Climate, Justice, and the world Katrina Left Behind

Marking 20 years.

At 11:10 AM CT on August 29, 2005, 120 mph (200 km/hour) winds battered the Mississippi coastline, bringing a record-breaking 28 foot storm surge with it, breaking the earlier record held by Hurricane Camille (1969) by almost four feet.

At 11:10 AM CT on August 29, 2005, I was 16 years old, dancing in the wind and rain of Hurricane Katrina as she made her second landfall at the Mississippi-Alabama border.

Twenty years ago from the moment I published this piece, my life and the lives of everyone from the region were irrevocably changed.

Katrina didn’t just arrive and vanish; it settled in, reshaping lives, communities, the whole country. I was there, and in many ways, I’m still there. The storm lingers, like a high water line haunting the soul.

I have spoken in depth about the storm’s impact on me, my family and the communities that raised me.

For all of those who forgot, didn’t pay attention, or were not yet born, I hope this summary will provide a grounded understanding of what Katrina means to survivors like me.

Because to survive a storm like Katrina is to never truly leave it behind. The water may drain, the houses may be rebuilt, the debris hauled off—but the storm nests inside you. I’ve said before that Katrina was one of the few events that shifted the very axis of my life, alongside the birth of my son and the raid on my home.

Survival does not mean escape. It means carrying the wound, waking to it when the sky darkens or the air presses heavy, recognizing it in every new storm alert that buzzes across your phone. People assume trauma softens with time, but sometimes it calcifies into identity—you become the storm’s witness, its archivist, the one who can’t forget even when the world insists on forgetting.

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A Quiet Morning, A Shattered World

On a late August morning in 2005, the Earth weaponized the ocean against us.

The day had an eerie calm to it at first — quiet and calm enough to wrongly assume they had overplayed the monster lurching toward us. By mid-morning, the reality of what was upon us became clear.

I remember how disarming it felt as the day remained sunny through the entire storm. I’ve seen the sky go black, suddenly, threateningly before severe weather rolled through. But not on this day.

That day the sun hung above it all, almost mocking, as if indifferent to the havoc unleashed beneath its steady gaze. That dissonance—the calm light paired with the storm’s rage— felt like a trick. It felt less like weather and more like a reminder: the world is not bound to behave by our expectations, and it doesn’t owe us warning signs.

Katrina was, at the time, a once-in-a-lifetime beast. In the modern record, only three landfalls carried comparable fury: the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, and Camille in 1969. Roughly every thirty-five years, it seemed, the Gulf of Mexico demanded tribute in total devastation. Katrina felt like the next terrible installment in that grim cycle.

But the climate we inhabit now has broken those patterns. The ocean is warmer—globally by about 1.5°F (0.85°C) since the late 19th century, and the Gulf of Mexico is heating even faster, setting record sea surface temperatures nearly every summer. Warmer seas are jet fuel for cyclones, and warmer air holds more water, which translates into storms that are both more intense and more flood-laden.

That’s why Katrina was followed so quickly by Rita and Wilma, both stronger at peak intensity and arriving within mere weeks. It’s why Harvey in 2017 dumped more than 60 inches of rain on Texas—rainfall scientists have shown was made at least three times more likely by climate change.

It’s why Laura and Ida, fifteen and sixteen years after Katrina, blasted Louisiana with winds nearly as powerful, while Michael in 2018 tore into the Florida Panhandle as the strongest storm to ever strike that coastline. The “once-in-a-lifetime” scale has collapsed; storms that should be rare are now relentless.

The numbers tell the same story survivors already know in their bones. Since 2005, the Atlantic has produced more Category 5 hurricanes than in the entire first half of the 20th century combined. Between 1980 and 2010, only three Atlantic storms rapidly intensified by more than 70 mph in a single day; between 2017 and 2021, we saw ten.

This is the signature of a planet running a fever: storms that form stronger, intensify faster, and linger longer. Survivors of Katrina recognize the echo in every new storm that rises from overheated waters—the lesson that what once felt exceptional is becoming the norm in a climate unmoored.

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A Social Catastrophe

The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 remains the deadliest natural disaster in American history, with as many as 12,000 lives lost. Yet even then, much of the death toll came not from nature’s fury alone, but from human arrogance. Warnings had come from Cuban meteorologists that a monster storm was bearing down, but U.S. forecasters dismissed them as unreliable. The city’s leaders, eager to preserve commerce, told residents to stay calm. By the time the Gulf rose and the winds ripped homes apart, there was nowhere to run.

This pattern repeats across the centuries. Time and again, the storm itself is only half the story. The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, the most intense to ever strike U.S. soil, killed more than 400 people—many of them World War I veterans sent to the Florida Keys to build a highway. They were housed in flimsy work camps with no real evacuation plan, despite forecasts of a major storm. Government negligence, not just the hurricane, sealed their fate.

