Katrina broke New Orleans levees, but also an illusion about America: a retrospective

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I didn’t know I was driving into a requiem.

Nearly half a year after Hurricane Katrina made landfall and left hundreds of thousands of people displaced, and a still precisely unknown number of casualties over the course of its nine-day rampage, I was staying at the Algiers, La., home of my Uncle Leonard and my Aunt Anne.

Katrina had just torn through the Gulf Coast like it had a score to settle. My first book, about child soldiers and war-affected children, came out just before it hit, and I was still internally transitioning from a focus on war and crisis abroad to America’s own versions of those phenomena.

I should have been celebrating. Instead, I was in a car with legendary photojournalist Stanley Greene and his young assistant, driving east from New Orleans to Tallahassee, tracing the wreckage.

We were a strange trio. He only seemed to wear black leather, silver rings, and a bandana even in the extreme Southern heat and humidity, like armor. She was pretty, blonde, quiet, camera always ready, and eyes wide with the kind of innocence that I didn’t think would endure in that environment.

And me? Thirtysomething, emotionally drained, and in denial about being traumatized from my experiences in reporting on the lives of children in war zones.

We stayed with my uncle and aunt in Algiers, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. Algiers was quiet, but not untouched. The air smelled like rot and resignation. Most nights, I would step outside into the front yard, watching; listening; smelling the thick, damp air. The atmosphere wasn’t peaceful. It was the kind of silence that follows screaming.

Stanley and I, with his assistant in tow, first ventured into the historic New Orleans neighborhood of Treme, and later the infamous Ninth Ward. Eventually, we drove through Mississippi to Bay St. Louis, and on to small, rural villages in Alabama before reaching Mobile, through to Georgia and the Florida Panhandle. Two decades later, I often reflect on the towns whose names I’ve forgotten, but whose faces of the inhabitants I can’t.

After a week of crisscrossing New Orleans, stopping for Stanley to capture images and for me to grab quotes or invest more meaningful time with kids playing in front yards without actual houses, we began a weeks’ long journey on Highway 90 to document the swath of Katrina’s footprints across five states. Our stops were intermittent, without specific destinations in mind, grabbing something to eat during the daytime at familiar names, including Cracker Barrel, Waffle House, or Hardee’s — places where grief sat heavy in the booths and the coffee tasted like burnt hope. We met people who had lost everything. Black and Brown folks mostly, but many poor whites, too. The kind of people America forgets until it’s time to count bodies.

Hurricane Katrina famously broke the levees in New Orleans, but also an illusion about America.

An American failure

August 25, 2025. Hurricane Katrina first made landfall near North Miami Beach as a Category 1 storm, with winds of up to 80 miles per hour. By the time it reached Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, on August 29, 2005, it had escalated to Category 3 with a maximum velocity of 130 miles per hour. The levees in Louisiana failed due to the strong winds but also the lack of maintenance, which officials had been warned about for years. The Lower Ninth Ward drowned. More than 1,800 dead. Maybe more; we still don’t know. There’s no memorial. No list of names. Just silence. Just absence.

One site in New Orleans remains tragic, a haunting emblem of the worst failures in disaster preparation and the specific response to Hurricane Katrina: the Superdome — home field of the New Orleans Saints. The day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, then-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin had publicly identified the Superdome as a “shelter of last resort, for those residents unable to self-evacuate.”

Approximately 10,000 people entered the structure on August 28, 2005, the total number local and regional authorities had predicted. By the time Superdome occupants were transported out three days later, the number was shy of 30,000 people. Toilets overflowed, drinking water wasn’t readily available, trash overflowed. A drastically overwhelmed power system in the Superdome failed, compromising air conditioning, refrigeration for food storage, and the plumbing. Violence erupted in the chaos. People died, waiting, from dehydration, heatstroke, or pre-existing medical conditions.

Outside, the choices were even less appealing.

When the levees succumbed to the rage of Katrina on August 29, 2005, 80% of New Orleans flooded, making it by far the worst major city throughout the Gulf Coast. Thousands of families, elderly residents, children and their caregivers ascended to the highest ground around — their rooftops and attics.

The troubled federal response resulted in one of the largest civilian rescues in history, with more than 30,000 people plucked to safety by the U.S. Coast Guard, National Guard, FEMA, and Louisiana’s Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, as well as private citizens by helicopter and boat, between three and five days after Katrina’s landfall. Of the confirmed 1,400 people who perished, many died on rooftops and attics, but the total number of people who died in the storm itself, and the aftermath — across the Gulf Coast — remains unknown.

Throughout the storm and the weeks that followed, onlookers — politicians, the media, and civilians — had cast the survivors desperate for food, water, and medicines, for themselves and their loved ones, as “looters.” Bitterly, it was no surprise when the Danziger Bridge shooting took place on Sept. 4 — New Orleans police opened fire on unarmed Black civilians. Two dead. Four wounded. One was mentally disabled. The cops planted a gun. Lied. Got convicted. Some got off.

This wasn’t just a natural disaster. It was a man-made failure. A betrayal. The government let New Orleans down. Let the Gulf Coast down. Let Black America down, again.

