20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina | Federal government plans to blow off disaster response quicken
Today is the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans.
-- "Stories From The Storm: Remembering 20 Years Since Hurricane Katrina," Weather Channel
-- "Hurricane Katrina, 20 years later," NPR
When the disaster of federal government response to Hurricane Katrina's effect on New Orleans transpired, my overarching thought was that the cost of austerity-neoliberal policies introduced during the Reagan era finally hit, in that over the previous 20 years, government cutbacks could be withstood because of the long period of overinvestment that preceded it.
-- "Capital shallowing: the effect of disinvestment on government functioning," 2023
Certainly, the Trump Administration's desires to cut FEMA ("The Trump administration says it wants to eliminate FEMA. Here's what we know," NPR, "Trump says he plans to phase out FEMA after 2025 hurricane season," CNN) and devolve emergency response fully to the states is problematic because such "natural" or weather related disasters can exceed the resources and ability of local and state government to respond.
It's already bad that the Trump Administration has politicized what areas get disaster declarations approved ("FEMA delays disaster aid to multiple states while Texas receives rapid approval," EHN, "FEMA faces backlog of emergency aid requests as hurricane season nears," Washington Post), and how quickly ("Hawley says FEMA is ‘slow-walking’ disaster declaration requests, but he’s pushing Trump," St. Louis NPR, " Trump's former FEMA chief opens up — and says administration is 'delaying' aid," Politico).
The Washington Monthly has a good article, "Trump’s Definition of DEI Is a Disaster for Disaster Management," on the topic of how calling planning and response "diversity" and therefore not funding it will have disastrous consequences. From the article:
Billion in damages mark, outpaced only by the record-setting 28 in 2023. Presiding over America’s response to this cataclysmic situation, we have a president ignoring the science on climate change, rolling back environmental protections, and denying half of the requests the federal government receives from states for major disaster aid. From weakening the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to laying off hundreds of federal employees critical in forecasting and responding to extreme weather events, this administration has already shown itself to be disastrous for disaster management.
But the unequal consequences of natural catastrophes reveal an added danger that Trump’s wide-ranging rollbacks create. When wildfires ravaged Los Angeles at the beginning of this year, killing at least 30 people, forcing around 200,000 evacuations, and destroying more than 16,000 structures, then-Trump advisor Elon Musk placed the blame squarely on L.A. agencies’ prioritization of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
... we accept the Trump administration’s operational definition of the acronym, the L.A. fires—and every other natural disaster—most definitely have something to do with DEI. Since January, the administration has cast DEI to mean any consideration of populations uniquely at risk, turning efforts to identify and address where needs are greatest into “dangerous preferential hierarchy.” In response, government agencies have been limiting the use of language like “at risk,” “historically,” “marginalized,” “underserved,” and hundreds of other terms, according to a New York Times analysis.
Not surprisingly, those with the least resources have the most to lose in the face of such disasters. Planning and responding to disaster efficiently saves money, time, and lives.
The inability of the Trump Administration to have any other agenda than wrecking the capacity of the federal government to add value to society is breathtaking ("It was the costliest hurricane in U.S. history: Have we forgotten Katrina's lessons?," NPR).
=====
In 2007, I was in New Orleans for the National Main Street conference and I went on a Katrina "disaster" tour. The tour guide was incensed "how could the government do this?" I said, "have you ever been to Detroit?"
.webp)
Flood waters from Hurricane Katrina cover streets in New Orleans on Aug. 30, 2005. It is estimated that 80 percent of the city was under flood waters as levees broke and leaked around Lake Pontchartrain. Vincent Laforet/Pool/AFP via Getty Images.
Labels: disaster planning, emergency management planning, federal policy, neoliberalism and the market economy
posted by Richard Layman @ 4:00 AM&Permanent Link
11 Comments:
Eric Klinenberg makes this point in his book about social infrastructure, Palaces for the People.
In New Orleans, Katrina Taught a Lesson in Local Resilience
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-29/in-new-orleans-post-katrina-resilience-hubs-aim-to-speed-aid-for-future-storms
“We’ve learned from Katrina and every event since then that the first responders are your neighbors,” said Pierre Moses, president of 127 Energy. The renewable energy firm has been working with Together Louisiana to install solar panels and back-up batteries on more than a dozen churches, civic centers and other neighborhood-serving facilities throughout New Orleans, creating microgrids that stay powered during prolonged blackouts.