Katrina followed the same script, written in even larger letters. The levees in New Orleans—designed and built by human hands—collapsed under pressure they should have withstood. Evacuation orders came late and without provisions for the poor, the elderly, or those without cars. Thousands were left to suffer in the Superdome or on rooftops as the water rose. The storm surge was monstrous, yes, but the real catastrophe was the scaffolding of decisions, delays, and dismissals that turned a natural disaster into a human one.

And still, we’ve failed to learn. When Hurricane Harvey poured more than 60 inches of rain over Texas in 2017, it was climate change that loaded the clouds, but it was human development—paving over wetlands, ignoring floodplain maps—that left Houston defenseless. In 2018, Hurricane Michael exploded into a Category 5 in the Gulf, but what doomed so many in Mexico Beach was not ignorance of its strength, but the absence of strict building codes and a culture of denial that told people “it can’t happen here.”

What survivors know is this: storms will come, and they will grow stronger as the planet warms. That much is out of our hands. But the choices we make—the strength of our levees, the honesty of our warnings, the justice of our evacuation plans—are ours to own. The deadliest hurricanes in American history are less indictments of the weather than of ourselves. The lesson is simple, though rarely heeded: the storm is merciless, but the greater danger is our refusal to listen, to prepare, to value every life equally before the water rises.

What Katrina revealed wasn’t just vulnerability to storms — it was the geography of injustice, etched long before the winds picked up.

In New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward, 98% African American at the time, floodwaters rose quickly after the levees failed. Hundreds drowned in attics, unable to hack through their roofs. Those who survived faced years of bureaucratic neglect: federal housing programs after Katrina systematically gave white homeowners more aid than Black homeowners for the same amount of damage, according to a 2010 HUD investigation. Renters — disproportionately Black and poor — were often left out entirely.

In Gulfport, Mississippi, homeowners with insurance rebuilt within a year. Just blocks away, Black families without policies — or with coverage denied under the label of “storm surge” rather than “wind” — remained in FEMA trailers for half a decade. Casinos returned faster than schools.

Disasters, geographers remind us, do not create inequality. They expose it.

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The First Climate Refugees

Perhaps the most haunting legacy of Katrina is Isle de Jean Charles. Once a thriving island community of several hundred, it has lost 98% of its land since 1955. After Katrina, repeated storms finally forced a reckoning: the tribe became America’s first official climate refugees, offered government-built subdivisions 40 miles inland from what supposed to be miracle HUD funding.

But relocation is not the same as justice. Families were uprooted from ancestral fishing grounds. Burial sites are now underwater or collapsing into the rising water table. Children grow up without the marshes that defined their parents’ lives. It is not just land that is lost, but culture, sovereignty, memory.

For Isle de Jean Charles, home to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw, Katrina was one of many storms that made staying impossible. Within a decade, the community would accept the first federally recognized climate relocation in the U.S. The federal government paid $48 million to move families inland. It was called “resettlement.” For the tribe, it was exile.

I worked on the HUD grant for the Isle de Jean Charles. I was there when the state took the money and gave it to developers with connections to both the awarding agency and their politicians. I was there during the public meeting when Chief Albert Naquin closed his eyes to keep from crying as the new proposal site was approved — without any input from the tribe itself. All of that work, effort, and worst of all hope, only for the state bureaucracy to squander and steal it.

What happened there is not an isolated story. It is the leading edge of a national trend. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that by 2100, 13 million Americans could be displaced by sea-level rise. Katrina’s displaced communities were the first. They will not be the last.

“We lost more than houses,” Houma elder Russell Dupre once said. “We lost our map to who we are.”

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The Storm That Never Ends

Katrina should have been the breaking point, the storm so devastating it forced America to change course. But the years after told a different story.

Carbon emissions kept rising. Coastal wetlands continued vanishing at the rate of a football field every 100 minutes in Louisiana. Oil and gas drilling expanded. Flood insurance programs were patched, not transformed. And FEMA — politicized and weakened — became once again a pawn of ideology rather than science.

We rebuilt what had been destroyed, often in the same vulnerable places, without addressing why it was destroyed in the first place. We raised levees higher around New Orleans, but ignored the sinking land beneath them. We reopened casinos faster than we rebuilt schools. We treated Katrina as a one-time tragedy, instead of the first chapter of a new climate era.

For survivors, Katrina is not past tense. It is present. It lives in the memories of children who grew up in FEMA trailers, in the tribal elders who mourn lost land, in the Mississippi families who never came home.

And it should live in all of us — as a warning. Because Katrina was not just a storm; it was a prophecy. And we are living in its shadow still.

The Gulf is hotter. The storms are faster. The waters are rising. The injustice remains.

The storm that never ends is not Katrina itself. It is our refusal to listen to what Katrina was trying to tell us.

In loving memory and in grief of all the lives lost and forever changed on August 29, 2005.