "but beginning Saturday night, the roads were completely full up until about midnight. Then it dropped off until about 6 a.m. in the morning. And then the roads were full again."
All lanes of the interstates leaving New Orleans were opened to outgoing traffic. An estimated 80% of the population got out before the storm. But that left at least 100,000 people in the city, many without cars or resources to get out on their own. A plan to use school and city buses to pick up residents and help them evacuate never materialized.
The city designated its indoor stadium, the Superdome as the "shelter of last resort." Ivor Van Heerden says, "On the night before landfall, there were about 12,000 people at the Superdome. There was enough food and water for them, for 48 hours. And then, you know, once the levees broke, everything changed because people were being rescued."
Katrina weakened before landfall, but still hit the area near the Louisiana-Mississippi border on August 29 as a category 3 storm. Most of the deaths and damage were caused by a massive storm surge — nearly 28 feet in towns along the Mississippi coast. In New Orleans, the storm surge strained the levee system.
Schleifstein says it soon became apparent that the city and surrounding areas were flooding. He says, "we got reports from photographers at about 9:30 in the morning that they were seeing people on top of houses in Saint Bernard Parish and in the Lower Ninth Ward."
Katrina's storm surge caused major breaks to levees and floodwalls in several areas. Coast Guard and Navy helicopters rescued hundreds of people stranded on rooftops.
In the Lower Ninth Ward, overtopping caused a floodwall to collapse along the Industrial Canal, a major waterway. As Katrina's wind and rain pummeled the city, Robert Green and his family, like many others, were stranded on a rooftop fighting for their lives.
"Our house floated with us on the roof of it, as other houses were hitting these gigantic oak trees and breaking up," he says. "We wound up being tossed in the water. And at the end of that, my mother lay dead, she had so much water in our lungs that she didn't make it."
Green's mother and granddaughter were among the estimated 1,400 people who died in the storm.
He entertained moving elsewhere, but "I'm a New Orleanian," he says proudly. For a decade, he's been part of a second line, a celebratory parade with roots in African American tradition and a vibrant expression of New Orleans culture, to honor those who died in the storm.
"Our thing is commemorative. Our thing is celebrating their lives. Our thing is giving reverence to the people who lost their lives," says Green as he gets emotional, "the community that was lost, and the idea that this community will come back one day."
Many felt abandoned in recovery efforts after Hurricane Katrina
Hundreds who couldn't evacuate before the storm were rescued from rooftops and flooded homes and brought to the Superdome, where they quickly overwhelmed the available resources. With so much of the city flooded, including the barracks of the National Guard, aid was slow to arrive.
In New Orleans, many felt the city had been abandoned and there was an air of desperation and looting. It soon became apparent federal authorities didn't understand the seriousness of the situation.
On NPR's All Things Considered three days after the storm, John Burnett reported on the desperate conditions at a makeshift shelter at the New Orleans' Convention Center. "There are, I estimate, 2,000 people living like animals inside the city convention center and around it," he reported. "They've been there since the hurricane. There's no food. There's absolutely no water. There's no medical treatment. There's no police and no security. And there are two dead bodies."
In an interview with All Things Considered host Robert Siegel, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff indicated it was the first he'd heard about it. "Actually, I have not heard a report of thousands of people in the convention center who don't have food and water. I can tell you that I know specifically the Superdome, which was the designated staging area for a large number of evacuees, does have food and water."
Eliminating FEMA isn't the solution to respond to natural disasters
During the George W. Bush administration, FEMA, once a cabinet-level agency, was placed under the Department of Homeland Security. The director, a political appointee with no expertise in emergency management, resigned two weeks after the storm.
Mary Landrieu, then serving as Louisiana's Democratic Senator, says FEMA clearly was unprepared. Looking back now, she says it was difficult to get the agency to recognize the need and level of destruction from Katrina.
"Katrina was horrifying and tragic," she says. "People drowned trying to swim away from their homes or drowned in their attics or drowned in nursing homes where they were left because no one came to evacuate them. (They) died in hospitals because the electricity went off and there were no backup generators."
Following the storm, a White House study found a host of failures within FEMA and DHS in preparing and responding to the storm. Among them, top decision makers were unfamiliar with their national response plan. Also, FEMA field offices were understaffed, and nearly all the top positions were filled by acting directors.
At least until Katrina, President Bush looked to downgrade the role of FEMA in responding to natural disasters. Landrieu says that's a mistake she's worried it's now being repeated by President Trump, who proposed eliminating the agency shortly after taking office in January.
Since the flooding in Texas in July that killed more than a hundred people, the White House has softened its tone but is still talking about reducing FEMA's role in disaster response. In a statement to NPR, a White House spokesperson said, "FEMA's outsized role created a bloated bureaucracy that disincentivized state investment in their own resilience. President Trump is committed to right-sizing the Federal government while empowering State and local governments by enabling them to better understand, plan for, and ultimately address the needs of their citizens. "
Katrina, Landrieu says, is a reminder the federal government can't walk away from its role in overseeing the response to natural disasters.
She says, "What President Trump wants to do, his view of eliminating FEMA, I mean, that isn't the answer. The answer is, is to think carefully. About what worked at Katrina."
Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans still hasn't fully recovered. Many people who left never came back. The city has about three-quarters of the population it had before the storm. Some areas in the French Quarter, the Garden District, and Uptown look fine. In many other neighborhoods, vacant houses, overgrown lots and the lack of businesses remind people of a disaster that happened before many of them were born.
Hurricane Katrina caused some $125 billion in damages, making it the costliest hurricane in U.S. history. Rebuilding New Orleans' levees to be able to withstand a similar storm cost nearly $15 billion. And that's another lesson from the storm. As difficult and costly as it is to prepare for a hurricane, wildfire or flood, it's easier and cheaper than the recovery.
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