These buildings have also been designated as “Community Lighthouses”; during disasters, they’ll serve as resilience hubs offering people a range of support and potentially life-saving services. They’re stocked with food, charging stations and refrigerators for storing medicine. And they’re run by members of the community.
“The most important part is a team of people who are the ‘lighthouse keepers,’” said Broderick Bagert, a founding member of the Community Lighthouse project. They routinely canvass the neighborhood, identifying people who live alone, surveying households about their most urgent needs and building trust with the community. When an emergency arises, that information can be used to determine who needs to be checked in on, by phone or in person.
“We have come to understand more that isolation is a big factor in who lives and dies,” Bagert said.
Mutual Aid Model
The need for community resilience has taken on new urgency as President Donald Trump continues to shrink FEMA’s role in disaster response. About a third of the agency’s workforce has left since the start of the the Trump administration. FEMA has also moved to eliminate key hazard mitigation initiatives, including the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which helps cities prepare for future disasters. In August, a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration from reallocating $4.5 billion in BRIC funding after 20 Democrat-led states sued — but not before several projects were put in limbo.
... In a sense, resilience hubs just add survival resources to the list of daily essentials that should be sited within a short distance from people’s homes — a core principle of the zeitgeisty “15-minute city” urban planning model.
To that end, a resilience hub should serve residents year-round with resources that boost their ability to be self-sufficient. That means programs that not only give out food, but show people how to cook and grow their own produce. Some hubs could have commercial kitchens for members to make food that they can sell to other residents. It could also mean programs that foster connections and exchange of knowledge between older residents and students.
Long after a storm has passed, these facilities can also serve as third spaces, where residents can gather to socialize and develop community bonds. Ideally, she added, hubs are housed in spaces that are already trusted and respected by area residents, who can easily access them. Churches and other houses of worship are often ideal host sites for resilience hubs: They’re centrally located in their communities, often in large, robust older buildings with an abundance of space that can be adapted for multiple purposes. Their existing relationships with their congregations can easily be built upon and expanded. Community centers also make for good hubs, as many already have the physical capacity to provide a range of social services, from childcare to health care to economic development.
What made Hurricane Katrina a catastrophe, and why its horrors linger 20 years later
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2025/08/29/hurricane-katrina-20-years/
https://www.clarionledger.com/picture-gallery/news/2014/08/28/hurricane-katrina-anniversary--gallery/14750589/
After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans fired thousands of Black teachers. Twenty years later, these groups are bringing them back
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/30/hurricane-katrina-new-orleans-black-teachers
n the 20 years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the northern Gulf coast in August 2005, New Orleans’s education system has gone through drastic changes as the schools transformed into a public charter school system. Black children, who make up the majority of the student population at more than 90% of the schools, have felt the negative impacts of the decrease in Black teachers most severely, say some researchers, such as a reduction in Black role models and a lost sense of community. Before Hurricane Katrina, 71% of public educators were Black. But by 2014, the number of Black teachers had dipped to 49%. In recent years, the Black teacher population has increased to 56%. The number of Black teachers has never returned to its pre-Katrina level in the decades following the storm.
Research shows that Black students who have at least one teacher of the same racial identity by third grade are 13% more likely to graduate from high school and 19% more likely to enroll in higher education than their Black peers without one. And Black students perform better in math and reading when taught by Black teachers. A recent study from Tulane University’s initiative Education Research Alliance for New Orleans showed that Black students reported less positive educational environments than white students a few years in a row.
Test scores are only one piece of a well-rounded education, she said. For Dixson, what is missing are role models who look like the students and can help instill strong cultural values in them.
Be Nola was born out of a community-led response to the anger around the firing of teachers and that “education reform had been done to them and not with them”, said Elem-Rogers. The organization started with a coalition of Black New Orleanians who wanted to see more Black influence in the education system. Now the non-profit hosts a professional learning community for Black-led schools to learn from one another, and to receive coaching from Black institutions. From 2 to 5 October, the group will host its fifth annual Black Is Brilliant summit, where Black teachers from throughout the nation will discuss policy and how to help Black children thrive in the classroom. Last year, 1,000 people registered for the event.
