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Tag: hurricane katrina

  • The Hidden Devastation of Hurricanes

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    Parks’s team estimated that, among Medicare patients alone, tropical cyclones are associated with nearly seventeen thousand excess hospitalizations per decade in the United States. “It’s shocking, to be honest,” Parks told me. He sees each hurricane as a profound disruption to affected communities. “Once the water subsides, it becomes a huge, invisible burden,” he said. The hazards extend beyond rain, flooding, or wind. “They’re existential,” he said. “They pull at every element of the fabric of society.”

    A decade ago, two researchers, Edward Rappaport and B. Wayne Blanchard, set out to measure what they called the indirect deaths from storms: “Casualties that, while not directly attributable to one of the physical forces of a tropical cyclone, would not be expected in the absence of the storm.” How many more people are harmed than the official tallies suggest? “To answer those questions, one is faced with others,” the researchers wrote in a 2016 paper. How far in advance of a storm should they search? (During evacuations, a person could die from an untreated emergency or a car crash.) How long after? (Injuries can cause death weeks after they occur.) How far from the storm’s center? Where, and when, and in what way, should they look?

    Rappaport and Blanchard settled on an old-fashioned methodology: scouring reams of death records in the vicinity of fifty-nine storms, dating back to 1963. (To look back at Hurricane Camille, in 1969, they reviewed more than a thousand death-certificate records.) The pair ultimately identified more than fourteen hundred indirect deaths—almost as many as the total number of direct deaths reported from the storms. Many fatalities, such as electrocutions from downed power lines, were accidental. But the largest share reflected Irimpen’s findings from New Orleans. “Heart attacks and other cardiovascular failures are the most pervasive elements in indirect deaths,” the researchers wrote. Most seemed to be triggered by physical exertion—loading sandbags before Hurricane Wilma, for example, or bailing water out of a car owing to Hurricane Floyd. But, during Hurricane Hugo, in 1989, one man reportedly dropped dead after he “saw everything he had, totally demolished.” Their research echoed findings from other studies of disasters. Three years after a 2004 earthquake in Japan, mortality from heart attacks was found to be fourteen per cent higher than pre-quake. In the two weeks after Hurricane Sandy, New Jersey recorded thirty-six more strokes and a hundred and twenty-five more heart attacks than usual. Many were fatal.

    Elena Naumova, a data scientist at Tufts, was part of a team that analyzed around four hundred thousand Medicare hospitalizations after Katrina. They found that hospitalizations for cardiovascular problems increased up to sixfold, and remained elevated for two months. “These are hidden consequences,” Naumova told me. “It’s very hard to connect what happens months later to the hurricane . . . but the risks linger for a long time.” Naumova now thinks of a storm as similar to an outbreak whose effects ripple out in her data. “The health-care system will be constantly bombarded by these cascading effects,” she said. “You see one wave, and another, and another.”

    When researchers want to study the collateral consequences of a major event, whether a natural disaster or a pandemic, they often use the concept of excess deaths. Mortality rates don’t capture the full extent of harm; for one thing, they exclude injuries and illnesses that people recover from. But they can capture broad trends that might otherwise escape notice. When Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, in 2017, the official death toll was sixty-four—a number that seemed low, given the storm’s violence. Then a team of researchers surveyed more than three thousand households, searching for fatalities that could be related to Maria. Based on their results, they estimated that mortality had likely increased more than sixty per cent in the three months after the storm. If all of Puerto Rico experienced a similar uptick, the storm would be responsible for nearly five thousand excess deaths.

    Rachel Young, an environmental economist at the University of California, Berkeley, told me that she had read the Hurricane Maria paper and had an idea: perhaps she’d find a signal if she studied mortality across the entire United States. Young and Solomon Hsiang, a colleague at Stanford, tried to link state-by-state mortality data to five hundred tropical cyclones since 1930. “I ran the analysis, and I thought I must be doing something wrong,” she told me. “We were stunned.” Their results, published last year in Nature, suggested that the average tropical cyclone generated between seven and eleven thousand excess deaths, up to fifteen years after the storm—three hundred times as many as NOAA had tallied. For years, they tried repeatedly to invalidate their findings. “We really wanted to stress-test the result,” Young told me. In the end, they concluded that large storms “reverberate for so much longer than we thought,” she said. “They’re not just disasters of the week.”

    One of the most striking findings in Young and Hsiang’s paper hinted at how storms were causing long-term damage. Infants were impacted more than any other group—and many died at least twenty-one months after the storm in question, meaning that they had not been conceived at the time of landfall. This suggested that “cascades of indirect effects,” not “personal direct exposure,” were proving deadly, Young and Hsiang wrote. Displaced people may lose access to medical care, child care, and support networks; disasters undermine not only physical but also mental health.

    Irimpen’s research at Tulane helps pick apart these cascades. In his initial study, two years post-Katrina, he observed increased unemployment, lack of insurance, smoking, and substance abuse—but not an increase in risk factors traditionally associated with cardiovascular disease, such as diabetes or high blood pressure. Ten years later, however, these illnesses had increased as well. “We think there is a compounding effect,” he explained. Stress and adverse behaviors contribute to chronic diseases, which then further increase the risk of heart attacks. The disaster’s impacts were lasting enough that some of these trends took a decade to detect.

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    Clayton Dalton

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  • The New Orleans That Hurricane Katrina Revealed

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    Everybody loves New Orleans. It’s only the fifty-fourth largest city in the United States—down from fifth largest two hundred years ago—but it occupies a much larger place in the national mind than, say, Arlington, Texas, or Mesa, Arizona, where more people live. There’s the food, the neighborhoods, the music, the historic architecture, the Mississippi River, Mardi Gras. But the love for New Orleans stands in contrast to the story that cold, rational statistics tell. It ranks near the bottom on measures such as poverty, murder, and employment.

    None of this is new. If one were to propose an origin story for New Orleans as it is today, it might begin in 1795, when a planter named Jean Étienne de Boré held a public demonstration to prove that he could cultivate and process cane sugar on his plantation, which was situated in present-day Audubon Park—just a stone’s throw from where I grew up. This was during the years of the Haitian Revolution, which made the future of slavery on sugar plantations in the Caribbean look uncertain. De Boré’s demonstration set off a boom in sugar production on plantations in southern Louisiana. Within a few years, as a newly acquired part of the United States, New Orleans was on its way to becoming the country’s leading marketplace for the buying and selling of human beings.

    This history feels ever-present in New Orleans, but it was perhaps most visible after Hurricane Katrina, which occurred twenty years ago this week. Two documentary film series timed for the anniversary—Traci Curry’s “Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time,” and Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles, and Spike Lee’s “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water”—make for an excellent reminder not just of the terrible suffering the storm inflicted but also of how it showed New Orleans to be a place not at all like its enchanting reputation. Both series re-create day-by-day details of the week the storm hit, substantially through the testimony of a cohort of eloquent witnesses. They vividly remind us of what we already knew: that, with the notable exception of General Russel Honoré, the head of the military relief effort, public officials—the mayor, the governor, the President, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency—proved incompetent. New Orleans’s flood-protection was completely inadequate. The order to evacuate the city came far too late. After the storm, attempts to rescue people trapped in their homes and to get them out of town were inexcusably slow.

    Both documentaries make obvious how much the story of Katrina—and New Orleans—is about race. New Orleans’s subtropical, swampy location makes it susceptible to recurring catastrophes, and these have periodically entailed the mass displacement of Black people. “Rising Tide,” John Barry’s book about the 1927 Mississippi River flood, memorably recounts an earlier example. The neighborhoods that flooded most severely after Katrina were the ones built during the twentieth century, when the city erected a pumping system that was supposed to keep its low-lying areas dry. Many of these were Black neighborhoods.

    In the days after the storm, tens of thousands of refugees, the vast majority of them Black, jammed into the Louisiana Superdome, the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center, and the elevated sections of the local highways. During that terrible week after the storm, white observers—including, the documentaries remind us, members of the national press—often voiced the suspicion that these crowds would inevitably turn to theft, violence, and revenge. Such sentiments also have very deep roots in Louisiana, going back to the days of slave uprisings and, later, Black political activity during Reconstruction, which whites often chose to see as “riots” that needed to be violently, often murderously, dispersed.

    Racial injustice wasn’t the only reason for the catastrophic aftermath of Katrina. The storm made it clear that New Orleans was unusually susceptible to general system failure. Katrina was not a world-historically severe hurricane, but it caused New Orleans to cease functioning almost completely for months: just about everybody, of all backgrounds, had to leave town. Flood control—the idea that the disaster happened simply because the levees broke—is also too narrow a frame to explain Katrina fully. The storm demonstrated the fragility that comes from being an extraction economy. Beginning in the days of plantation slavery, New Orleans and its surrounding area had no strong motive to develop a substantial middle class or high-functioning institutions, and, compared with most American cities, it never has. Low-skill industries such as sugar, and then oil and chemicals, and then tourism—by now sugar has faded, but the others, along with the port, still power the local private economy—seemed to provide what Louisiana needed. Local politics were historically corrupt and hostile to the participation of the federal government. Only one of the thousand largest companies in the country is headquartered in New Orleans. An extensive rebuilding of the levees prevented disastrous flooding after Hurricane Ida, in 2021, but the power in some areas was out for weeks and the streets were full of uncollected debris for months. Most American places work better than New Orleans does.

    The city’s population peaked in 1960, at nearly six hundred and twenty-eight thousand. Today, it’s a little more than half of that. More than two hundred and fifty thousand people relocated after Katrina, and the city has continued to see a long, slow, steady population decline. Neighborhoods such as the Lower Ninth Ward, the area worst hit by the storm, are still full of empty lots. In Katrina’s immediate aftermath, it seemed as if every good-hearted national organization promised to come and help over the long term. That wave receded not too long after the flood waters did. A smaller-scale movement into the city by community organizers, artists, writers, musicians, and chefs has been more durable and has produced many achievements—most of New Orleans’s best restaurants and some of its liveliest neighborhoods are the fruit of post-Katrina efforts—but it hasn’t changed the city’s over-all situation. New Orleans is one of those declining cities where the local universities and hospitals are among the largest employers. It’s a place where you’re more likely to be asked who your people are than what you do for a living. It aims for your heart, not your head. By all means, visit. New Orleans needs you. But don’t deceive yourself about whether the city’s undeniable magic represents the level of its civic health. ♦

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    Nicholas Lemann

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  • Katrina inspired a $3B wetlands rebuilding project. Louisiana just killed it.

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    PLAQUEMINES PARISH, Louisiana — Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina, the cancellation of a $3 billion wetland restoration project has upended a hard-won consensus about how to rebuild this state’s rapidly eroding coast and shield the New Orleans area from future storms.

    Engineers and scientists for decades have studied the erosion of Louisiana’s coastal wetlands, which are disappearing into open water at a faster pace than anywhere else in the nation. The devastation wrought by Katrina forced state leaders to get serious about the problem and craft a 50-year strategy featuring an ambitious plan to harness mud and sand carried by the Mississippi River to build new land.

