Jackson Square, New Orleans (Credit: Author)
I have stood where the floodwater flowed,
where cobble streets fell beneath the waves,
where home was drowned and hearth was doused,
And the Crescent City had its heart ripped out.
Walking the French Quarter of New Orleans today would make one strain to believe how a whole city could be underwater. Certain sections of the city have done a remarkable job at recovering from Hurricane Katrina. Two decades later, other parts of New Orleans are still struggling to rebuild, forgotten by society at large.
This past August marked the 20th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The hurricane formed on August 23rd, 2005. It crossed over south Florida into the Gulf of Mexico, intensifying into a Category 5 hurricane on August 26th before hitting landfall on August 29th, and dissipating the next day. The center of the hurricane missed New Orleans but dumped a massive volume of water into Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. The storm surge caused the levees and floodwalls around the city of New Orleans to break and flood the overwhelming majority of the area.
I have written in the past about the trends of big storms and the need to believe in science. I first traveled to New Orleans a few years ago and fell in love with the city. The food, the music, the character of its people all resonated with me. It’s a place that’s hard not to want to go back to. But one of the things that struck me most was a cab ride from my hotel. The driver of that cab took me all around the French Quarter into other parts of the city. Every street, every block, every building we passed was accompanied by some variation of the phrase “completely underwater.” These were the same streets which, at other points of my trip, I was walking down on my way to listen to live jazz at a bar after dinner or to Café du Monde for beignets at 1:30 in the morning before heading back to my hotel. A city almost destroyed had come back from the brink.
Being who I am and finding interest in what I do, I began reading more about the city’s more recent history. I remember Hurricane Katrina on the news, and much of the criticism afterwards, but the details eluded me. As I grew up, it became less important to society at large. And so, as with many other topics here, I felt that 20 years on, it was important to explain what happened during Katrina in a way which is easily digestible for people like me who may not really remember but also offers reflections on what this storm and its effect on such a special city means for the rest of us.
Much of the content of this article is sourced from When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts and If God Is Willing and da Creek Don’t Rise by Spike Lee which originally aired on HBO in 2006 and 2010 respectively, and Netflix’s Katrina: Come Hell or High Water, which was released in 2025 in addition to the National Geographic series Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time also released in 2025.
Inadequate Preparations
I heard the echoes of their promises,
They ring hollow even after all this time.
I saw the defiance marked on headstones,
And bitter memory on the faces of the living.
The city of New Orleans sits below sea level and exists on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River. The only think keeping the city safe from the waters flooding the streets during a storm surge are a series of levees and floodwalls. Hurricane Betsy in 1965 saw a levee collapse and flood most of the Lower Ninth Ward. As a response, the United States Army Corps of Engineers was brought in to reinforce the levee system. The new levee system was only built to withstand a Category 3 hurricane.
There was an exercise in 2004 called Hurricane Pam, which was a joint exercise developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Louisiana Office of Homeland Security, Emergency Preparedness, the National Weather Service, and Innovative Emergency Management, Inc. to simulate the effects of a hurricane hitting New Orleans. The report from this exercise would be a chilling prophecy which Hurricane Katrina would prove to be true. Many of the safety measures recommended were not executed ahead of Katrina making landfall.
Hurricane Katrina was the first time New Orleans ordered a mandatory evacuation of the city. However, Mayor Ray Negin did not give the order until August 28th, one day before landfall. There were no preparations for food or fresh water nor did the city of New Orleans provision city resources such as school buses to assist with the evacuation. As a result, residents of the city were caught unaware and unprepared. Additionally, New Orleans is a predominantly black city with a large poor population. Many of its citizens were unable to evacuate of their own accord, and there were no resources to assist them.
The population also saw a large number of individuals who refused to leave even in the face of a Category 5 storm. Either from a belief that they could weather the storm or uncertainty over the evacuation’s feasibility. The evacuation route was not established ahead of time due to the last-minute order of the mandatory evacuation. As a result, the highway was bumper to bumper traffic for hours, and gas stations along the route did not have nearly enough supply to meet the demand. Gridlock extended for miles and the early reports of such influenced many people’s decisions to stay home.
While preparations for those who remained in the city were underway, such as closing prepared floor barriers, placing sandbags in the appropriate places, generators being prepared, and so on, New Orleans’ fate had been sealed. The wetlands had been eroded by efforts to facilitate greater oil and gas drilling efforts off the coast of Louisiana. The wetlands prevented storm surges which traditionally kept New Orleans safer from increased rainfall. With those depleted, the system of levees and floodwalls was all that could keep the city safe.