‘Never seen before’: How Katrina set off an education revolution
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/28/new-orleans-schools-hurricane-katrina/
After Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, the city began a long climb back that remains incomplete to this day. Yet one aspect of recovery began soon after the catastrophe and quickly gained speed: A new approach to public education was introduced. And in the five years after Katrina smashed into this fabled city, it progressed so far that Arne Duncan, education secretary in the Obama administration, declared the storm “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”
Get first-person illustrated stories about how work is changing
His words were crass, but a new study from Tulane University confirms, now two decades after the disaster, that they were true. For the winds and rain that lashed the city, and the crumbling levees that flooded it, shattered the systemic inertia and stifling bureaucracy that had betrayed generations of children, unleashing a schools revolution unmatched anywhere for its radicalism and scale.
Surveying the devastation that left intact just 16 out of 128 schools and destroyed about a third of school buildings, state legislators took an enormous gamble: They fired all 7,000 teachers, sidelined unions, invited ambitious experts to run the schools and offered parents almost total freedom over where to send their children. This drastic move was backed by rigorous assessment of the schools’ and students’ performance. Over the following years, at least 50 of the remaining 75 schools were shut down or handed to new operators.
Now, Tulane University researchers have analyzed scores of studies of this bold experiment. They conclude that New Orleans’ daring act of liberation from local bureaucrats, converting all city schools into charter schools — publicly funded, but with the freedom and flexibility to set curriculums in line with contractually agreed goals — has been a remarkable success.
“It’s the largest, broadest and most sustained improvement we’ve ever seen in a U.S. school district with substantial improvement everywhere we have looked, from test scores and parental satisfaction through to college access and reduced involvement in crime,” Douglas N. Harris, the Tulane economics professor and director of the Education Research Alliance who headed the research, told me.
New Orleans has gone from being one of the country’s worst school districts, with graduation rates 18 percent below the national average, to middle of the pack. Graduation rates rose nearly 20 points in the scheme’s first decade. Improvements have since plateaued, but they have been sustained, dipping during the pandemic amid school closures before recovering sharply. “We’ve leapfrogged thousands of school districts,” Harris said, “which has never been seen before.”
20 Years After Katrina, New Orleans Is ‘at a Tipping Point’
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/29/us/katrina-anniversary-new-orleans.html
The city has taken pride in its ability to endure. But many residents, fed up with dysfunction and soaring costs, want it to strive for more.
After the flood and the trauma, New Orleans was flush with financial resources, big ideas and hope that some of its worst and most pernicious problems might have washed away for good. The city might not only stagger back to life, but get better governance, better flood protection, better schools, better police. Two decades later, much of that hope has gone unrealized.
New Orleans has taken pride in its ability to endure; just in the past few years, it suffered a deadly terrorist attack on Bourbon Street, another hurricane that knocked out power and disrupted trash collection for weeks, and a pandemic experience that paralyzed the city’s economy and led to one of the nation’s worst surges in violence. But many residents want it to strive for a higher standard than simply hanging on.
“We can’t be complacent,” said Markethy McClellan, who runs an air-conditioning repair business in the city’s Seventh Ward. “All of us deserve better.”
“Traffic lights aren’t working, the streetlights aren’t working, the drainage pumps aren’t working, and City Hall is not working,” said Edward Chervenak, director of the University of New Orleans Survey Research Center. “People feel that the city is at a tipping point, and that if we don’t get this next mayoral election right, we’re going to spiral downward.”
By the fifth anniversary of Katrina, residents were getting back on their feet, and by the 10th, the city was gradually rebuilding, with positive momentum as more people returned. At 20 years, that optimism has been replaced with widespread concern about the city’s livability, even in light of recent bright spots, like a significant drop in the murder rate.
This Is Why New Orleans Never Recovered From Katrina
The $140 Billion Failure We Don’t Talk About
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/opinion/new-orleans-katrina-funds.html
Most Americans soon moved on, but the federal government did something extraordinary: It committed more than $140 billion toward the region’s recovery. Adjusted for inflation, that’s more than was spent on the post-World War II Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe or for the rebuilding of Lower Manhattan after the Sept. 11 attacks. It remains the largest post-disaster domestic recovery effort in U.S. history.
For a moment, the investment created a rare opportunity: to reimagine a major American city as a model of innovation and resilience. What instead emerged was the uncomfortable truth that America isn’t good at long-term recovery. If the reconstruction of Lower Manhattan and the Marshall Plan are hailed as triumphs of American exceptionalism, then the response to Katrina belongs in a darker corner of U.S. history: the Afghanistan or Vietnam of rebuilding — painful, expensive and, ultimately, a failure. It is now a cautionary tale for every place in America that will one day face its own disaster.