    The idea was simple: To help protect New Orleans and other Gulf Coast communities, Louisiana must restore the natural protection offered by wetlands that slow down hurricanes and absorb storm surge.

    But in July, almost two years after construction broke ground on the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry canceled the project. He said it had gotten too expensive and threatened the seafood industry vital to south Louisiana’s culture.

    Coastal scientists and conservationists are now unsure what comes next as land losses continue, climate change accelerates and questions remain about the $618 million already spent on the project. Critics of the move see this moment as a return to a pre-Katrina tradition of politics determining how the state spends coastal restoration money instead of being guided by scientific evidence.

    “We worked very, very hard to get the politics out of coastal policy,” said Sidney Coffee, who chaired the state’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) after Katrina under former Gov. Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat. “I think we’re back to square one. The politics are absolutely back.”

    Suggested by state officials during the Blanco administration, the Mid-Barataria project emerged as a key component of Louisiana’s coastal plan under Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal and remained so when Democrat John Bel Edwards took office in 2016.

    That record of support ended with Landry, a close ally of President Donald Trump who became governor in 2024.

    Author John Barry, a Tulane University professor who wrote “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America,” said he saw the scrapping of the project as an existential decision.

    “I think it’s a disaster for the future of Louisiana,” said Barry, who got involved in hurricane protection after Katrina as a member of both the state coastal authority and a levee board in the New Orleans area. “The length of time that went into that, getting the approval, starting the work, the number of governors who supported it of both parties, the virtual unanimity of the scientific and environmental community in support, and the fabricated reasons for canceling it, it all adds up to a serious blow to the future of the state.”

    But Landry’s decision was celebrated by some in Plaquemines Parish, south of New Orleans, particularly commercial oyster farmers. The project would have destroyed prime oyster harvesting spots and crushed the parish’s seafood-dependent economy, according to opponents like former parish President Billy Nungesser.

    Now the state’s Republican lieutenant governor, Nungesser has questioned whether Mid-Barataria would have actually built new land.

    “When you talk to all these organizations, they say it’s the best thing since sliced bread,” Nungesser said. “All these coastal projects we’ve built over the last 20 years, most of them have washed away.”

    Landry’s office declined requests for an interview and did not respond to written questions. The governor has echoed some of Nungesser’s criticisms, saying that axing the project protects Louisiana fisheries and that long-term costs had escalated because of litigation.

    While the state was using money from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement to pay for the diversion, any costs above $2.9 billion would not have been covered, Landry said last fall at a legislative hearing.

    “CPRA is now moving forward with another coastal restoration plan — one that balances our environmental goals with the needs of all citizens, businesses and industries,” Landry’s office said in a statement.

    ‘Nothing experimental about this’

    Louisiana’s wetlands began fading into the Gulf of Mexico nearly a century ago, a phenomenon driven by human activities like oil and gas drilling and infrastructure like levees built to control the Mississippi River. In recent years, sea-level rise and powerful storms have exacerbated the trend.

    The sediment diversion project was projected to build up to 20 square miles of new land over 50 years to help slow down storms, absorb floodwaters and save some of Louisiana’s iconic swamps. It would’ve done so by diverting sediment-laden river water into the Barataria Basin, a wetland-rich area south and west of New Orleans that has seen severe land losses.

    The project was designed to mimic the very processes that formed the river delta centuries ago, long before wetlands were cut off from the river by levees and canals.

    The CPRA said it could not answer questions on the project’s cancellation. But Greg Grandy, the coastal resources administrator at the agency, said the state is moving forward with other wetlands restoration initiatives and has restored all 11 barrier islands in the Barataria Basin.

    “When you’re looking at projects being done right now that provide protection for the hurricane, storm damage and risk reduction system in New Orleans, we’ll be completing in October of this year the largest marsh creation project that we’ve ever built, in St. Bernard Parish,” Grandy said.

    The authority also plans to direct money approved for the diversion to new projects. Those include a plan to introduce a smaller amount of Mississippi River water into the Barataria Basin wetlands and to use dredged sediment to build marshland.

    Mitch Jurisich, a Plaquemines Parish resident and third-generation oyster farmer, described the cancellation of the sediment diversion as vital for his industry. He and other commercial oystermen had sued to stop the project, along with the Earth Island Institute, a California-based nonprofit concerned about projected harms to bottlenose dolphins and oyster reefs.

    After years of fighting with the state, Jurisich said he finally feels like someone is listening to him. Since Landry came into office and appointed Gordon Dove as the new chair of the coastal authority, they have been in conversation “almost on a daily basis,” Jurisich said.

    “We’re finally at the table,” said Jurisich, who also sits on the Plaquemines Parish Council.

    Mid-Barataria was projected to harm privately leased oyster harvesting grounds, and the state had committed $54 million to help affected fisheries. Overall, communities expected to see adverse effects would have gotten $378 million in mitigation benefits, an amount the state bumped up in 2022 in response to feedback.

    Some scientists, environmental advocates and residents have questioned whether the potential alternatives would make the most of the state’s limited funding.

    Mid-Barataria was critical for addressing the root causes of land loss, said Austin Feldbaum, the hazard mitigation administrator for the city of New Orleans.

    “It’s really only these big projects, which attempt to harness natural forces and nature-based solutions, that have a potential impact at a scale proportional to the problem we have,” said Feldbaum, who previously worked as a scientist at the CPRA.

    The chief concern is time — and land — that will be lost as the state determines a path forward.

    One alternate project described by the Landry administration, the Myrtle Grove Medium Diversion, was authorized by Congress in 2007. But it’s been on the shelf for years and would need to undergo a full study by the Army Corps of Engineers before it could be approved. That process typically takes three years and costs $3 million, said Ricky Boyett, a spokesperson for the agency.

    Meanwhile, the CPRA has said that $618 million of the state’s oil spill settlement money had already been spent on Mid-Barataria. It remains unclear whether the state will need to pay that back, said Jerome Zeringue, a Republican member of the Louisiana House of Representatives who previously served as the state authority’s executive director.

    Zeringue said he does not want to spend time “lamenting” Mid-Barataria’s demise but acknowledged its importance to the state’s coastal restoration strategy.

    “The key feature is that to sustain and preserve the coast, we’re going to have to connect the river,” he said. “In the future, we have to look for similar projects.”

    The bitter debate about the project is front and center as state leaders reflect on the 20th anniversary of Katrina.

    At a recent public forum, former Republican Rep. Garret Graves, who also served as Jindal’s coastal adviser, lambasted those who’ve claimed the project wasn’t backed by science.

    “There’s nothing experimental about this. You’re a complete, uninformed, third-time idiot if you think that’s the case,” Graves said during the forum, in an apparent jab at Dove, also in attendance.

    Dove shot back, according to a video of the exchange posted by Louisiana Public Broadcasting. “For Garret to use the word idiot … Garret, I raised money for you. I supported you in the election,” said Dove. “Garret, I want to know one question: Can you come sit down with me and look at all the facts and figures?”

    “I’d love to, anytime,” Graves replied.

    A changing landscape

    On a recent August morning, the stretch of river levee slated for Mid-Barataria remained stripped of trees and flanked by a construction truck.

    The diversion would have been built on the west bank of the Mississippi, about 25 miles south of New Orleans near the Plaquemines Parish town of Ironton. With fewer than 200 residents, the historically Black community was expected to see increased storm surge due to the project, as would several other similarly sized communities nearby.

    Still, by 2070, the predominant driver of storm surge increases would have been sea-level rise, not the diversion, according to an environmental impact statement. In 2017, the state estimated that Plaquemines Parish could lose 55 percent of its land area over 50 years without any action to restore the coast.

    That long-term trend is part of why project supporters saw the cancellation as shortsighted.

    Foster Creppel, who runs an inn at a former plantation in West Pointe à la Hache south of Ironton, said coastal management should be about balancing different economic interests. In addition to oyster farming and other kinds of seafood, the area benefits from tourism and is full of people who love exploring the bayous and wetlands — himself included.

    “The oyster industry is not doing great down here,” Creppel said. “But our coast is not just an oyster reef. It’s not just a ridge of trees, and it’s not just fresh water. It’s the balance of all those things.”

    The diversion location was chosen after extensive studies on the river’s configuration and sediment levels, said Denise Reed, an independent consultant and research scientist who has worked on coastal issues in Louisiana since the late 1980s.

    “It would build land,” she said. “Not only is this something that scientists understand, through geological studies and field studies, but it’s something we have many, many analogues for across the Louisiana coast.”

    The wetlands in the Barataria Basin, west of the Mississippi River, declined by an average of 5,700 acres per year between 1974 and 1990, according to state estimates. Signs of the die-off are visible while driving through parts of the basin, where the trees appeared charred, likely due to subsidence and the creep of salt water, according to coastal scientists.

    Getting fresh water into the basin is critical not just for land-building but saving land that has not yet washed away, Reed said. That’s because saltier wetlands are more vulnerable to subsidence, or land sinking, she said. Although the rate of subsidence in southeastern Louisiana has generally slowed since the 1980s and 1990s, it remains among the highest in the world.

    “If we don’t get fresh water in there, then basically, the Gulf of Mexico is coming,” Reed said.

    That risk is a top concern for Albertine Kimble, whose home in the tiny community of Carlisle is elevated on stilts 23 feet in the air to fend off floods.

    “We’re not going to be able to live here eventually. That’s the bottom line,” said Kimble, who once worked as the coastal manager for the Plaquemines Parish government.

    Semi-retired, she spends her time duck hunting, planting cypress trees, driving airboats for companies like Entergy, and watching ships go up and down the Mississippi from the levee near her home.

    Friendly with many diversion opponents in the area — including Nungesser, her former boss — Kimble said the cancellation of the project will eventually cause everyone to lose out. Southern Plaquemines Parish never really recovered from Katrina, and insurance costs have skyrocketed, she said.

    “Everybody wants dredging, and I agree with them,” Kimble said. “But what’s causing [the land] to sink is cutting off the main artery of the river here: You gotta sustain what you build.”

    Nungesser said he spoke to Landry about his concerns about the diversion in early 2023, around the time he decided not to get into the open governor’s race that Landry eventually won. In Louisiana, the lieutenant governor mostly oversees culture and tourism initiatives and is elected separately from the governor.

    He did not ask him to cancel the project, Nungesser said, but implored Landry to “look at the facts of this diversion and not the people that make political donations.”

    “He told me he would look at it and judge it based on the facts of whether it was the best thing to spend dollars on coastal restoration for,” Nungesser said. “I applaud him for standing up and doing the right thing.”

    River passes and ‘dirty politics’

    Farther south than the proposed diversion site, near the fishing town of Empire, the muddy Mississippi is working its magic through a process similar to the one envisioned for Mid-Barataria.

    Since 2019, the river has been spilling into an old offshore oil well field called Quarantine Bay, east of the river. It began by accident, when the river burst through the levee at a spot known as Neptune Pass, said Alex Kolker, an associate professor at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.

    At first glance, the bay itself is an unremarkable stretch of water, dotted with a few docks used by the oil and gas industry. But since the pass expanded into a new distributary, mud flats, marshes and land have burst above the surface, Kolker said.