It would come out later that the levees had been improperly constructed by the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Flood Protection System had floodwalls which were not properly secured into levees. When the pressure of the water grew too great, the floodwalls gave way and flooded the city. In other areas, the levees were created primarily with sand, which meant that the structural integrity of those levees were weakened in the leadup to the storm. The Army Corps of Engineers knew about these deficiencies and the government never publicized that fact before the hurricane struck.
Nobody ever knew the city was at risk of flooding until it was underwater.
The Storm and The Flood
They withstood the beating of the winds,
And endured when the waters rushed forth.
The wind and water collected souls,
But hope could never be drowned.
When the storm finally made landfall, its center hit southeast of the city proper. However, the 150 mph winds and pounding rain still caused a massive storm surge. It strained the levees in short order. After the storm had passed, many residents noticed that there was a decent amount of water still on the ground. Expecting it to drain, they were shocked when the water level began rising instead. In certain areas, residents heard loud booms as the levees gave way and water began flooding across the city.
Within the first twenty-four hours, levees and floodwalls in predominantly low-income areas of the city were breached and waters from the lake, river, and canals flooded the streets of New Orleans. Entire houses were almost completely underwater. Many people drowned inside of their homes or died from exposure in the following days due to the intense heat. The flooding problem only got worse as levees continued to breach over the next few days.
Many of the hotels downtown were booked by locals to ride out the storm. The Hyatt Regency served as a shelter for around a thousand people. As the storm unfolded, they were moved to the ballroom because the force of the wind stripped the entire glass exterior from the hotel and flung furnishings out of the hotel into the streets. The Hyatt Regency was part of a downtown entertainment complex that also included New Orleans’ main stadium.
The Superdome was opened in 1975. While it was built with a waterproof roof and protection against rains and some wind, the building was not engineered to serve as a shelter in the event of a hurricane. An engineering study was being conducted around the time Katrina arrived and was thusly suspended due to the storm’s arrival.
Because of the danger that Katrina posed, the Superdome was designated as a shelter of last resort for those who could not evacuate. Tens of thousands of people were sheltered in the stadium. During the storm itself, winds ripped the roof off and allowed water to flood in. The building also lost power and plumbing during the storm. Tens of thousands of people were trapped in a building not meant to serve as accommodation for several days with no food, no water, and no escape from the horrific conditions. Emergency workers struggled to provide care.
The problem of caring for so many people in a city that was 80% underwater was felt elsewhere too. With the Superdome bursting at the seam with massive crowds, people were rerouted to the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. The convention center sheltered around 25,000 people in overwhelming heat with no food or water. Many of the people inside endured similar conditions as the Superdome, and threatened to overwhelm another makeshift refugee shelter for those who had lost their homes to the floods.
In the wake of the storm itself, and the flooding reaching its heights, the people of New Orleans were left in a chaotic mess of a city without functioning utilities such as fresh water or power. Additionally, all the lines of communications had been destroyed. Cell towers, phone lines, and the internet were all inaccessible.
The City of New Orleans faced its darkest hours after she sun came out once the storm passed.
Chaos in the Crescent City
The storm had passed and the sun returned,
Shed its light on the horrors in the streets.
But the heartbeat of New Orleans never stopped,
And its people could never be broken.
The situation in New Orleans after the storm itself passed was nothing short of a warzone. Entire neighborhoods were underwater. Volunteers in boats traveled neighborhood streets as though they were the canals of Venice or Amsterdam to try and find people they could take to safety. People were trapped in their attics or on their roofs. Rescue workers were forced to smash and cut open roofs open to save people trapped in attics. Many of the people evacuated using makeshift rafts, or by fording deep floodwaters themselves. Children, elderly relatives, and supplies which were salvaged were placed in refrigerators which had been emptied or other containers and floated down the flooded streets. Bodies were found inside homes or floating out in the streets, bloated and rotting.
The Superdome became a refugee site, with those who lost their houses now packed into a massive structure without the resources to take care of them. So many people went to the Superdome that people were redirected to the convention center, which was two miles away. People who had been in the hot sun with no food or water for days were now being sent two miles away in the same heat. Five days after the storm hit, the people who had been trapped in the Superdome were finally able to be evacuated from the stadium. Most of the evacuees were sent to Houston, Texas where they were sheltered in Houston’s Astrodome.