Today, New Orleans is smaller, poorer and more unequal than before the storm. It hasn’t rebuilt a durable middle class, and lacks basic services and a major economic engine outside of its storied tourism industry.
The core problem was the inability to turn abundant resources into a clear vision backed by political will. Federal dollars were funneled into a maze of state agencies and local governments with clashing priorities, vague metrics and near-zero accountability. Billions went to contractors and government consultants while public institutions such as schools, transit, health care and housing barely scraped by. For example, one firm, ICF International, received nearly $1 billion to administer Road Home, the oft-criticized state program to rebuild houses.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/29/katrina-inspired-a-3b-wetlands-rebuilding-project-louisiana-just-killed-it-00523737
Katrina inspired a $3B wetlands rebuilding project. Louisiana just killed it.
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.
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/in-depth/20-years-after-hurricane-katrina-what-can-uk-learn-from-new-orleans-approach-to-flood-resilience-20-08-2025/
20 years after Hurricane Katrina: What can UK learn from New Orleans’ approach to flood resilience?
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/08/they-survived-katrina-and-started-to-rebuild-now-trumps-cuts-may-flood-them-out-again/
They Survived Katrina and Started to Rebuild. Now Trump’s Cuts May Flood Them Out Again.
One of the administration’s first moves was to kill off the BRIC program that Algiers has been using to begin mitigating its flooding problem. Congress created BRIC in the bipartisan Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018, which Trump signed in his first administration. The program was an outgrowth of reforms to FEMA in the aftermath of Katrina, and President Joe Biden’s administration infused another $1 billion into it in 2024 as part of his effort to address climate change.
Before Trump shut it down, BRIC had a national portfolio, poised to fund everything from tornado safe-rooms to earthquake detection systems to shoreline upgrades—most of which were designed to protect critical infrastructure like electricity and clean drinking water. But in April, FEMA stopped taking applications for 2024 BRIC grants and started canceling projects that were already on the books from 2020 to 2023—more than $4 billion in funding authorized by Congress.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/katrina-lower-ninth-ward-canal-expansion/
The Threat That Could Destroy 20 Years of Progress in the Lower Ninth
Past storms nearly erased New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. A new federal project may finish the job.
It is here where the US government is moving to restart a $4.7 billion canal reconstruction effort. This winter, on the heels of the 20th anniversary of Katrina and 68 years after the project was first approved by Congress in 1956, the US Army Corps of Engineers is expected to decide whether to seek funding for a plan to relocate the canal’s lock system, which transfers boats from the canal to the river and vice versa, and subsequently rebuild a portion of the canal’s flood protection system.
It would leave the city’s weakest flood defenses exposed for more than a decade and allow the Mississippi River—and its storm surges—to flow about a quarter of a mile deeper into the neighborhood. Supporters see it as a long‑delayed fix to a chokepoint vital to Gulf commerce; residents like Calhoun see years of disruption with uncertain protection and a fresh test of what “progress” means for Black families.
For decades, the construction had not moved forward due to sustained community opposition, environmental lawsuits, and shifting economic justification. (Over the last decade, the estimated cost has ballooned by $3.5 billion.)
But today, the Corps now finds itself in a more advantageous position. Lax environmental regulations, a steadily declining population, and the shifting priorities of federal policy have created fewer obstacles than ever before.
Yet even as blocks stayed empty and storefronts went dark, the region poured roughly $14.5 billion into a fortified rim of levees, gates, and pumps meant to keep surge from ever reaching the Industrial Canal and the Lower Nine again. The Army Corps has been in charge of projects that have strengthened levees, floodwalls, and seagates and built the world’s largest pump station and storm surge barriers.
But that system now faces a cut in federal funding and will no longer receive regular monitoring, leaving the city more vulnerable to unnoticed weaknesses and potential disaster.
Already, parts of the new flood system are sinking by as much as 2 inches per year. Standing on the floodwall system in August, Calhoun could fit his finger through cracks in the slowly separating wall. The new project could worsen that decline. When levees settle unevenly, they crack, which weakens the city’s barrier against the fastest-rising sea levels in the United States.
The Corps knows this. “In New Orleans, you’re kind of building on pudding,” Ricky Boyett, a spokesperson for the Corps, said earlier this year. “If you build anything on that ground, it’s going to sink.”
Post a Comment
<< Home