    “This was everything I dreamed about right here,” Ryan Lambert, a fishing guide and longtime Plaquemines Parish resident, said on a recent visit by boat.

    Lambert admired the willows and grasses, some of which had been planted by researchers and volunteers. He and Richie Blink, who runs a local ecotourism company, named the range of birds spotted nearby: laughing gulls, black terns, black-necked stilts, great egrets and plovers.

    Cruising into the bay until the water became too shallow to pass through, Kolker stepped out of the boat and onto a mudflat. He then started walking on what he described as some of the youngest land in North America.

    “This would’ve been four or five feet of water five years ago,” he said.

    Here on the lower, eastern reaches of the Mississippi, the Army Corps of Engineers no longer regularly maintains the levee, Kolker said, which allows river passes to form.

    Supporters of the diversion, like Lambert, see the passes as a real-life example of the river’s power to build land. He grew up catching redfish and speckled trout, as well as hunting ducks in wetlands and bayous that he said no longer exist.

    These days, he only comes to the east side of the river, because wetlands on the west side — in the Barataria Basin — have been dying out since he was a teenager, he said.

    Yet while the passes have nourished and built new wetlands, they also pose problems for navigation. The Army Corps is now working to prevent Neptune Pass from becoming the main distributary of the Mississippi River.

    Sean Duffy, who runs a trade group focused on protecting river commerce, said he feared Mid-Barataria would have caused similar navigation problems farther up the Mississippi River.

    “There’s just no way to divert that much water and not have a negative impact on the ship channel,” Duffy said.

    And for commercial oystermen like Bernie Picone, who has been in the business for 25 years, the river passes represent the death of oyster harvesting grounds that once sustained families.

    Until the mid-2000s, Picone would harvest oysters on the east side. Now, he only goes to the west side, where the river remains behind the levee.

    “There’s just nothing left over there,” said Picone, who currently works for Jurisich.

    The diversion project, he said, would have caused a die-off in the oyster bottoms that remain. Oysters have the best chance of survival in brackish water, with a salinity range of 5 to 15 parts per thousand, so too much river water could kill them.

    Diversion supporters stressed that they understand the concerns of people in the oyster industry. But not everyone agrees that the diversion would have been its demise.

    Robert Twilley, the vice president of research and economic development at Louisiana State University, said oyster beds have moved inland in the Barataria Basin over the years, as land losses accelerated and salinity increased.

    The estuary today is “highly engineered,” due to the Army Corps of Engineers’ extensive system of flood control and navigation infrastructure, he said. If the Mid-Barataria diversion had been built, oyster harvest reefs could have been planted farther out as wetlands were rebuilt, said Twilley, who is also a coastal sciences professor.

    With the project now dead, scientists and advocates hope the state settles on another way to quickly protect remaining wetlands.

    One Tulane University river-coastal science and engineering professor, Ehab Meselhe, said he is researching a potential alternative project that could introduce sediment into the Barataria Basin, while causing a smaller change in salinity. The research is still in an early stage, Meselhe said.

    Lambert, the fishing guide, said it will be critical to continue monitoring the few areas in the river delta where wetlands are forming, such as Quarantine Bay. He wasn’t hesitant, however, to express his displeasure with the state’s current direction on coastal restoration and spiking of Mid-Barataria.

    “I’ve been a champion for this project for 20 years,” Lambert said. “All the science in the world don’t beat dirty politics.”

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  • 20 years later, Gulf Coast natives remember the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina – WTOP News

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    Twenty years ago to the day, Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast, wreaking havoc especially on the city of New Orleans in Louisiana.

    Twenty years ago to the day, Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Gulf Coast, wreaking havoc especially on the city of New Orleans in Louisiana.

    Over 1,800 people were killed in the most devastating storm in decades, which dumped over 15 inches of rain and moved at a pace of 175 mph.

    Now, one D.C.-based group is commemorating the disaster’s anniversary and remembering those who lost their lives.

    “Hurricane Katrina, literally, forever changed, not only New Orleans, but also this nation,” said Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr. of the Hip Hop Caucus, an organization that encourages young people to get involved in policymaking.

    In 2006, profound failures by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response prompted Congress to pass the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act. At the time, the administration of former President George W. Bush wrote that the natural disaster taught the federal agency 17 lessons on how to treat the next disaster — including community preparedness, public health and debris removal.

    Yearwood was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, and raised near New Orleans.

    “It’s been 20 years, but there are also parts (of the city) that look just like it did back in 2005, and that’s probably the most shocking part, things that have been this left to this (squalor),” Yearwood said.

    In 2010, a study by the National Institutes of Health found there were long-term impacts on the health of low-income parents that survived Katrina. The report showed that the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, rose to 47.7% among the 392 participants surveyed after the storm.

    Environmentally, the hurricane damaged millions of trees and caused an estimated $130 billion in damage. Significant damage still persists in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward where there are noticeably fewer residents.

    Yearwood recalled the traumatic event but said “the courage, the fight, the power and the love of our people” over the last 20 years has made honoring it even more poignant.

    “I’m just excited that we’re now approaching this 20 year anniversary in a way that’s more than about remembrance, it’s about justice. It’s about honoring the lives lost, and it’s ensuring a safer, healthier and a more equitable planet,” he said.

    New Orleans-based rapper Sess 4-5 serves as the co-founder of New Orleans Katrina Commemoration Inc. “Even today, some areas in New Orleans still look like Katrina hit yesterday,” he said.

    He recalled evacuating to Baton Rouge and hearing the news that the levees had broken around the city and seeing people waiting outside the Superdome with all of their personal belongings.

    “We were living in the richest country in the world. That’s disrespectful. That’s disheartening for citizens of the country to have to go through that,” he said.

    His organization, in the true style of his city, is holding a “second line” — a march through the streets led by a brass band — to honor those that lost their lives, as well as celebrating New Orleans’ reemergence.

    “We wanted to honor the lives of the citizens who lost their lives in 2005,” he said. “It was very important for the people to come back and keep our culture.”

    For Yearwood, the performance is “a moving concert.”

    The two groups are also calling for a national moment of silence at 11:20 a.m. on Friday to remember those who died.

    “I just think that fighting spirit was one of the reasons that made us come back and continue the culture,” Sess 4-5 said.

    WTOP’s Ciara Wells contributed to this report.

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    Luke Lukert

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  • From Pittsburgh to Mississippi: Hurricane Katrina 20 years later

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    It’s been 20 years since one of the worst hurricanes ever hit the U.S.

    Hurricane Katrina killed more than 13-hundred people and caused $125 billion in damage along the Gulf Coast.

    New Orleans bore the brunt of the storm, but it left damage along the coast.

    In that time of need, teachers and students from Pittsburgh answered the call for help.

    Channel Eleven’s Rick Earle traveled with them on their first trip to Mississippi 20 years ago.

    That one visit led to nearly a dozen trips over a decade to help the residents of Bay St. Louis.

    Earle went with the teachers on their first trip.

    During the next ten years, they would return every year with groups of high school students who volunteered their time to help rebuild homes and lives torn apart by Hurricane Katrina.

    Earle recently sat down with Richard Yount, the man who organized the relief effort, and a chaperon who participated in a number of trips.

    Earle: Is it hard to believe it’s been 20 years?

    Yount: Yes and no. It seems like yesterday, but I know I’ve gotten 20 years older.

    20 years ago and just three months after Hurricane Katrina, Yount and a group of teachers from Baldwin High School boarded a small jet at the Allegheny County Airport.

    “We’re going to go down and assess the situation and see exactly what the people need,” said Yount at the time.

    The group headed to the Mississippi coast. They had seen the devastation and destruction on television and wanted to help.

    Earle also traveled with them.

    “There we go, we just touched down in Mississippi,” said Earle.

    They landed in Biloxi and drove to Bay St. Louis.

    There was damage and destruction everywhere.

    “The storm surge from the bay slammed into Bay St. Louis, and now nearly three months later, the beach here is still littered with debris,” Earle reported at the time.

    “It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” said Yount.

    One of the first stops, the Bay St. Louis school district.

    “We’re here to help,” said Yount, when he arrived at the temporary offices they were working out of.

    “Once I did go I felt like I had to keep going. There was so much to do,” said Yount, during an interview this week at his home in Crafton.

    That one trip 20 years ago, led to a decade long mission to Mississippi to rebuild homes and lives.

    Yount showed us pictures and memorabilia from his trips.

    “This was a house we built in four days,” Yount said.

    Yount, an english teacher at Baldwin High School and fellow teachers launched Vision Club.

    They recruited students.

    “This is a 93 year old lady who lost everything,” said Yount.

    They helped put insulation in her home and built a railing for her handicap ramp.

    Every year for a decade, students on their easter break would travel to the gulf coast to help those devastated by Katrina.

    “We put up at least two houses from scratch, remodeled probably half a dozen. We did drywall work electrical work, plumbing work,” said Yount.

    The students raised funds, and paid their own way. Yount and chaperone Kevin Clancy said students were eager to help.

    “A lot of these students started out not knowing which end of the nail to drive into the wall, and now they’re asking their parents for power tools for Christmas,” said Clancy.

    Yount and Clancy, whose two daughters participated, teamed up with Habitat For Humanity in Mississippi and Brother’s Brother in Pittsburgh.

    For a decade from 2005 to 2015, Yount made at least ten trips with more than 200 students and 70 chaperones.

    “It was like they came along side of us and said how can we help and I still tear up when I think about it,” said Donna Torres, who was with the Bay St. Louis school district when Katrina hit.

    Earle and the teachers met Torres on that first trip, 20 years ago.

    Today, she fondly recalls the helpers from Pittsburgh.

    She said Yount put together most of the furniture to get the administrative offices up and running again.

    “We were able to see the best of humankind, the best of our neighbors and you wouldn’t normally think of Pittsburgh being a neighbor, but truly that neighborhood spirit came out of that,” said Torres.

    “That’s the reason we kept going back. They were incredibly appreciative. They couldn’t do enough for us, and they had nothing,” said Yount.

    It’s been ten years since Yount and his students wrapped up their work in Mississippi, and 20 years since the devastating Hurricane, but they saw the incredible transformation.

    “Watching the evolution from the total devastation to coming back as a community, you just can’t beat that. It was amazing,” said Clancy, who served in the military and is now retired.

    Yount: For the most part it looks like a brand new city.

    Earle: And that’s all thanks to you and your students?

    Yount: Well, most of the kids and the chaperones. I was just the organizer.

    The organizer who made it all happen.

    Yount retired from teaching in 2010, but continued leading students to Mississippi until 2015.

    He still does some volunteer work with Habitat For Humanity.

    He said he misses the yearly trips to Mississippi, but he’s glad he played a small part in helping to rebuild the communities along the Gulf coast.

    Yount said he couldn’t have done it without the support of the Baldwin School District.

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  • After Katrina, Atlanta became their Second Home

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    Family photos of the aftermath that Hurricane Katrina wrought on New Orleans in 2005. Photos courtesy of the Duncan family.
    Above: Photo of the photos by Tabius McCoy/The Atlanta Voice

    Monday, August 29, 2005, at 6:10 a.m. marked the start of a moment that would be forever etched in history. Category 3 Hurricane Katrina had just made landfall on New Orleans, and the city would never be the same. Its aftereffects wiped out more than 80 percent of the city’s infrastructure.