Charity Hospital was a public hospital and was one of three major hospitals in New Orleans for decades. Originally opened in the 1930s, it was one of the busiest hospitals in the country. It also predominantly served the poor black parts of the population. Charity Hospital saw horrific conditions inside as dedicated healthcare workers attempted to save as many patients as they could. There was no power, no equipment, food ran out quickly forcing patients to use IV drips to get nutrients, and the temperature reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit. It took several days for the last of the patients to be rescued from Big Charity. They were ferried out through flood waters and rescued by helicopter several blocks away from the roof of Tulane hospital. Despite all of this, only eight patients died in Charity, which was less than Lindy Boggs Medical Center or University Hospital.
Katrina flooded the basement and lower levels of the hospital. Despite this, volunteers cleaned up Charity Hospital to prepare it to see patients again in the immediate aftermath. It was ready in three weeks, but the state of Louisiana decided that Charity would not be reopened as a hospital. The arguments being that it would be too expensive to pay for the renovations. Instead, the plan was to raze several city blocks of historic houses to build a new hospital complex nearby.
The community, however, was fighting for Charity. A massive public campaign was waged by the community. The government said that they were waiting on FEMA to pay out. FEMA offered a paltry sum, which the city of New Orleans fought by going to Congress and having the law changed. This was challenged, and New Orleans fought and won in arbitration. Still, Charity never reopened. It’s replacement, University Medical Center opened in 2011. UMC fulfills the role of Charity and the old University Hospital which was closed when University Medical Center was opened. The old Charity Hospital building is still abandoned, however, there is a plan with Tulane University to rehabilitate the structure for new use.
The conditions in Charity during the storm were not unique. Memorial Medical Center caught much more attention for the brutal conditions and the cruel choices the doctors trapped inside had to make. Without backup power, or outside support, the personnel inside Memorial had to triage available resources and make hard decisions on which patients to focus their attention on based on their best chances of survival. It’s a completely unenviable position and doubtlessly caused much anguish within those doctors and nurses and physician assistants. However, the caregivers at Memorial had patients who were relying on them.
Gretna, Louisiana is the parish seat of Jefferson Parish, which is one of the largest parts of the greater New Orleans metropolitan area. Gretna is connected to New Orleans via the Crescent City Connection bridges over the Mississippi River. There was an incident on the bridge to Gretna when predominantly black citizens of New Orleans attempted to escape the flooded city across the bridge. They were met on the Gretna side with a roadblock of armed officers from the City of Gretna Police, along with Crescent City Connection Police, and Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s department who turned them back. The police officers were predominantly white, adding a racist undertone to the proceedings despite Gretna’s mayor’s arguments that Gretna could not handle the influx of people due to the damage and lack of utilities afflicting much of the city already. He later admitted it was a response to a spate of robberies.
The city was in total chaos, and a great deal of the emergency response at all levels was ineffective. A large number of the fatalities were elderly people near the areas where the levees failed. Bodies were floating in the flooded zones or left in the homes to be retrieved later. The search parties would be ineffective in many of the neighborhoods, marking houses as searched when they never saw inside.
The city needed help, but the various authorities refused to give it.
Lack of Response
The Ninth Ward is the legacy of ditherers and cowards,
Who passed the buck rather than work the shovel.
A community’s bleeding heart lies on their table,
And they complained about the mess.
Government can be a force for good if properly executed. The power to mobilize immense amounts of manpower and resources to accomplish any task is the biggest advantage of the federal government of the United States. However, all those resources and personnel mean absolutely nothing if the leadership is not competent enough to deploy these resources in an appropriate manner. Furthermore, leadership is culpable for a lack of preparation.
Kanye West’s famous comment during a live fundraiser for Katrina victims represented the feeling of many both in New Orleans and across the country: “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Whether or not that is actually true, the sentiment wasn’t hard to believe and disagreement wasn’t common to see.
George Bush promised aid ahead of the hurricane’s landfall. These promises would be unfulfilled, and federal efforts would only begin days into the crisis. The President flew over New Orleans two days after the storm on his way back to Washington DC from his vacation in Texas. It was only after he returned to Washington did the federal government begin planning to mobilize resources to aid New Orleans.
The most notorious part of the federal response was FEMA. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is designed to manage the federal government’s response to disasters both manmade and natural. FEMA’s director was Michael Brown at the time. FEMA was under the Department of Homeland Security, whose Secretary at the time was Michael Chertoff. Brown, who was in the area at the time, maintains that he repeatedly asked President Bush for more help, including the 82nd Airborne to handle logistics, and that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had urged Bush not to commit military resources. Brown also stated that right before the infamous press conference wherein President Bush said, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” he had told Bush how bad the situation was in the city streets.
