In September 2005, I remember watching the approach of Hurricane Katrina with a wary eye; just a year before, my own area had been savaged by Hurricane Ivan. I had no desire to live through that again, especially now that I was working in a glass factory. As luck would have it, Katrina wandered steadily west, and we were largely spared — but the TV images of the aftermath have stuck with me for twenty years, especially people stranded on the interstates and parking lots full of flooded busses that could have been used in evacuations. Last week was the 20th anniversary of Katrina’s landfall, and I figured it was high time I read this history — which I’ve been eying for at least fifteen years. It was published very quickly after the storm itself, and does not pretend to be an impartial history in the least. It’s instead written with teeth bared, with specific targets like Ray Nagin in mind. Its transparent passion serves the narrative more than diminishing it, I think, recalling Americans’ horror and shame at seeing residents of a major city neglected — and their anger, too, as we realized many of the Guardsmen who could have been deployed were instead being uselessly shot at in Iraq.

As with San Francisco in 1906, the worst destruction came not from the disaster itself but from its aftermath. In San Francisco, fires consumed the city; in New Orleans, the levees cracked under stress, and the city filled like a muddy and increasingly toxic punchbowl. Faulty engineering played its part — some levees were old, neglected, or shoddily built — but government incompetence turned vulnerabilities into catastrophe. Confusion reigned over who was in charge. FEMA, which had handled several earlier storms that year, saw itself mainly as a coordinator: local officials requested aid, and FEMA matched them with public or private suppliers. That model collapsed when the city was cut off from the outside world, its bridges impassable, communications dead, and its mayor hiding in a hotel. (It didn’t help that for much of its early life, FEMA’s leadership was often staffed with political favorites of the reigning administration, disaster-response experience not required.) Florida’s officials, drilled by annual hurricanes, responded effectively; New Orleans, by contrast, hadn’t been hit hard in decades, and it showed. Evacuation was delayed until it was too late for many — even assuming the poor had the means to leave. Buses that could have saved lives were left idle and flooded, while the National Guard concentrated their forces in a zone directly in Katrina’s path. Governor Blanco handled things better at the state level, putting Fish & Wildlife into service and making sure they had boats stationed at diverse areas to better serve the people. As in subsequent disasters, the private sector also stepped up: Walmart poured resources into the area, and the “Cajun Navy” was born: that was a particular surprise for me, as I associated the name with the private rescue navy that erupted after Hurricane Harvey drowned Texas a few years back.

The problems only grew worse as the days ticked by: the people of New Orleans felt abandoned, and amid the heat and stress bad behavior grew all around. The first responders here were residents of New Orleans: they had lost their own homes, they were concerned about their own parents and children, and some like the police cracked under pressure, turning down their empathy toward those in need. Others deserted their posts, and some participated in criminal behavior themselves. It didn’t help that in the early hours opportunists began looting in earnest, behavior that grew to the point that the mayor redirected police attention from search and rescue to squelching the open theft that was taking place all over the city. This looting was not food and water , as criminal apologists would have it: one hardware store owner saw people trying to steal a washing machine before he and other business owners began defending their livelihoods with firearms A lot of the criminality wasn’t just opportunism, it was outright barbarism: stores were trashed (and desks defecated upon) for no reason other than that social norms had been disrupted. The criminal element was also defending its crimes, shooting at Coast Guard helos and the like who approached trying to bring aid — and they were industrious in their perverse way, breaking into one business’s vehicle yard, stealing its trucks, and using them to pick up stolen goods. There were still hope spots, though, like citizens taking it upon themselves to rescue those in danger, and the fact that most of the zoo’s 1500 animals survived: it helped that the Zoo had firm disaster-response plans in place.

This was a harrowing book to read, but informative. While I’d long heard of Katrina as a case study in mismanagement at every level, this account illustrates it vividly — from Mayor Nagin hiding in the Hyatt, to FEMA’s passivity and its director’s obsession with optics over action. The flood’s aftermath emerges here as a mix of nobility and savagery, though barbarism seems to have had the upper hand. That tension is one of the reasons I find reading about disasters so compelling — they lay bare the best and worst of human behavior at once. One hopes that both New Orleans and FEMA learned lessons from this and are more prepared for the next Big One, but given the abandonment of the mountain country during Hurricane Helene last year, I have my doubts about the feds at least.

Related:
Hurricane Katrina through the Eyes of Storm Chasers
Eye of the Storm: Inside City Hall During Katrina. This is far kinder to Nagin as one might expect, written by his comms director.