    The same streets where children played and brass bands once marched were unrecognizable, submerged in water. Homes, history, and culture vanished, erasing the soul of the predominantly Black city, similar to that of Oscarville. In parts of the city, water climbed 18 feet high, taking more than 1,300 lives.

    Millions across the region learned through television, word of mouth, or firsthand experience that the homes and safe havens they once knew were gone. An estimated 1.2 million people evacuated from New Orleans during Katrina.

    Among the cities people fled to, Atlanta was high on the list. Its historical Black presence and southern culture made it a natural choice for many New Orleans natives. Nearly two decades later, many of these natives still call Atlanta home. However, the path that brought them here is unique to each person.

    “The pictures can give you some sense, but being there is actually different,” said Cheryl Corley, an NPR reporter who covered the aftermath of Katrina in September 2005. “I don’t know if I could compare that to anything I’ve gone through—tornadoes and the destruction of tornadoes, other floods, and even much smaller floods. But this was eerie because you saw all of this destruction all over the place, and there was just a lack of people.”

    Months after Katrina, many people from New Orleans went without governmental support. “It took a while for all of those things to happen,” said Corley.

    In remembrance of the 20 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall, The Atlanta Voice sat down with New Orleanians who made Atlanta a home away from home.

    Troy Lewis. Photo by Tabius McCoy/The Atlanta Voice

    Troy Lewis, Age During Katrina: 35, 9th Ward

    A Saints hat on his head, a Saints t-shirt on his back, black pants on his legs, and a pair of sneakers on his feet. That was Troy Lewis’ attire when he arrived in Atlanta in 2005.

    “Of course, you all in Atlanta gave me a warm welcome,” laughed Lewis, reflecting on how he was suited head to toe in the gear of the Atlanta Falcons’ arch rival.

    Troy Lewis had this Saints hat on his head when he first arrived in Atlanta following Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall 20 years ago in his native New Orleans. Lewis is still a diehard Saints fan. Photo by Tabius McCoy/The Atlanta Voice

    Despite the light-heartedness he shows today, the reality is that the Saints gear on his back was the only possession he had when he got to Atlanta. At the time, evacuees like Lewis were often referred to as “refugees,” a term that felt heavy for someone still in his own country.

    Lewis initially didn’t take Katrina seriously. He had grown up in New Orleans, and hurricane warnings seemed like a regular occurrence.

    “We were going to try to stick it out because a lot of times hurricanes don’t hit New Orleans too hard,” he said.

    But as he watched his older next-door neighbors evacuate, he grew more cautious. “They were leaving, and they normally don’t leave, so I figured we should get out of here.”

    Lewis gathered his wife and two daughters, ages eight and six, and the four of them made their way west toward Metro Atlanta to stay with his wife’s friend.

    In the days that followed, Lewis watched Katrina unfold in his hometown. 

    “It’s not like today, so communication was not easy,” he said. “We went a good little while, maybe a couple of weeks, not really knowing where most of our family was.”

    The more news and footage he saw, the more he realized he would be in Atlanta for a while. 

    “It was like sixteen of us living in a three-bedroom house,” he said, as his family relied on neighbors and community donations to make ends meet.

    When he returned to his home in St. Bernard Parish in October 2005, it was clear that everything had changed. 

    “This looked like the end of the world,” Lewis said, reflecting on his drive through New Orleans and St. Bernard. “You could see the gray flood lines at the top of houses where the water had risen.”

    With banks shut down and all of his possessions, clothes, vehicles, and keepsakes lost, Lewis realized he would be rebuilding his life from scratch. 

    “If you ever felt the feeling of being homeless, that’s what it felt like,” he said.

    Two decades later, Lewis still calls metro Atlanta home. 

    “I love it here… can’t get me out of here now,” he laughed.

    Eddie Duncan and his daughters, Kayla (right) and Alicia, all made the trip to Atlanta during Hurricane Katrina. About relocating to Atlanta during Katrina, Duncan said, “I wasn’t stressed. I just knew it was gonna be cool. You can’t show no stress when you got kids, then they gonna feel it.” Photo by Tabius McCoy/The Atlanta Voice

    The Duncan Family

    After Katrina, the Duncan family evacuated from New Orleans and came to Atlanta. 

    Eddie Duncan, 60, is a New Orleans native and remains a Saints fan. despite living in metro Atlanta since he and his family arrived in 2005. Photo by Tabius McCoy/The Atlanta Voice

    Eddie Duncan, Age During Katrina: 35, Home: 6th Ward

    “The strangest thing happened. It was like days before it came, it got quiet out there, like everything just—you see, no birds flying around, no chirping or nothing. It’s like they knew,” said Eddie Duncan with a tremor in his voice as he recalls the days leading up to Katrina.

    Eddie had a decision to make. Watching television and seeing various news outlets warn residents of New Orleans to evacuate, he began to realize this storm wasn’t like any other he had experienced in his 35 years living in New Orleans. But for Eddie and his family of five, he felt like he would be left with no choice but to stay.

    “We were almost going to stay because the transportation that we had wasn’t that reliable,” said Eddie. This would leave him, his three children, all under the age of ten, and his wife to tough through the toll Katrina was bound to take.

    At the last minute, his mother called and told him to take her car, as she had evacuated days earlier. Taking her car, Eddie and his family made their way to Jackson, Mississippi. Initially, he thought they would be gone for just a couple of days.

    Days after the storm hit New Orleans, Eddie had electricity back in Jackson. Watching TV, he realized Katrina was unlike anything anyone had experienced before.

    Even today, when he hears of storms headed towards Georgia, he gets slightly triggered. “Just the thought of it, that it may be coming this way.”

    After about three days in Jackson, Eddie and his family drove to Atlanta to stay with a family friend. 

    “We were just running around a lot those few days,” said Eddie.

    With his home in New Orleans destroyed, his two children displaced from elementary school, and a toddler to care for, one would expect a sense of anxiety to take over Eddie.

    “I wasn’t stressed. I just knew it was gonna be cool,” he said in the calmest tone with a slight smirk. “You can’t show no stress when you got kids, then they gonna feel it.”

    The thought of going back and rebuilding in New Orleans initially crossed Eddie’s mind, “but it wasn’t about me.” With a school system struggling to rebuild, his decision was more about the betterment of his children. “The schools never came back up the way they need to be, still to this day,” said Eddie.

    At 55 years old, Eddie still resides in Metro Atlanta. Two of his children have graduated from college, and another serves in the military. 

    They all turned out great to me. I’m proud of them,” he said.

    Kayla Duncan. Photo by Tabius McCoy/The Atlanta Voice

    Kayla Duncan, Age During Katrina: 10, Home: 7th & 9th Ward

    “Oh, this is fun, we’re getting a break from school,” is what went through the mind of 10-year-old Kayla Duncan in August 2005 as she sat in a cramped two-bedroom apartment of a relative’s house with her two siblings and parents in Jackson, Mississippi.

    Jackson was the first place Kayla and her family evacuated to when word broke that Katrina was headed to New Orleans. Having lived in New Orleans her whole life, she thought it would be like any other storm passing through. Her family didn’t evacuate until the last minute.

    Katrina hit New Orleans on Monday, August 29, 2005, but on Friday, August 26, Kayla remembered, “We were outside playing in the street.” 

    The next day, the family evacuated.

    It wasn’t until days after Katrina hit that Kayla truly grasped what had happened. Dealing with Mississippi’s own destruction from Katrina, Kayla and her family didn’t have power to watch television to see what was going on back home.

    “And then when the power came back on, after it being off for a couple days, we turn on the TV and New Orleans is underwater,” said Kayla. At 10 years old, she was too young to fully grasp how this event would forever change her childhood, but old enough to know it was serious.

    Just two weeks into her last year of elementary school, Kayla and her family were uprooted over 400 miles across the south to Atlanta to stay with her cousin, a city she knew nothing about except that her cousin lived there.

    Kayla Duncan (far right) with younger siblings, Eddie Duncan, Jr., and Alicia Duncan, during their early years in Atlanta after Katrina. Photo provided by the Duncan family

    Living with her aunt and uncle, who was an attorney in an affluent neighborhood in Gwinnett County, Kayla described it as a “culture shock” when she first attended school in Atlanta. She went from attending school in the 7th and 9th Wards of New Orleans, where she was among a class full of Black students, to being the only Black student in her suburban class in Atlanta.

    “We had really young parents who weren’t really financially stable,” said Kayla. She recalled her family going to Goodwill to find clothes after all of them were lost in Katrina.

    “And I remember it was like two pairs of shoes and maybe six or seven outfits that I would wear on rotation. So kids were kind of picking on me because of that.”

    Kayla arrived in Atlanta in 2005 and never left. She finished high school at South Gwinnett High School, earned her degree from Georgia State, and, nearly 20 years later, still calls metro Atlanta home.

    Her love for New Orleans is still there and comes out when she visits, but Kayla admits, “The city has just never been the same.” 

    Alicia Duncan. Photo by Tabius McCoy/The Atlanta Voice

    Alicia Duncan, Age During Katrina: 3, Home: 7th & 9th Ward

    The Saints shirt Alicia Duncan wears with pride might throw you off at first. She grew up in Atlanta nearly her whole life. Atlanta is where she learned to drive, went to her high school prom, and performed in her first fifth-grade play. Atlanta is home.

    But the life she knows now could have been completely different.

    She was three years old when her parents and two older siblings fled New Orleans because of Katrina. Most of her memories from that time are hazy, but one moment stands out.

    “I remember we were all gathered around this really small TV in Mississippi, watching the news coverage. I remember distinctly,” she said. “There was a newscaster on TV, and he was literally getting blown away by the winds.”

    Over the next few days and weeks, she went with her family from New Orleans to Jackson, Mississippi, and then to Atlanta. She didn’t really understand the stress her parents and siblings were under.

    “I was just a baby,” she said.

    As Alicia got older, listening to her siblings and relatives share their anecdotes about Katrina brought a deep sadness. Watching archival news footage of New Orleans flooded and stripped of life, she said, “It’s really sickening and disheartening to see how America treated the city.”

    Even now, at 23, when she hears her dad retell how he led their family of five through the evacuation, her face still shows shock and sadness. “I wish I kind of got the experience of childhood in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina,” she said.

    There are pieces of childhood Alicia never got, like being close to her cousins and relatives, many of whom were scattered across the country after Katrina.

    Thomas Dean. Photo by Tabius McCoy/The Atlanta Voice

    Thomas Dean, Age: 35, Home: 9th Ward

    Sitting in a Belmont Hilton lobby, where he and his family were staying to take shelter from Katrina, Thomas Dean thought to himself, “We going back home soon, right?” as he watched the news on TV. Usually, when he and his family evacuated to Beaumont for hurricane warnings, it was only for a day or two, but this time felt different.

    Moments later, the reporters on the news made a statement that left Dean and many others in the lobby in shock.