Five days after the hurricane hit, FEMA had not deployed significant resources or even realized that people were stranded at the convention center with no food or water or other supplies. The Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, had been on national television several times asking for aid, and his calls remained unanswered. Ahead of the storms, FEMA urged emergency responders to not respond to areas affected by Katrina unless specifically tasked by their controlling agencies or authorities. FEMA was more concerned about legal liability than rendering aid, and so kept doctors at the airport rather than assisting patients. Michael Brown was at a loss for information. He was unaware of the people at the convention center until days after the hurricane. From top to bottom, the response from the federal government was a complete and total disaster for the first several days of Katrina. No major aid made it to the convention center until much later in the week.
While FEMA’s response was atrocious, the United States Coast Guard performed excellently. Units of the United States Coast Guard were some of the first on the scene and took heroic actions to help Katrina survivors. The Coast Guard threw out the rulebook for rescues because none of their planning prepared for working in an urban environment such as New Orleans. Helicopter pilots ignored regulations limiting their flight hours for the day in order to stay in the air and continue rescuing people. They also had to navigate with little communication in very hostile environments for helicopters due to the hazards of powerline snagging the blades or the fact that so many helicopters operated with no air traffic control in very close proximity to each other. Coast Guard personnel borrowed axes from firefighters or bought axes and wood saws in order to cut through buildings to reach people trapped in their homes. Quick thinking and dedicated actions allowed the Coast Guard to set up communications when most lines of communications were completely washed out along with the rest of the city.
On September 1st, the Federal Government tasked Lieutenant General Russel Honoré to lead Joint Task Force Katrina, allowing active duty military personnel and assets to assist in New Orleans. This provided an influx of resources to help distribute aid to people and evacuate survivors. Honoré is a native of Louisiana and understood the situation, both from a pragmatic standpoint as well as what New Orleans would need as a city with a large poor and black population. He received operational command of the USS Bataan and its helicopters, which were necessary. Honoré was able to direct federal resources in ways which were able to do the most good. Honoré provided direct leadership and access to resources which were sorely needed in the absence of the Louisiana National Guard. In August 2005, a large number of the Louisiana National Guard and the equipment which would have been useful in moving people and supplies were busy in Iraq. General Honoré could only work with what little the country would give him.
General Honoré pushed back against the prevailing narrative that New Orleans was a lawless city being looted by roving gangs of criminals. The federal government, the Louisiana governor, and the news all pushed a narrative that people were looting stores in droves, and there was a massive storm of crime doing more damage to New Orleans than the storm and flood did. With the lack of supplies readily available, people raided stores to provide for themselves and their loved ones and other strangers. These were characterized as purposeless looting, which made it more difficult to support many of the people suffering and dying in New Orleans.
With the false narrative that the city was a violent wasteland that needed to be controlled, the arrival of additional federal resources on September 2nd saw the National Guard carrying weapons openly, and patrolling. The people of New Orleans, still trapped at the Superdome and the Convention Center felt like they were criminals. Countless instances of people who were at their absolute lowest were treated like threats instead of citizens who needed to be helped. Honoré made a point of ordering military, National Guard, and even police officers to keep their weapons down. He knew the deployment needed to be seen as a humanitarian mission.
Sadly, many citizens felt it was their job to take the law into their own hands, and there were several instances of vigilante shootings which occurred in the aftermath of Katrina. Many of these were white gun owners who shot black civilians trying to make it through, with encouragement from the governor. Additionally, police officers were tasked with trying to keep peace and protect stores and property rather than being deployed to rescue survivors.
Honoré’s response to the governor of Louisiana, Kathleen Blanco, was that she did not want to tell citizens to shoot at other citizens is also noteworthy. The reports of looting had pushed the governor to focus on making stern warnings and encourage citizens to step up for the police force which was overworked. A combative environment made General Honoré’s work much harder. He knew this and tried to impress upon the governor that New Orleans was a matter of survival for everyone, and more lives would be saved if everyone worked together.
This hit on the biggest issue of the governmental response at all levels: Everyone was fighting with each other because of political squabbles. The Bush administration had to pay for a war in Iraq which was becoming costlier as mission creep was dragging out what was supposed to be a quick and simple action. Governor Blanco was a conservative Democrat, while Democratic Mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin had backed Bobby Jindal in the 2004 Louisiana gubernatorial election. So, there were competing political interests, and a great deal of passing the buck and refusal to take responsibility for anything during the Katrina response.
