Twenty Years After Katrina: What We Chose Not to Learn

##August 29, 2005 — Hurricane Katrina makes landfall

As we approach the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I’ll be publishing several pieces covering my own perspective, the challenges still creating danger in South Louisiana, and lessons learned (and the ones that weren’t).

Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription so I can keep this newsletter free to the world.

---

Very few moments in a lifetime actually shift the axis your world spins on. For me, Katrina was one of them—the storm that rewired how I saw the world, matched only by the day my son was born and when the state raided my home. What I lived through on August 29, 2005, and in the long, bitter weeks that followed, planted in me the conviction that truth is not optional, that someone has to hold it fast. That storm was less a detour than a compass, and it set me on the path I still walk today.

It’s hard to wrap my head around the fact that twenty years have passed since the storm. Time says it’s history, but it doesn’t feel that way—it feels like something still raw and open, a wound that never closed. 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 high water that never quite drains away.

What Katrina revealed was not simply the power of a hurricane, but the fragility of a society that had ignored every warning.

I remember reading the maps years before—New Orleans drawn like a bowl, with walls of dirt between it and the sea, everyone knowing those levees were not built to withstand what the Gulf could send. Engineers and scientists said it plainly.

When the storm came, it did what we knew it would. The failure wasn’t natural. It was political. It was social.

And after the waters finally receded, I thought, surely this was the moment the country would wake up. Surely, after watching our fellow citizens stranded on rooftops and left to die in the heat of the Superdome, we would treat poverty and climate as the national emergencies they are. But we didn’t. We went back to business as usual. We let leaders call it a freak storm, an anomaly. We convinced ourselves it wouldn’t happen again.

South Louisiana still bears the scars. I’ve walked through neighborhoods where the houses remain gutted, skeletal reminders of promises never kept. I’ve spoken with families who fled to Houston, Atlanta, Dallas—who wanted to come home but never could. Those who did return often found their communities reshaped not by renewal but by removal. Entire blocks of Black and working-class families were erased, replaced by developers and investors. I can still see the waterlines, faint and high up the walls, as if the city itself keeps a memory of its drowning.

And then the storms kept coming—Rita just weeks later, then Gustav, Ike, Isaac, Ida.

Each one another hammer on a glass wall already cracked. Every hundred minutes, Louisiana loses a football field of land to the Gulf, wetlands slashed apart by oil and gas canals, the sea reclaiming what human neglect had left defenseless.

But if Louisiana bore the brunt of the levee failures, Mississippi absorbed the storm itself.

The surge there was almost unthinkable — 28.5 feet high in some places, turning coastal towns into kindling. I drove through Waveland and Bay St. Louis months later, and it looked as if someone had scraped the coastline clean with a giant blade. Whole neighborhoods gone, not just damaged but erased. Casinos that had once floated just offshore were hurled inland like toys, crushing houses beneath them.

Families who had survived generations of hurricanes — 1969’s Camille included --stood stunned in front of nothing but slabs. Biloxi’s historic waterfront was shredded, its shrimping fleets splintered, its homes flattened. It’s telling that even today, many of those Mississippi towns never truly came back; the tax base was too weak, the resources too few, and the national attention too fixated on New Orleans to sustain long-term rebuilding. Mississippi’s pain was quieter, less televised, but no less immense.

And I think often about how little has changed in the systems meant to protect us.

FEMA is still a maze of forms and delays, quicker to redraw insurance maps than to deliver aid. Emergency response still bends toward those with means. And most damning of all, the carbon keeps pouring into the atmosphere.

In the twenty years since Katrina, we’ve emitted more greenhouse gases than in all of human history before 1990.

We knew — we knew — that hotter seas meant stronger hurricanes, that warmer air meant wetter storms, that rising seas meant higher surges. We had the science. We had the evidence. And still we chose to accelerate, to subsidize fossil fuels, to silence the very warnings that might have spared lives.

The media didn’t help.

I remember watching how they framed it: Black families wading through chest-deep water in search of food and medicine were called “looters.” White families doing the same were called “survivors.”

Reporters descended to marvel at the spectacle of misery but too rarely interrogated the policies that made it inevitable. Mississippi, especially, slipped out of the narrative almost entirely.

The images from New Orleans—the helicopters, the Superdome, the Convention Center—sucked up all the airtime, while the coast to the east was left largely invisible. It was as if an entire state’s devastation didn’t count because it didn’t fit the storyline. That failure hasn’t disappeared. To this day, most storm coverage is still framed in radar loops and wind speeds, reporters lashed to poles, drama without depth. Rarely do they connect the dots: poverty makes disasters deadlier, climate change makes them stronger, policy makes them inevitable. Katrina became a symbol of tragedy, but not the catalyst for the kind of transformation it demanded.

And if you look around America in 2025, you see Katrina everywhere. You see it in the wildfires that turn California’s skies into a kind of apocalyptic red, in the farmworkers in Texas who collapse in heat waves that push past the limits of the human body, in the Vermont towns washed away by summer floods.

You saw it in COVID-19, too, when the poorest and most vulnerable died at staggering rates while leaders shrugged or denied the crisis altogether.

The pattern is painfully clear: the warnings ignored, the inequality magnified, the lives lost, and then the silence—the familiar silence filled with promises of resilience, rebuilding, and ribbon-cuttings in a future that never came.

So what exactly are we marking, twenty years on?

Not only the memory of those who were lost, but the truth that we squandered in the moment.

Katrina taught us what happens when a powerful storm collides with a fragile society.

The tragedy is that, two decades later, we are still choosing fragility.

The most dangerous flood walls in this country are not the levees around New Orleans, but the walls of indifference and denial we keep building higher.

Climate change is not a future we’re trying to prevent, but a present we’re already living.

Katrina was the first chapter of that present.

And as I look back, as someone who witnessed the storm and the failures that followed, I know the question we face now is whether we will keep rereading that chapter—storm after storm, failure after failure—or finally decide to turn the page.