    “We were watching the news, and they said, well, this is a direct hit. Make plans to stay wherever you are in the country. We’re not going to open the city back up for residents to come back home for 90 days,” said Dean, reflecting on the day in late August 2005.

    “Our eyes and mouths were wide open. We were like, 90 days? What the hell we gonna do for 90 days?”

    Dean, his family, and a couple of friends began brainstorming on a long-term place to stay. “It was between Dallas and Atlanta.”

    So they embarked on an 18-hour trip to Atlanta. For Dean, he really didn’t expect the stay to be long. He thought in a couple of months, he would return to running his flooring business back home and go back to normal.

    His house sat in the Garden District of New Orleans, an area not usually prone to flooding. He even got word from his Uncle Cyril, who had stayed through the storm, that the house was fine immediately after Katrina.

    “Bo, your house is good. I’m standing in front of your house. Your work van is not underwater,” said Uncle Cyril.

    However, as the day passed, he received another call from his uncle.

    “I heard an explosion,” Dean remembers his Uncle Cyril saying. “Man, something strange happened. Now they’re talking about levees breaking, the water’s rising. I got to get out of here.”

    When Dean returned to New Orleans a few months after Katrina, much of what he knew was gone. 

    “So as you were driving down the street, reading these damn Xs on these houses, it was very telling,” said Dean.

    Dean grew frustrated with the government’s lack of urgency in rebuilding the city. 

    “Bush was in office. They didn’t care about other Black folk. So I got mad.”

    That anger eventually led him to decide to keep his family in Metro Atlanta. Dean admits his adjustment wasn’t as hard as it was for many others. A family in Stone Mountain allowed him and his family to live in a five-bedroom rental rent-free for a year while they saved up.

    During that time, Dean and his wife saved enough to purchase a new home a little over a year after Katrina.

    Nearly two decades later, Dean still lives in Metro Atlanta and is a successful business owner. He owns Premier Flooring Group, one of the very few Black-owned flooring companies in the area.

    “I’ve been really fortunate to have some success in business,” he said.

    Although New Orleans will always live in Dean’s heart, he admits that moving to Atlanta opened his eyes in ways he hadn’t experienced before. 

    “You know, I’ve met more millionaires in person since I’ve lived here than I ever had in my whole life,” Dean said.

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    Tabius McCoy, Report for America Corp Member

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  • Bringing order and hope: Arkansas Guard’s Katrina mission remembered

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    When the call came out to help their neighbors, the Arkansas Army National Guard and the Air National Guard responded.

    Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in late August 2005 and became one of the deadliest and most destructive natural disasters in U.S. history.

    The eye of the hurricane made landfall near Buras-Triumph, La., about 60 miles south of New Orleans as a Category 3 hurricane, with sustained winds of 125 mph. The loss of marshland allowed the storm surge to overwhelm the levees and floodwalls, especially in New Orleans. The massive flooding submerged about 80% of the city and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

    Katrina caused over 1,800 deaths, destroyed or damaged more than a million homes, and inflicted an estimated $125 billion in total damages. The disaster overwhelmed local and federal emergency response systems, prompting one of the largest domestic military mobilizations in U.S. history.

    The mobilization provided authorities in the Louisiana Parishes a needed reprieve to get back on their feet.

    “Local authorities are overwhelmed by this scale of a disaster or even something like a tornado,” said Col. Joe Lynch. “Our presence allows them to increase their capability to do their job, whether it’s just us blocking an intersection, providing water, or keeping watch over a neighborhood or section of a town.”

    After the storm, the forward base engaged with local mayors. Meetings were held with utility companies and police. Lynch assessed reporters daily to determine if there was a specific item to discuss, to clean up areas, or to clear the entrance to a park. They provided advice and even removed furniture from buildings damaged by flooding so that FEMA could haul it away.

    “We were later helping the outlier communities. The ones that couldn’t snap back because they lacked the resources or the personnel,” Lynch said.

    Answering the Call

    “We were the third busiest wing,” said Ret. Col. Paul Jara, who was a major at the time with the 189th Airlift Wing out of Camp Robinson near Little Rock. “We flew into a naval base, and when we got off the plane, it was a Who’s Who of C-130s from various states. It was a ballet of forklifts, equipment going on and off of aircraft. You knew you had to get out of the way. It was mesmerizing to watch. It was an amazing view of America. We used that picture a lot. I wish I could find it again.”

    The 142nd artillery unit was in the process of adding cannon-fired artillery alongside the rocket-fired vehicles, so Ret. Capt. Ross Brashears remained behind in Fort Smith to provide support to process the evacuees from Louisiana.

    The old Fort Smith Armory was opened to serve as the central processing stage. Afterward, the evacuees were transported to Fort Chaffee for temporary housing. The base could hold about 5,000 soldiers at a single time, but 9,000 people came through the base for a few weeks.

    “Our mission was to process the evacuees, so we could move them somewhere else they could live,” Brashears said. “It was a coordinated effort between local law enforcement, Chaffee’s forest and game wardens, soldiers, and some of those were also in the guard. It was a good, non-standard mission that we were able to bring all those other agencies together to help them.”

    Brashears added that it may not have seemed efficient from the evacuees’ point of view, as they were moved onto a C-130, then bused to the armory, and subsequently bused to Fort Chaffee, where they were set up with the necessary commodities and received medical care. However, they processed 9,000 evacuees in three days, and within less than two weeks, all of them were relocated to more permanent housing.

    Col. Lynch, who served as the intelligence officer for the unit in Baghdad and during the Hurricane Katrina mission, was at home in Shreveport with his family. He trained with the Arkansas Guard unit in Warren, Ark. Lynch was getting back into his regular life and preparing to make a trip with his family to San Antonio. He was keeping an eye on the storm that hit the southern part of Louisiana.

    Lynch received a call on Tuesday before Labor Day (Aug. 30, the day after landfall) from an administrative officer stating that the 39th Infantry Brigade was heading to New Orleans and that he was to link up with his unit as it prepared to convoy to Little Rock.

    “If you’re the intelligence officer, your job is to prepare information for the commanders. From my experience in Baghdad, one of the things I knew I would be doing was looking for maps,” Lynch said. “I stopped at every Walmart between Shreveport before I connected with my unit and cleaned out each one of any Rand-McNally map so that we would have a reference.”

    The maps paid off.

    “It turned out to be a good purchase. It assisted in planning operations, looking at the terrain,” said Lynch. “I’m a map nut. Always have been.”

    Jara stated that it was rare for the Air Guard to respond to a domestic mission, but when the call came in, it was all hands on deck.

    “We didn’t know what was needed for a domestic response. Maj. Wes Nichols had some knowledge about what kind of assets may be needed, and we were able to send those down before landfall,” said Jara. “We had returned from Iraq the year before, and one of my guys, a former airman, arrived and began loading the trailers. I thought it was a huge testament. He wanted to help our Louisiana brothers and sisters.”

    Nichols is now a brigadier general and served as the interim commander for the 188th at Ebbing ANGB in 2023.

    Into the Unknown

    Going into New Orleans, the unit didn’t know what to expect. The rumors coming out of the city painted a chaotic situation. Stories of lawlessness were sensationalized. The police lost control, gangs were roaming around, cars were on fire, and looting. During a press conference, then Gov. Kathleen Blanco implied that the Arkansas troops had just come back from Iraq, and that they were “well-trained, experienced, battle-tested, and under my orders to restore order in the streets. These troops know how ot shoot to kill and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will.”

    Lynch said they never received shoot-to-kill orders, but in their minds, they were going down to restore order. He suspected that the local authorities in Louisiana and New Orleans were tired of the situation. However, the unit wasn’t going to let its guard down.

    “We had on all our combat gear, vest, and helmet. We thought it was going to be rough. We thought we were going to have to engage in urban combat, use force,” said Lynch. “Concerns of the civilian population were going through our minds as well. It was just an unknown.”

    Everything that followed happened fast. The unit was focused on preparing for the trip. No one knew what was happening in New Orleans except what was reported on the news. They gathered food and arranged for the most suitable mode of transportation to transport the troops, their gear, and their supplies to their southern neighbor.

    “We didn’t know how we were going to get everything down there, and we had to leave that day,” Lynch said. “I’m in charge of 300 men. Get them to the right truck and the right highway. We were going to be the first ones on the ground for the first couple of days, and not knowing what’s ahead.”

    The Convention Center

    When the unit arrived in New Orleans, they began at a parking garage to devise a plan. They still had no idea of the situation they were going into. The unit commanders decided to proceed with the entire convoy and secure the convention center.

    “We talked through the things we normally do. We’re good at planning. That’s what we’re trained for,” said Lynch.

    A convoy unit from the Louisiana Guard was there, but their driver, who had heard about the lawlessness, didn’t want to go to the convention center. The Arkansas unit followed a police escort. They turned a corner and went about eight to 10 blocks toward the aquarium.

    People were milling around. A couple of non-functional police cars littered the street. The police escort pulled back. The Arkansas unit turned onto another street and reached their objective. Lynch and his driver exchanged a glance. There was no one else ahead of them. They were the point. Lynch got the convoy in place. They dispersed food and water.

    “When the people saw the military, anyone who would have caused trouble backed away,” Lynch said. “We were moving people out of the way, pulling in a truck, and starting to help people. The situation was fairly calm. The people were cooperative. We thought we would be involved in urban combat, but it turned into an urban rescue.

    “You can tell that they were appreciative that we were there. They felt like they’d been let down, but the police and other services were overwhelmed, and that’s why we were there.”

    Mirroring Baghdad

    Lynch would spend his days in New Orleans as a liaison to the police department, meeting with them twice a day to discuss current situations and coordinate efforts.

    He would also meet up with other organizations that came into New Orleans to help.

    “People came in so fast, I would link up and establish rapport with them. We had units from all over,” Lynch said. “One came down from Connecticut for three days. An Oklahoma unit showed up for one day, and I knew some of them. It was constantly changing. Shaking hands. That’s part of what we did. It illustrated the scale of the response.”

    Lynch stayed for thirty days, and others remained up to six months. When the commanders asked for 100 volunteers, it didn’t take long to fill out the roster. Lynch could see how it was leveling out after a couple of weeks, as local officials and authorities were able to get things under control.

    “In Baghdad, we were trying to get a country back on its feet, and I spent time interfacing with the local council to collaborate on improving the city, whether it’s the schools or utilities. Once it was secure, it became a rescue mission. It was similar to what we experienced in New Orleans in that regard.”

    Exclusive book: How Katrina changed all of us

    Moving Forward

    In the aftermath, improvements were made and lessons were learned. More importantly, those who were part of the mission to help felt like they contributed.

    “All the training, equipment, leadership, trades, and engineers were used in direct support for American citizens on the worst day of their lives,” said Jara, who was a new Guardsman at the time of the Katrina mission. “The things we learned, I learned, during Katrina, shaped my future. I got a master’s in emergency management. I performed emergency work in both theory and practice, and passed that knowledge along to many other Arkansas guardsmen and recruits. I got the most satisfaction from supporting a domestic mission in Arkansas or Louisiana.”

