Reflections on Katrina: 20 Years Later

Front page of The Times-Picayune the day before Hurricane Katrina struck. Credit: The Times-Picayune/Nola.com

Author’s note: I am a native New Orleanian who developed the models NHC uses to forecast storm surge and wrote FEMA’s hurricane response playbook. At the time of Katrina, I was a meteorologist and emergency manager at the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

People often ask me: What’s the worst hurricane you’ve ever personally seen? With over two decades in the hurricane and disaster space that’s taken me to the ground (or in the air) for nearly every major U.S. hurricane in that span, including Katrina, the answer to that question shouldn’t come so quickly. But it does.

Katrina was apocalyptic in every sense of the word. Crossing the 17^th Street Canal for the first time in the weeks following – along Veterans Boulevard on my way to West End Boulevard into New Orleans’ Lakeview neighborhood – is etched in my mind. It was a route I took regularly as a native New Orleanian, weaving through the uneven, pothole-ridden streets and between high-walled canals, typically on my way toward Harrison Avenue, Marconi Meadow, and the gritty Rubico tennis courts at New Orleans City Park.

Returning in the fall of 2005 as a meteorologist and emergency manager was both surreal and sobering. On the west side of the 17^th Street Canal – the Metairie side where the canal walls held – it felt like other hurricane-struck places I’d seen: missing shingles and downed fence lines, fallen trees and damaged street signs, abandoned gas stations still boarded up. Things have a rusty tint after a hurricane. Pervasive winds and saltwater have corrosive qualities. The smell of sulfur compounds from open gas lines becomes all too familiar after you’ve been to enough disaster zones.

But nothing could’ve prepared me for crossing the 17^th Street Canal from west to east – to the New Orleans side where the levees didn’t hold. Everything I knew was dead. The grass was dead. The trees were dead. The air was still, punctured only by a distant emergency siren or a passing helicopter, but devoid of life.

Lakeview neighborhood in New Orleans looking down from the 17^th Street Canal after Katrina. Credit: Michael Lowry

It was the difference between Oz and Kansas – one of America’s most vibrant, colorful cities flattened into a sepia-toned, lifeless landscape. The ground all over the city resembled the skin of a South Louisiana alligator, hardened and scaly from layers of now-dried mud, bringing a distinctive crunch with every step. Homes were stacked against other homes and houses peeled from concrete slabs, left orphaned in the middle of city streets.

Lakeview subdivision after Katrina. Credit: Michael Lowry

Cars, trucks, and vans looked like they’d fallen from the sky. I saw cars on the roofs of houses, cars balancing on the tops of fences, cars stacked on top of other cars piled on top of industrial air conditioning units.

Government vehicle in Port Sulphur, Louisiana, after Katrina. Credit: Michael Lowry

It seemed to defy the laws of physics, even to someone who studied and modeled the physics of air and water. The intricate web of canals in New Orleans was filled with cars – in many cases expensive cars – as far as the eye could see.

If the hellish scenes told a story, it was that no one saw this coming, even if some did.

Katrina Takes Aim

Roadside newspaper stands were converted into time capsules. “KATRINA TAKES AIM” read the front page of the New Orleans Time Picayune, dated August 28^th, 2005, the day before Katrina struck. An avid collector of historic newspapers and magazines, I recovered one of these papers after the floodwaters receded and keep it in a frame on a wall in my office as a daily reminder that a hurricane forecast is a process, not an outcome.

At the time, the forecast for Katrina was about as good as it got. If Katrina proved anything, it’s that we can issue the perfect forecast – even today – and thousands of people can still die. That’s a humbling truth that doesn’t acquit the forecast but reaffirms the need to be ready for what’s real, not assume what’s easiest.

Katrina wasn’t supposed to happen but that’s precisely the point. In the wake of Katrina, with the enactment of the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act – known as PKEMRA – in October 2006, the federal government acknowledged it hadn’t planned for the worst. PKEMRA reshaped our approach to disaster planning in this country.

For the first time, PKEMRA mandated that FEMA develop and regularly update comprehensive response plans for catastrophic events, including hurricanes like Katrina, and instituted major reforms in coordination with states before and after a disaster. Nearly half the people that didn’t evacuate ahead of Katrina stayed because they didn’t want to leave a pet behind. Of the almost 1400 deaths in Katrina, a disproportionate number were older adults and people with disabilities. PKEMRA prioritized the care of both people with disabilities and individuals with pets.

After public criticism leveled at then FEMA Director Mike Brown, an attorney with a dubious background in emergency management, PKEMRA also codified by law that the FEMA director have a “demonstrated ability in and knowledge of” emergency management (including at least 5 years of executive leadership and management experience) and during times of crisis report directly to the President – not to the Homeland Security director – as a member of the President’s Cabinet.

In recent months, approaching the 20^th anniversary of Katrina, FEMA has been swept back into the spotlight, this time as a new administration looks to overhaul the agency. In the days immediately following his inauguration, President Trump established a 12-member review council, including elected officials and emergency managers, to examine major reforms to FEMA, which to-date haven’t been publicly addressed. Since the start of January, FEMA has lost about a third of its workforce to early resignations and DOGE-directed buyout packages, and earlier this week, over 190 current FEMA employees and other signatories published an open letter to Congress addressing their concerns over what they view as departures from the Post Katrina Emergency Reform Act.

The lessons learned in the wake of Katrina, including the widely heralded Post Katrina Emergency Reform Act, were ones that should be cemented on our society. Every hurricane brings with it important takeaways, but Katrina, more than any other, left permanent scars that we carry with us as a source of protection for the future.

To be sure, catastrophic hurricanes will still happen. Helene last September was only the most recent example of that. But we owe it to those lives upended by Katrina to not toss the baby with the bathwater. Its lessons still apply 20 years later. We can coexist with hurricanes, even at the coast, but it can’t be an afterthought.

New Orleans’ Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System – the 14 billion-dollar fortress built around the city in the 12 years immediately after Katrina – will some day be topped or fail, perhaps in our lifetime, but next time will we have a coordinated system in place to avoid the same tragic mistakes?