People died. The inability of leadership to work across partisan lines or look past previous political slights led to more people in New Orleans dying pointlessly. They starved to death. They died of dehydration. They died of health conditions which were not able to be treated. The elderly and children and the vulnerable were left to die of their own devices. The lack of search and rescue assets led to people drowning in their homes trying to escape the waters. Louisiana was not the only state affected by Katrina either. However, the governor of Mississippi, Haley Barbour, was a Republican, and received money from the federal government for his state. Meanwhile, Louisiana saw significantly less in proportion to the damage done because Kathleen Blanco was a Democrat.
Petty politics killed residents of New Orleans. Many of which were poor and black, which meant they weren’t a priority by the federal government. The heart of New Orleans was left to die.
And in spite of that, New Orleans lives on.
Twenty Years On
The floodwaters subsided,
And the bodies were buried.
Home was rebuilt and hearth was relit,
The Crescent City would rise again.
In the years after Katrina, the city of New Orleans showed the nation and the world who they are. The rebuilding process proved the tremendous resilience of the Crescent City as it restored not only the buildings and neighborhoods, but also the spirit of its people.
In the immediate aftermath, New Orleans was left to fend for itself. The federal government seemed to want everyone to ‘move on’ from Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans. The Speaker of the House at the time was Denis Hastert, who said it made no sense to rebuild New Orleans. The people who survived without their houses were denied access to the travel trailers FEMA purchased to serve as temporary housing for months, citing problems in the applications of people who had just lost everything they owned. Meanwhile, the trailers sat empty and unused. Insurance claims were denied because most of the people did not have flood insurance.
As time marched on, other avenues for funding the rebuilding were explored, with a large measure of success. Much of the city is back. However, the poorest areas found themselves victims of the cruelty of moneyed interests. The Lower Ninth Ward was the last neighborhood to have restored utilities, and has received less assistance than other areas in the years since. Twenty years on, the Lower Ninth is still far from being anywhere close to what it was. Road Home and other government programs which distributed money to homeowners to rebuild treated the lower income house owners horrifically. Payouts were based on the valuations of the houses pre-flood, which put the people in the poorest neighborhoods at significant disadvantages, driving many of them not to return, and leaving the land up for the taking. In absence of governmental aid, Brad Pitt started the Make It Right Foundation to build housing in the Lower Ninth Ward so people could return to their neighborhood. The houses were designed by world-renowned architects with features meant to avoid the dangers of another flood, such as raised houses and roof access from the interior. The result was a series of houses constructed with good wishes in mind, but poor material quality, and a lack of specialization for the climate of New Orleans meant most of the houses barely made it ten years before needing to be ripped down.
On top of that, multiple other neighborhoods which were predominantly poor and black had developments and buildings which made it through the storm relatively intact and were still torn down. Many of these were solid brick housing projects built by the Works Progress Administration as part of the New Deal. They were sealed after the mandatory evacuation, and the City Council voted to demolish the projects and hand the land over to developers, displacing major black populations after ignoring maintenance on these buildings for years. The people asking for their homes to be taken care of quickly found themselves losing those homes for the sake of real estate developers.
Large numbers of New Orleans residents displaced by the flooding, especially from the poorer areas, found themselves in places like Houston, Dallas and Atlanta. The Houston Astrodome served as a short-term shelter for many people displaced in the immediate aftermath of the floods. Houston was one of many places where people traveled to which took the people of New Orleans in, and many of them offered a better quality of life for the displaced New Orleans residents, so they chose to stay. This gutted the community in New Orleans, because without the people, schools were dissolved, meaning teachers left in addition to doctors, lawyers, and other members of the black middle class had no jobs to come back to, necessitating those people to move other places as well.
The Superdome was completely repaired by the following year and saw the New Orleans Saints face off against the Atlanta Falcons in their home opener on September 25th, 2006. The Saints won 23-3. On February 7th, 2010, the Saints concluded the 2009 NFL season with the franchise’s first Super Bowl appearance, beating the Indianapolis Colts 31-17 in Super Bowl XLIV. The Saints’ victory was a moment of triumph for the city, something great for them to celebrate how far they had come since Katrina even while the work to put the city back together continued.