    Before Katrina, the Fort Chaffee barracks needed to be upgraded, but the process was slow, even to get started. There was no air conditioning in the barracks. That may be part of the military training process, but not for refugees from New Orleans seeking a brief respite from the early September humidity in Arkansas.

    After Katrina, the barracks began to be upgraded. It took 20 years for all to be completed, but the process is about to start again.

    Cell phone reception was scarce enough on the base that officers couldn’t get a signal from their own offices. A temporary tower was erected and later replaced by a permanent one.

    Rep. Steve Womack retired from serving with the Arkansas Army National Guard in Little Rock in 2009. While he wasn’t part of the unit sent to Louisiana, he has been a strong proponent for the National Guard and its mission.

    “From pre-landfall planning to executing one of the largest evacuation efforts, Task Force Razorback answered the call with excellence and without hesitation,” Womack said. “Our guardsmen did not just demonstrate operational excellence in their response to Hurricane Katrina. They showed immense humanity and empathy in the face of chaos.”

    Womack added that the storm and its aftermath underscored the necessity of having a modern National Guard capable of responding to national emergencies and functioning as an operational force. He said that the National Guard component offered the best return on investment for the Department of Defense. Womack continues to support the effort to ensure the National Guard is equipped and funded to meet the ever-evolving challenges it faces.

    “Today, the Guard remains an elite force, not only vital in responding to domestic emergencies, but also serving as an indispensable warfighting unit, protecting Americans from an increasingly complex global security landscape,” Womack said.

    Before Katrina, commanders couldn’t lead both federal and state units. The laws were amended to permit dual-status commanders. Lynch is one for Arkansas. He added that the lessons learned have helped with future responses to natural disasters.

    “It was my first time to help with a domestic operation, and it happened to be the biggest in my lifetime. We trained and plan for such events, but until it happens, you don’t know what the response will look like,” said Lynch. “It was on-the-job training. We learned how infrastructure works at the federal, state, and local levels. I’m appreciative of the people who continue to train for a cloudy day, when it inevitably arrives.

    “We jump in when things are at their worst. We’ve done that three times since then. We leave our families, our jobs, and hop in a Humvee. It’s not easy to do, but we practice and learn the skills to help, so that others can do their jobs and help other people get their lives back together.”

    By The Numbers

    Arkansas Army and Air National Guard Hurricane Katrina Domestic Mission

    • More than 1,800 Arkansas National Guardsmen from the Army and Air divisions were activated for Hurricane Katrina support. More than 500 were at Fort Chaffee, while many others were on the ground in Louisiana.

    • Opened 59 armories in 58 counties to register incoming evacuees from Louisiana and Mississippi.

    • Rescued more than 750 patients and hospital staff from the VA Medical Center in New Orleans.

    • About 300 members of the 39th Infantry Brigade provided support at the Superdome and New Orleans Convention Center.

    • Supplied over 5,000 blankets, 1,200 cots, and 26,000 MREs (Meals, Ready to Eat).

    • Delivered 59 tons of cargo by air from the 189th Airlift Wing to the New Orleans area.

    • Evacuated more than 620 individuals by air and flew nearly 60 patients to safety.

    • Processed 9,000 evacuees over three days at Fort Chaffee.

    • More than 30 non-military official agencies (police, fire, first responders, etc.) participated in the processing.

    • Nearly 20 social service entities (Red Cross, Salvation Army, United Way, etc.) assisted at Fort Chaffee.

    • More than 1,000 volunteers (including general support, medical, etc.) also assisted at Fort Chaffee.

    • Roughly 20 tractor-trailer loads of donated goods were provided (food, water, clothing, toys, diapers, etc.)

    This article originally appeared on Fort Smith Times Record: Arkansas Guard’s role in Katrina response recalled 20 years later

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  • FEMA Staffers Warned of Looming ‘Katrina-Level’ Disaster, Then Got Suspended

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    It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina slammed into the U.S. Gulf Coast, killing nearly 1,400 people and displacing up to 1.2 million more. The storm’s impact overwhelmed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, revealing fatal flaws in its disaster response.

    The agency’s failure prompted Congress to overhaul FEMA largely through the ​​Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act (PKEMRA). This set higher expectations for its leaders and enhanced its autonomy within the Department of Homeland Security. Now, the Trump administration is reversing this progress, and FEMA staffers with something to say about it are being shown the door.

    Setting the stage for another ‘Katrina’ debacle

    In an open letter to Congress on Monday, nearly 200 current and former FEMA employees argued that the Trump administration has eroded the capacity of the agency and its partners. Since January, the administration has moved to cancel billions of dollars in disaster preparedness grants and tossed around the idea of eliminating FEMA altogether. Additionally, about 2,000 FEMA employees—a third of its workforce—have left their posts through firings, buyouts, or early retirements since the start of the year, Reuters reports.

    These decisions are setting the U.S. up for another Katrina-level catastrophe, the signatories warn. “The agency’s current trajectory reflects a clear departure from the intent of PKEMRA,” the letter reads. “Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office, and our mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration.”

    In addition to denouncing the administration’s handling of FEMA, the letter urges Congress to restore the agency’s cabinet-level status, shield it from DHS interference, and protect its funding and authority. It also calls for safeguards against politically motivated firings as well as greater transparency around internal employment policies and future staff cuts.

    “We hope [these changes] come in time to prevent not only another national catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina, but the effective dissolution of FEMA itself and the abandonment of the American people such an event would represent,” the letter reads.

    Supercharged threats

    Now, more than a dozen employees who signed the letter have been placed on administrative leave, the Washington Post reports. This is roughly a third of the staffers who signed with their names on Monday, with the other 141 signing anonymously for fear of retribution, according to the Associated Press.

    FEMA did not answer Gizmodo’s questions about exactly how many employees were suspended or when they would be reinstated. “It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform,” an agency spokesperson said via email. “Change is always hard.”

    This news broke as the Atlantic hurricane season approaches its September peak. Earlier this month, the eastern U.S. narrowly avoided disastrous impacts from Hurricane Erin as it slid up the coast. Decades of research show that climate change is supercharging hurricanes and other extreme weather events. We’re already seeing this play out this season as experts warn that above-average sea surface temperatures will lead to more frequent and intense hurricanes.

    The Trump administration clearly isn’t worried about all that, seeing as it already told FEMA to scrub information about climate change from both public-facing and internal documents. Ignoring the effects of rising global temperatures won’t stop the storms from coming, and gutting U.S. disaster response certainly won’t offset the losses when they do.

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    Ellyn Lapointe

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  • Pack Your Memories Into Your Disaster Bag

    Pack Your Memories Into Your Disaster Bag

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    This April, when a 1,000-year storm drenched South Florida, my father and older sister were among the thousands of people abruptly hit with severe flash flooding. They made it out physically unscathed, but many of their possessions were reduced to waterlogged piles of debris. Among those ruined mementos were sets of baby clothes, which my sister had painstakingly preserved for the future but forgotten during the rush of the flood. More than half a year later, she’s still grieving them. “Stuff is stuff,” she told me. But those pieces of clothing had been in the family for decades; she had worn them, and so had her 2-year-old. She just wished, she told me, that she could have held on to those outfits, “and my daughter could have had them for her kids.”

    The “rain bomb” that displaced my family from their damaged rental homes was amplified by a warmer climate. Climate change is likely making storms wetter and more frequent, and in coastal hot spots across South Florida, where drastically rising sea levels are driving tidal flooding, a sudden storm can easily become a disaster. Extreme hazards such as these are a by-product of the planet’s unprecedented pace of warming, which could change where and when wildfires, floods, and other catastrophes strike and how they overlap. These events affect millions of Americans—roughly one in 70 adults has been displaced by a hurricane, flood, or other disaster event in the past year, per the latest U.S. Census Household Pulse Survey data.

    People living in hurricane or earthquake zones have long been taught to be ready for the worst, but these new threats make “all hazards” preparedness that much more important for everyone, no matter your location. Emergency-management guidelines in the United States already include recommendations for every household to keep a supply kit on standby, with a more compact version that can be mobilized in case of evacuation. Both should contain emergency medications, copies of identity documents, food, water, and other essentials. “What you put in those ‘go bags’ are the items that really are essential to you,” Sue Anne Bell, a researcher and nurse practitioner who specializes in disaster response at the University of Michigan, told me.

    But in talking with experts about disaster preparedness, I was surprised to find that recommendations on storing personal possessions in those bags are basically nonexistent. That necessities come first makes sense: These items can make a life-and-death difference in moments of crisis. But ever since members of my immediate family were displaced, I have started thinking about a third way to prepare for the uncertainty of extreme weather and the disasters that follow—what I like to call my “climate carry-on.”

    This bag can now be found, zipped up and resting on a shelf in my bedroom closet, ready to be wheeled out if the need arises. In it, I have stashed away some of my most prized personal objects: photos of loved ones swaddled in pieces of clothing inherited from relatives who have died; a tarnished ring, priceless to me alone; a stack of journals teeming with childhood ramblings. All are relatively small physical mementos that I consider my most indispensable belongings. All are things that I’d like to one day be able to share with a family of my own.

    Most of the advice about preparing for an extreme-weather-related calamity is extremely practical, for good reason. “First and foremost, we need to safeguard our lives,” Fernando Rivera, a professor at the University of Central Florida who studies the sociology of disasters, told me. Bracing for the realities of recovery—grabbing physical copies of identity, medical, employment, and financial documents to help with disaster assistance and insurance claims—comes second. But survivors of climate disasters can benefit from preserving other meaningful parts of their life too.

    Read: Tiny climate crises are adding up to one big disaster

    Bell told me that losing a home and certain possessions can affect a survivor’s well-being throughout the recovery process. In a small, qualitative study about supporting elderly patients through a disaster, the in-home caregivers she interviewed described the stress and personal devastation their patients experienced from those losses after Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. “There’s a kind of trauma that comes along with knowing everything you’ve worked for in your life is something that you no longer have,” she said. That can affect “their larger health trajectory, as they’re trying to recover from a disaster in advancing age and feeling like they’re starting over.”

    Although it varies person-by-person, life changes after disasters do cause grief that can manifest in health complications, Priscilla Dass-Brailsford, a psychologist and Georgetown University professor who studies the effects of trauma, told me. And if these hazards put someone in a state of chronic stress, they can lead to serious physical health problems, including cardiovascular dysfunctions and cancer. “Extreme trauma and loss from a disaster, that’s a given,” Dass-Brailsford said. In the immediate aftermath, a person’s focus is typically on physical safety and navigating any remaining threats; the interwoven mental- and physical-health effects usually come later. “Once that’s done, and you’re settled down a little bit, the enormity of what happens then strikes people,” she said—problems such as headaches and stomach issues can suddenly flare up terribly, as she’s seen in her own patients.

    Losing personal property and, for those permanently displaced by a disaster, the place they live, can mean that survivors fare worse psychologically, according to Dass-Brailsford. She was a Hurricane Katrina first responder: “I remember walking through the rubble, looking at things that were lost during the storm, and wanting to pick things up and save them,” she said. She remembered thinking that “this is someone’s treasured object, and it was just now going to be sent to the dump.”

