As the nation marks the 2oth anniversary of the historic catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina, two words resonate in my mind. The first is betrayal. The second is renewal.
While Katrina was one of the four most intense hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States, the monumental scope of death, devastation, and heartbreak it left behind was entirely man-made.
In August of 2005, I had been out of office about three years and had moved to New York to lead the National Urban League. I had attended a funeral in New Orleans two days before Katrina hit, and flew out just as people were starting to evacuate. When I turned on the television on Monday morning and Tuesday, and saw the people at the Convention Center and the Superdome suffering in the heat with no food, with no water, no medical provisions, and absent leadership, it was not only heartbreaking, it was shocking. It brought me to tears. It brought me to fury. And it did not need to be that way.
As powerful a force of nature as Katrina was, the wreckage she left in her wake was not primarily a result of the wind or the rain or the surging gulf, but the failure of improperly designed and constructed levees. The American Society of Civil Engineers called it the worst engineering catastrophe in U.S. history.
The failure of the levees flooded the city, leaving 80% of the city underwater — but incompetence and indifference at every level of government were more deadly than the flood.
The people I encountered as I made my way back to New York two days before the storm made landfall were those who had the means to fly away from the danger. Those without the means were abandoned. The image of a fleet of idle schoolbuses, which could have been used to carry people to safety, became a symbol of the city’s botched evacuation plan.
Those left behind waited — stranded on rooftops, crammed into unprepared and inadequate shelters, drifting on makeshift rafts; without food, water, medical supplies — for days on end.
Betrayal.
But even as my heart was breaking for my beloved city, I never doubted that the strength and spirit of its people could never be quenched.
Faced with unimaginable loss, the people of New Orleans gathered their loved ones who survived and mourned the ones who did not, rolled up their sleeves, and went to work on rebuilding the city they loved so dearly.
Renewal.
Even as their elected representatives failed them again and again, the people of New Orleans continued to fight for their city, eventually succeeding in the release of significant federal dollars for rebuilding the levees, their homes, and their communities. However, the path forward was difficult and fraught.
In the days after Katrina, I wondered if my hometown would become a modern-day Herculaneum or Pompeii, frozen forever in its destruction and never rebuilt. In fact, many thought that large portions of the city should not be rebuilt. They had a plan to ethnically cleanse New Orleans of its Black community.
But the people rose. They rose up against that plan, and that plan was defeated.
Today, New Orleans still suffers from its age-old challenges: poverty, racism, the education system. But the New Orleans of today is also a city whose one-of-a-kind culture — its music, its food, its celebrations — defines who it is and who it will always be. New Orleans is a city for the ages — not for yesterday or today, but forever.
Marc H. Morial was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002. He has served as president and CEO of the National Urban League, the nation’s largest historic civil rights organization, since 2003.