Amidst the finger-pointing that inevitably followed, rapper Kanye West blurted out during a televised fundraiser for the victims: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” while Mike Myers just stood there, stunned. The moment wasn’t just viral. It was prophetic.

Treme was gutted. One of the oldest Black neighborhoods in the country, and it was treated like an afterthought. More than 8,000 HIV-positive people were displaced across the Gulf Coast. The South already carried half the nation’s AIDS cases. Katrina made sure the burden got heavier.

Bay St. Louis was obliterated. Boats in trees. Homes split open like fruit. A woman stood in front of what used to be her house, holding a photo album warped by water. She didn’t cry. She didn’t speak. She just stared.

In Alabama, outside Mobile, we found a house draped in Confederate flags and military memorabilia. The war photographer — whom I grew to love and respect in our month-plus journey together — didn’t flinch. “Even here,” he would later note in an interview, “the storm didn’t discriminate. But the recovery will.”

My father’s country

Whenever I think about Louisiana, New Orleans, the South, and the span of the Gulf Coast, I can’t help thinking about my father. During my trip across the Gulf Coast to document the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, all I saw was his face.

He grew up in Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley,” one of nine siblings, raised by a single mother who picked cotton and did whatever else she could do for her children to survive. Enlisting in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War bought him a ticket out of crushing poverty, and Jim Crow racism, but he never forgot the family he left behind.

Most spring breaks and summers in my childhood growing up in Missouri, he would take me along on the day-long drive from St. Louis to New Orleans on I-55 in his mint-condition Trans Am T-Bird. The heat was initially suffocating, but I soon enough was running around outside with my seemingly countless cousins and extended family in New Orleans and “the country.”

Some of the fondest memories of my life include eating ice-cold watermelon, collard greens with bacon, ham hocks, candied yams, fried catfish, steaming hot chicken with gravy, macaroni or spaghetti, with a canned soda — usually grape — from someone’s cooler. I was fascinated when watching my father and uncles cast nets into the ocean for shrimp, or coming back to my grandmother’s house with a bucket of crawfish after an afternoon trek into the woods for a swim in the river, or sloshing through some creek.

Not sure how old I was, but the most cherished visit to New Orleans was for the centennial birthday of my great-grandmother, the daughter of a slave owner, whose mind was as clear as a bell.

I didn’t understand the weight nor importance of that legacy then.

When I got older and went off to college in Georgia, he’d drive me down, at times detouring through the Gulf Coast while listening on the cassette deck to blues musicians like Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim, and scores of others who created the rhythm of the South. After college, it was well over a decade since I had gone down South, gone to Louisiana, New Orleans, the “country.” I didn’t really “hear” the rhythm or the lives behind what those blues musicians were singing about … until Hurricane Katrina. The storm called me back.

Ghosts of the Bayou

During my weeks on the road as part of a truly motley trio (two Black men and a white woman), we encountered survivors who still hadn’t seen a FEMA trailer, hadn’t heard from the Red Cross, were still only eating irregularly.

There’s no memorial listing the names of the total number of lives lost from Katrina. No National Day of Mourning. Just silence. Just absence. Just the occasional photo — boats in trees, homes split open, bodies covered in sheets on sidewalks. Just the occasional story — of a mother who lost her children, of a nurse who stayed behind, of a man who drowned in his attic.

The media moved on. The country moved on. But the Gulf Coast didn’t. It still carries the weight. It still hears the water.

There are no monuments to the migrant workers who rebuilt the city unpaid. No plaques for the families who buried loved ones in backyards. No statues for the nurses who stayed behind.

Katrina didn’t just expose broken levees. It exposed a broken country. A country where nonwhite lives remain disposable, or are used as political props. Where poor lives are invisible. Where disaster can be profitable. Like a scab pulled from bruised skin, it revealed a truth we knew but can’t say out loud. As a country, we remain unable to face ourselves, who we are, what we’ve done, from where we came. In the Superdome. On Danziger Bridge. In the Lower Ninth Ward. In Bay St. Louis, and the forgotten towns along the Gulf in Alabama, Georgia, Florida.

Highway 90 still runs like a scar across the Gulf Coast. It’s a road of ruin and resilience. Of forgotten towns and unforgettable pain. Driving it in 2005 was like tracing the contours of a wound.

I was in Tallahassee when I got the call, just shy of a month on the road. My erstwhile companions stayed behind, continuing their documentary work. I remember the flight alone back to New Orleans, to pick up my bags, notebooks, and equipment at my family’s home in Algiers. The clouds looked bruised. The descent felt like falling into grief. My father was dying of lung cancer.

Twenty years later, he’s gone, as well as his seven brothers, most from cancer; only my aunt survives. I think about that journey often. About Stanley Greene, who passed in 2017. About the quotes and stories that have steadily blended together and faded, of individual and collective loss, disbelief, but also resilience and survival.

If another storm comes, will we be ready? Will we count the dead? Will we remember? Or will we drive on, past the wreckage, past the flags, past the ghosts — hoping the road leads somewhere past the loss, past the legacy of pain.

Jimmie Briggs is a Baltimore-based writer and lecturer. His 2005 book “Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War” took readers into the everyday lives of child combatants in Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Uganda, and Rwanda.