    Some may balk at the suggestion of packing away belongings that they’d rather see every day. Precautions like this can seem unnecessary—and it’s easy to tell yourself you’d move quickly enough to save what matters in case of a crisis. But although we may feel we are ready for an unexpected disaster event, that perception can often be far from reality, Bell, the University of Michigan disaster-response researcher, told me. A 2021 study she led found that, even for the basic steps of all-hazards readiness—having a stocked emergency kit, having conversations with family or friends about evacuation plans—people believed they were more prepared than they actually were.

    Read: Hurricane Otis was too fast for forecasters

    When measuring well-being after disaster or success in recovering, the focus is on quantifiable indicators, Sara McTarnaghan, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute who studies resilience planning and disaster recovery, told me. Disasters can put people in debt, or land them in the hospital. But, she said, hazard preparation shouldn’t just consider those tangible aspects of recovery. “As people, we’re often boiled down to those financial resources,” McTarnaghan said. When I asked her how people could better prepare for other types of loss they might experience, she stressed the importance of mental health, which climate-hazard-recovery processes tend to put less emphasis on. Reminding people that sentimental belongings—whether a photograph, a figurine, or an item of clothing—matter too could be a small stride toward helping them recover emotionally after a disaster.

    Of course, the objects that would be most meaningful to save will differ from person to person. And that’s probably one reason it’s harder to find guidance about selecting and storing personal property ahead of a calamity, McTarnaghan said. Thinking about this question at all is a good first step. “I absolutely encourage the reflection of some of the more personal and sentimental pieces that also lead to loss for individuals,” she said.

    Because searching for those items really isn’t what anyone should be doing in the rushed moments before evacuating, or as they start to shelter in place. No one should prioritize personal memorabilia over their own physical safety. Think of a climate carry-on as an optional supplement to a disaster kit and go bag. The latter two reflect the things we can’t live without; the first, the things we’d rather not.

    Still, creating a climate carry-on isn’t a bad idea, Rivera, the UCF sociologist, said. He has thought, too, about the possibility of a communal repository, where things that matter to people could be stored and easily accessed year-round, further encouraging community-wide hazard resilience. “Individually, you never think that you’re going to be in that situation,” he said. But climate change is that much of a threat, becoming all the more real in our daily lives. Some of us will end up in that very position, forced to swiftly determine what we consider irreplaceable.

    My dad never fathomed he would be displaced by a flood until he was watching the waters rising around him. “As the water increases, you have to, right away, rationalize what is important and take it from there,” he told me. If he could go back in time and pack a bag full of memories, he would stuff it with objects that are now lost: a collection of books he’d kept with him for decades and photo albums of his parents, his brother, and his sister, all of whom he’s lost. But of course, not everything can fit. He was thinking, too, of a rug worn down by multiple countries and moves, and a box of schoolwork and memorabilia handcrafted by my siblings and me.

    “I saved a good amount,” he said. “But the rest of it? It’s gone. And you have no choice but to move on.”

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    Ayurella Horn-Muller

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  • One of America’s Oldest Hospitals Lay Abandoned. Then a University Stepped In.

    One of America’s Oldest Hospitals Lay Abandoned. Then a University Stepped In.

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    The last time Lee Hamm was working in New Orleans’s Charity Hospital, critically ill patients were being hauled up and down dark, sweltering stairways as nurses hand-pumped oxygen to keep them alive. In August 2005, for those inside a hospital ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, the sounds of helicopters whirring nearby only added to the frustration, as day after day went by with no rescue.

    Over the next 18 years, Hamm,now a senior vice president and dean of medicine at Tulane, relived memories both horrifying and inspiring as he looked out the window of his nearby office building. There, in a gritty portion of New Orleans’s downtown, the abandoned skeleton of Charity Hospital loomed, boarded up behind chain-link fences and overgrown weeds. The million-square-foot Art Deco building occupied a full city block.

    To many, the state’s decision in 2005 to shutter Charity represented the neglect of New Orleans’s most vulnerable residents. The iconic hospital had served as a safety net since the 1700s, doing so in its current structure since 1939. “This building that was brought to its knees during Katrina and not built back,” said Tulane University’s president, Michael A. Fitts. “That symbolized a lot to the community.”

    So too, he hopes, will Tulane’s decision to help bring Charity back. The university is spending $135 million on the hospital building, where it plans to move its School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine by the end of 2026. Approximately 600 researchers and research staff from the medical and public-health schools will also move into the overhauled building. Tulane will serve as an “anchor tenant,” taking up about a third of the former hospital. Hamm will oversee the creation of new labs and research space for Tulane’s medical school.

    The mixed-use building will also house apartments and retail space, as well as the Tulane Innovation Institute, a center designed to turn university-funded research into products faster. Beyond its investment in Charity, Tulane will spend another $465 million expanding its presence in the surrounding downtown biomedical corridor, with the hope of revitalizing the area as a hub of bioscience research.

    At a time of public questioning about the contributions colleges make to their communities, Tulane’s latest investment demonstrates how deeply the fates of higher-education institutions and the cities they inhabit are intertwined. When urban campuses swallow city blocks and residents are displaced, the projects often breed resentment. Tulane’s plans, though, have been welcomed because the hospital and its immediate surroundings have been abandoned in a section of downtown that’s become an eyesore and a constant reminder of Katrina.

    Expanding in a downtown biosciences corridor makes sense, strategically and financially, for the private university of more than 14,000 students, Tulane officials say. The university’s enrollment has been inching up, and construction continues at its pristine uptown campus. But given the growth in its health-related graduate programs and the desire to be closer to the city’s economic center, expanding downtown is a priority, they say.

    Meanwhile, Charity Hospital is “an iconic building with so many stories and histories,” Fitts said, a place where thousands of lives were saved and generations of health-care workers trained. The building that stood empty for nearly two decades “symbolized in many respects the tragedy of Katrina.” Although Charity will no longer be involved in the kind of direct patient care it provided before Katrina, the education and research that will take place there send an important signal, Fitts said, about the university’s commitment to the community’s well-being and health.

    This building that was brought to its knees during Katrina and not built back. That symbolized a lot to the community.

    By supporting and encouraging the development of biomedical start-ups, Tulane hopes to help diversify the economy of a city that has historically relied on hospitality and tourism, both of which took huge hits following Hurricane Katrina and the Covid-19 pandemic.

    The president cited a number of cities that were transformed because of their relationships with prominent universities. “You look around the country, and it’s amazing how much development has occurred in cities as a result of universities — obviously Silicon Valley and Cambridge — but also Nashville, Austin, and Pittsburgh,” Fitts said. “We’re in the middle of an idea revolution as well as a biomedical revolution. I just think this is the perfect moment for Tulane to make a commitment substantively, geographically, and symbolically to the downtown.”

    Another plus, according to Mike Strecker, a Tulane spokesman, is that external funding for Tulane research has risen by close to 50 percent over the past four years, and the university expects it to increase another 50 percent over the next few years.

    The overhauled Charity Hospital building will include about 20,000 square feet of space for students to study and socialize. The developers plan to retain the building’s Art Deco facade, as well as the lobby and other historical features.

    Plans for the innovation district include affordable-housing units and jobs for neighborhood residents. That’s especially important in a place where rapid gentrification has made living in the city unaffordable for long-time residents, many of them families of color, said Marla K. Nelson, a professor of planning and urban studies at the University of New Orleans. Urban-renewal projects and tourism influxes were largely blamed for pushing families out of the historic Tremé neighborhood, near the French Quarter, one of the nation’s oldest Black neighborhoods and to many, the birthplace of jazz.

    Fitts said that’s not going to happen in the area around Charity Hospital, which is blighted and largely abandoned. “We’re taking over vacant buildings and parking lots,” he said. “We’re not displacing anybody at all.”

    ‘Where the Unusual Occurs’

    Charity Hospital was founded in 1736 as a New Orleans hospital for the poor, funded by a dying French ship builder. It became the second oldest continually operating public hospital in the country. The 1939 building, whose architects also designed the Louisiana State Capitol, in Baton Rouge, replaced earlier ones that burned or were too small for the growing number of indigent people needing care. It served the city’s poor until the severe damage caused by Hurricane Katrina forced it out of service.

    Until Katrina struck, “Big Charity,” as it was known, was one of two New Orleans teaching hospitals affiliated with Louisiana State University. The other, located nearby, was University Hospital. Instead of reopening Charity Hospital after Katrina, the state approved LSU’s proposal to replace the two hospitals with a new, $1.1-billion University Medical Center. That move, made possible by a hefty disaster-relief payment from FEMA, left bitter feelings among those lobbying for Charity to reopen, as recounted in an award-winning documentary about the hospital’s closure.

    Over the years, the 20-story building became a fixture on the city’s ghost tours and the subject of rumors of paranormal activity. (Part of the recently released movie Renfield, a modern-day adaptation of Dracula, was shot on site after the production designer noted that the building “looks like the classic silhouette of a vampire castle.”)

    In 2005, I was among a group of Chronicle reporters who traveled to New Orleans and Baton Rouge, where many New Orleans residents had been evacuated, in the days immediately following Katrina. Having heard harrowing stories about the conditions inside Charity and the city’s other public hospitals, I was eager this year to see for myself what was behind the broken and boarded-up windows and locked gates that had shielded the inside from view for the past 18 years.

    A tour in February with Hamm, the Tulane med-school dean, started on the first floor, where the emergency room stood before the rising floodwaters forced the staff to relocate it upstairs. The hospital’s motto is written in large letters on the wall, still visible beneath the grime: “Welcome to the Medical Center of Louisiana. Where the Unusual Occurs and Miracles Happen.” In another room, a ceiling-mounted surgical light is poised over an operating table, seemingly frozen in time.

    The hospital held up surprisingly well during the initial phase of the storm, which slammed into the Gulf Coast on Monday, August 29, 2005, lashing New Orleans with heavy rain and high winds, the dean said. By late that day, the streets were dry, the air calm, and it appeared the city had dodged a bullet. But by that night, water from distant, breeched levies began trickling down the street and on Tuesday, was flooding into the hospital buildings, he said. The next several days, as the water rose to waist height in the streets around the hospital, were a nightmare inside Big Charity. The generators that had kicked in were in the basement and soon submerged. With no water or electricity, temperatures swelled well above 100 degrees.

    Hamm and two other doctors paddled over to Charity, one block away from his office, in a canoe a colleague had brought in from home to check on evacuation efforts. Without electricity, emergency workers were using manual ventilation bags to breathe for patients who would normally be hooked up to machines. Residents were hauling patients on flat stretchers that weren’t designed to make the tight turns in the dark stairways. Bodies from a flooded morgue were stacked in a stairwell.

    More than 1,500 patients, staff, and refugees from the community were trapped inside Charity Hospital for days without food and drinkable water. While people were being plucked off of rooftops in submerged sections of the city, and evacuations were underway at the private Tulane University Hospital, no one seemed aware that thousands were trapped inside the city’s public hospitals. When word did get out, Hamm said, “They were told help was coming, and it didn’t come.”