Shortly after the Super Bowl, however, the Gulf Coast would be rocked with another environmental disaster. The Deepwater Horizon was a drilling platform for crude oil which exploded almost five years after Katrina on April 20th, 2010. The disaster became known as the BP Oil Spill, thanks to the immense volumes of oil gushing from the well due to the
The fishing industry would be devastated, and the environmental impact on the wetlands and the natural environment was another huge blow to the Louisiana Gulf Coast. New Orleans found itself harmed by nature once again. It took years to clean up the oil, and the environment is still attempting to rebound.
The oil industry is responsible for some of the most dangerous aspects of what made Katrina so deadly. The coastal wetlands are an absolutely vital part of the local ecosystems. They provide the best protection against storm surges because it forces water to navigate dense thickets of growth and slows down the growth. Much of those wetlands have been devastated by the oil industry which does a great deal of operation in the Gulf of Mexico and on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. Without these wetlands, the city is left more vulnerable in spite of the enhancements to the levee system made since Katrina.
Perhaps the most chilling fact about life in New Orleans twenty years after Katrina, is that the city’s levees are in danger once again. The Army Corps of Engineers attempted to claim that the flooding happened when the waters flowed over the floodwalls and levees, when there was video evidence which proved in court that the flooding began before the peak height of the water. The levees were upgraded, along with the pumping stations, and other measures were taken. However, the question of New Orleans’ safety still remains after all this time. Insufficiently funded, and improperly maintained, the levees will break again should another big storm hit the city. Without properly caring for them and the flood prevention systems, all of the progress from the last two decades will be washed away.
And even though New Orleans can rise again, it will lose another chunk of its heart and soul like it did after Katrina.
The Song I Hear
I have stood in a city reborn,
Welcomed by its music and its cooking.
I walked neighborhoods resurrected,
And heard it scream, “This is New Orleans!”
Katrina is a shadow that looms over a great deal of my childhood. I fell in love with New Orleans from the moment I arrived at my hotel in the French Quarter. It was a city with great personal significance since my parents had gotten engaged on the back of the riverboat Natchez. I am not someone who drinks, but I love music. Walking down Frenchman Street, in and out of bars where real New Orleans jazz was playing is one of the best musical experiences I’ve ever had. It’s a city that demands authenticity at all corners, from the people to the music to the food. I loved every second I was there.
It’s why I wanted to understand the effects and ramifications of Hurricane Katrina on the city and its people. Katrina is one of those things that happened so long ago for many of us that its importance feels somewhat under appreciated.
One of the most important lessons of Katrina to me is that our leadership matters. That we have a responsibility to our most vulnerable citizens to choose leadership that will protect and care for them in their times of need. That it is important to forget politics in times of need. That when you step into the voting booth, you are gambling with so many more lives than just your own.
I also believe that it is important to maintain compassion and dignity when interacting with others. That is a charge for us at a societal level. You don’t hassle over the cost of your garden hose when your neighbor’s house is on fire. Our unwillingness to lend assistance in the face of Katrina is criminal. Our hesitancy to hold people to account who sought to profit or benefit off this tragedy is abhorrent.
Not only that but we as a society must put a greater importance on the preservation of our environment, both natural and manmade. Much of the culture of New Orleans was built because of the contributions of poor black people who went unremarked upon by the world. America mistreated them, and they said, “We will not be overlooked, we will not be ground down, we will not be robbed of our humanity and dignity.” Those neighborhoods not being restored and protected in the wake of Katrina is an indictment of all of us for not respecting our own history and appreciating our culture. America today would not be where it is without the contributions of its black populations, and to act otherwise, as if any of us are above it all is morally repugnant.
Let New Orleans after Katrina be a long overdue wakeup call for the rest of us that we have not only the ability, but the responsibility to take more of an active interest in our society. Not just the parts that we like or feel comfortable in, but every part of it. To pay attention and act with care and respect, to think intelligently and remember that every single one of us here, in this country, is an American first and foremost.
If New Orleans taught me anything it’s that people in their darkest hours can survive if they do it together. New Orleans is stronger together. America is stronger together. We have come far, but we still have far to go. Hold our leaders to account, think about all the ramifications of our actions, and genuinely try to build the world that does the most for everyone. New Orleans needs our continued help to recover from Katrina. Education, business, environmental protection are all areas where the city continues to struggle.
New Orleans is one of my favorite cities to visit, and it deserves our help in being the best version of itself that it can be, while still keeping what makes New Orleans true.
Ark of the Lost Angels 
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