    Some patients were paddled by boat across flooded streets and carried up to a rooftop parking deck, where a few died awaiting rescue that finally came, nearly a week after the hurricane struck. Like others who stayed behind to help with the rescue efforts, Hamm was one of the last people evacuated out.

    Like any financially constrained safety-net hospital where medical trainees are treating unpredictable influxes of poor and mentally ill patients, Charity faced its challenges long before Katrina struck its near fatal blow.

    “A lot of good things happened in that building,” Hamm said. “I’m sure there were things that weren’t as good as they should have been, but the hospital has taken on the symbolism of compassionate care to those that need it most. To be back in that building will be terrific.”

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    Katherine Mangan

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  • A Katrina survivor with a disability tells her story

    A Katrina survivor with a disability tells her story

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    Karen Nix was working at Tulane Medical Center, monitoring the vitals of patients, when the levees failed and Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans on August 29, 2005.

    By evening the medical center was inundated – water rose several feet into the first floors of buildings. Everyone in the hospital spent the night on upper floors, waiting for their chance to get out. Nix, who usually worked the night shift on the fifth floor, continued to attend to patients. Then the backup generators began to fail.

    Conditions deteriorated, especially for Nix, who has mobility issues caused by cerebral palsy. “I remember that it was hot and we didn’t have power, so it was miserable,” she said. Medical staff began gathering in pockets of the hospital where it was cooler. That crowded Nix, who uses a walker.

    The next day patients started climbing stairs to the seventh floor of the parking garage, where Blackhawk and Chinook helicopters waited. As part of the hospital staff, Nix stayed behind another night, caring for patients that remained.

    When it looked like her turn had finally come, Nix needed help climbing two flights of stairs. The elevators weren’t running. Nix and other medical staff ended up spending a third night in the parking garage, using a makeshift bathroom, before finally boarding helicopters that took them to a shelter in Lafayette, Louisiana.

    Using that commode chair, surrounded by borrowed emergency room curtains for privacy – is burned into her memory.

    “I worked the whole time and it was horrible …. That was a difficult time for me because of my disability,” she said.

    Nix, 59, has lived with cerebral palsy most of her life. She was diagnosed when she was six and said because it isn’t as severe as for some people, she has been able to work, go to school and graduate from college.

    Still, she imagines a world where she would not have to work when hurricanes and storm surges are on the horizon, but would instead get some type of disability pay since most places she’s worked, even hospitals, become inaccessible during disasters.

    That way, she could spend more time making preparations to get out of town. She can’t board up the windows of her house in New Orleans East to withstand potential wind damage. And in the event that rain and wind damage her home, she can’t do the cleanup.

    She has support, though. She is married and has children, so her family are often the ones to fortify the house before a storm and clean up the damage.

    But not all disabled people in regions getting hit by climate-related disasters have that support. She said local, state and federal governments don’t create adequate emergency plans for people with disabilities, whether for hurricanes, floods or wildfires.

    “I think you get left out of the equation if you’re not self-sufficient or don’t know how to get the resources you need,” Nix said, “or if you don’t have someone to be a voice for you.”

    ___

    Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.

    ___

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Undaunted by DeSantis, immigrant workers are heading to Florida to help with hurricane cleanup | CNN

    Undaunted by DeSantis, immigrant workers are heading to Florida to help with hurricane cleanup | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Just weeks after Ron DeSantis made a very public display of his efforts to keep migrants from coming to Florida, Hurricane Ian’s destruction is drawing a growing number of immigrants to the Republican governor’s state.

    “They’re arriving from New York, from Louisiana, from Houston and Dallas,” says Saket Soni, executive director of the nonprofit Resilience Force, which advocates for thousands of disaster response workers. The group is made up largely of immigrants, many of whom are undocumented, Soni says. Much like migrant workers who follow harvest seasons and travel from farm to farm, Soni says these workers crisscross the US to help clean up and rebuild when disaster strikes.

    To describe their work, he likes to use a metaphor he says a Mexican roofer once shared with him.

    “What you have now is basically immigrants who are sort of traveling white blood cells of America, who congregate after hurricanes to heal a place, and then move on to heal the next place,” Soni says.

    Already, Soni says his team has been in the Fort Myers area with hundreds of immigrant workers – about half of whom came from out of state. And he says more will arrive in the coming weeks.

    He calls it a “moment of interdependence.” And he says it’s something he hopes DeSantis and others in Florida will recognize.

    “Many who were traveling in the opposite direction weeks ago are now traveling to Florida to help rebuild,” he says.

    And each morning when they wake up, he says, many migrants have told him they are praying for DeSantis.

    “They’re praying for him to lead a good recovery, they’re praying for him to be the best governor he can be. Because they need him and he needs them. And they know that,” Soni says.

    Does DeSantis?

    “There’s no way that he doesn’t,” Soni says.

    But so far, the Florida governor’s words and actions tell a different story.

    Back in 2018, DeSantis campaigned for governor with a TV ad showing him teaching his kids to build a wall. And since then, he’s positioned himself as one of the most vocal critics of the Biden administration’s immigration policies and announced high-profile immigration steps of his own, including – most recently – using state funds for two flights taking migrants from Texas to Florida to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.

    Word that immigrants are now coming to help clean up some of his state’s most storm-ravaged communities hasn’t softened the governor’s stance.

    Several minutes into a news conference Tuesday billed as an update on the state’s hurricane response – before he detailed ongoing rescue efforts – DeSantis made a point of trumpeting that three “illegal aliens” were among four people recently arrested on looting allegations.

    “These are people that are foreigners, they’re illegally in our country, and not only that, they try to loot and ransack in the aftermath of a natural disaster. I mean, they should be prosecuted, but they need to be sent back to their home countries. They should not be here at all,” he told reporters.

    Later in the news conference, CNN’s Boris Sanchez asked DeSantis whether he had any response to reports that Venezuelans in New York were being recruited to work on recovery efforts, and whether the governor would also be trying to send those migrants back north.

    DeSantis doubled down on his earlier message.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a news conference Tuesday in Cape Coral, Florida.

    “First of all, our program that we did is a voluntary relocation program. I don’t have the authority to forcibly relocate people. If I could, I’d take those three looters, I’d drag them out by their collars, and I’d send them back to where they came from,” the governor said, drawing applause from officials surrounding him.

    He went on to describe a funeral he attended this week of a Pinellas County sheriff’s deputy who was killed in a hit and run by a front-end loader that authorities allege was driven by an undocumented Honduran immigrant.

    Then he ended the news conference, making no mention of immigrant workers who were putting tarps on roofs or clearing debris.

    Hurricane Ian is the first major hurricane to hit Florida since DeSantis took office in January 2019.

    Many migrants coming now to help rebuild, Soni says, have responded in the past to numerous major disasters in Florida and across the country.

    “Many are from Venezuela. Many are from Honduras and Mexico. They represent all of the different waves of migrants that have been arriving into the US and into this industry. Many of them who I’ve known since Hurricane Katrina and who have a dozen hurricanes under their belt,” he said. “But there are also newer migrants. I just met a group of Venezuelan asylum-seekers who were arriving to do the work.”

    The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History notes in its description of an artifact in its collection that after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, “Many homeowners undertook their own clean-up, but much was performed by immigrant laborers attracted to the region by the promise of hard work and good wages.”

    This file photo from April 2006 shows immigrant workers performing

    Sergio Chávez, an associate professor of sociology at Rice University who studies Mexican roofers, describes Katrina as a “key moment” that shaped the identities and careers of many of the hundreds of men he’s interviewed.

    A little more than half of the roofers in the group he’s studied are undocumented immigrants, Chávez says. And when he’s spoken with roofers across the United States – based in places like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Iowa, Ohio and Kentucky – Chávez says a common detail quickly emerges when he asks how they ended up in those locations.

    “They always name a storm,” he says.

    After Hurricane Ian, he says, many of those roofers are poised to head to Florida. Deciding exactly when to go to a disaster zone is a strategic decision, Chávez says, noting that arriving too early can be problematic.

    “There’s no telephone service, gasoline, food, housing,” he says. “They also have to be really careful not to just work for anybody, because otherwise they may not get compensated for the work that they do.”

    But there’s no doubt they’re going to Florida, he says, and that they’ll play a key role in the state’s recovery.

    “DeSantis is not scaring them away,” Chávez says.

    That doesn’t mean they won’t face some hostility once they get there, just like they have in other communities.

    “My guys for the most part do experience ‘the look.’ They do get pulled over, maybe. But for the most part, any time they go to a lot of these different locations, they are there to do work which the local population sees as essential. So they get their work done,” Chávez says.

    On the ground in communities, Chávez says he’s seen contradictions between people’s political beliefs and their actions. Some may support anti-immigrant rhetoric, he says, but then look the other way when they need certain services that immigrant workers provide.

    A bigger problem, Chávez says, is that when these workers face abuses – like wage theft or unsafe housing conditions – there aren’t enough laws to protect them, or local authorities may be hesitant to enforce them.

    On top of that, the work is physically demanding and risky.

    “These guys are helping us to adapt to a new world that we live in and we need their labor,” Chávez says. “But it turns out they actually risk their bodies. (Roofing is) one of the most dangerous occupations in the United States.”

    Damage from Hurricane Ian is seen on Tuesday in San Carlos Island, Fort Myers Beach.

    Chávez says he’s spoken with many roofers about on-the-job injuries.

    “A lot of these guys have fallen and they don’t have access to health insurance. Their bodies are no longer the same. They have bad knees, bad backs,” he says.

    So why do roofers and other disaster recovery workers keep setting out for these destinations, storm after storm?

    Even though wage theft is a major problem some face, there’s the potential to earn good wages, send their earnings to families in their home country and possibly advance to higher-paying jobs over time, Chávez says. So it’s a choice that makes economic sense to many, despite the risks.

    Desperation is also a factor, Soni says.

    “Part of what’s happened is because this is such dirty, dangerous work, and the conditions are so harsh, the most desperate people – those with no other economic avenues, those who are willing to be transient for a year or more – are the ones who join,” he says.

    When it comes to the physical and economic risks, Soni says Resilience Force does what it can to protect workers by helping them negotiate fair wages and payment with contractors, and making sure they have the right safety equipment as they set out to rebuild homes and schools.

    But those aren’t the only construction projects they’ll be working on in Florida, Soni says.

    “We also try to rebuild a society that’s better than it was before the storm,” he says. “And it’s better when there are more relationships and there are more bonds between different people. … Politics can change when the people in a place change their minds.”

    After previous hurricanes, he says, the organization has led workers on service projects rebuilding uninsured homes, then hosted meals where homeowners and workers can talk with the help of interpreters.

    “Those bonds have lasted. People have become friends and people have changed their minds,” he says. “What that often looks like in Florida or Louisiana is for someone who thought immigration was their most important issue, well, after a hurricane, immigration becomes the 35th most important issue. And what’s more important is, how are we going to stay in this place to survive and thrive again? Who will it take? What family will it take to bring this place back? And that family usually includes the immigrants who helped rebuild the place.”

    DeSantis may not take note of this. But as Florida rebuilds, Soni is betting that community leaders and homeowners who need help will.

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