The program is easy to use
The program is user-friendly and simple to operate. improve the levee system in the area but by 2005 that project was still incomplete and the levees were still not up to the standard they needed to be in order to protect the city from a storm like Katrina
I’m Clint Smith and this is Crash Course Black American History. As many of you know, I was born and raised in New Orleans, a city that is in my heart and soul, and that made me who I am today.
In 2005, when I was 17 years old, I was looking forward to my final year of high school: homecoming, prom, Friday night football games, and celebrating college acceptances with my friends. But it didn’t turn out that way. On August 28, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans and I, along with my family, evacuated to Houston, Texas.
I still remember the long journey, surrounded bumper-to-bumper by hundreds of thousands of people trying to flee the city. When we arrived in Houston, I watched CNN as the grocery store we used to shop, the church we used to attend, and the school I used to go to were all submerged underwater. We later got a call that our home was destroyed. It’s hard to express what that moment felt like, and in many ways I’m still trying to find the right words to express it.
Hurricane Katrina impacted my family, friends, and me in profound ways. It’s important to remember that this history is not just an abstraction or a scholarly exercise, but something that impacted and continues to impact the lives of real people.
Hurricane Katrina was also a moment that further demonstrated how racism is not just interpersonal, but systemic. It’s not just someone using a racial slur, but the failure of a government to invest in and protect a community of disproportionately poor and black people who have been susceptible to a disaster like this for decades.
On August 23, 2005, a tropical depression formed over the Bahamas and quickly transformed into Hurricane Katrina. Government leaders across the Gulf States began telling people that they needed to evacuate quickly, but for a range of reasons (lack of transportation, cost, illness, mobility, and personal choice) at least 100,000 people did not evacuate and were left stranded as the storm hit.
At first, there was hope that at least in New Orleans, the worst of it had been avoided, but then the levees around the city and elsewhere across the Gulf region began to fail, causing massive flooding. Over 50 levees and flood walls were breached, resulting in over $100 billion in damage. This left many people frustrated because the flooding came not only from the storm, but from the failure of human engineering. This failure had fatal consequences for thousands and impacted the lives of millions.
A June 2007 report by the American Society of Civil Engineers indicated that two-thirds of the flooding was caused by the multiple failures of the city’s flood walls. We must learn more about levees and how racism can turn an engineering issue into something more sinister. The effects of racism in New Orleans had a devastating impact on the people of the city during Hurricane Katrina. Historical segregation, housing segregation, racial and restrictive covenants, and other forms of discrimination had been designed to keep Black Americans from moving into safer, higher elevation areas. This meant that when the storm hit, those living in the lowest elevations and near the most unstable parts of the levees - which were often inhabited by Black and lower-income folks - bore the brunt of the flooding.
Many of the poorest residents were unable to evacuate as they did not have cars, money, or places to stay outside of New Orleans. The only way they could possibly evacuate was by walking, but they were met with the threat of violence when they did. For example, when people tried to cross the Crescent City Connection bridge to the nearby suburbs, they were met by armed police officers who forced them to turn back and, in some cases, fired their weapons over their heads. At the Danziger bridge, police officers shot and killed two unarmed civilians and seriously injured four others.
Due to these factors, many of the poorest residents were stranded, at risk of death, and traumatized by their experiences. With the streets becoming increasingly flooded, some parts of the city were up to 20 feet deep. Up to 85 percent of the city was underwater and people had to wait on the roofs of their homes in the hope of being rescued. In the end, it is estimated that between 1,000 and 4,000 people lost their lives, mostly to drowning. This makes Hurricane Katrina the deadliest hurricane since 1928. Many survivors of Hurricane Katrina ended up permanently displaced and moved to cities such as Mobile, Alabama; Houston, Texas; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; and Chicago, Illinois. Over 1 million people across the Gulf Coast were displaced and resettled elsewhere.
The narrative around Hurricane Katrina was that New Orleans and Louisiana as a whole were unprepared for this disaster, and there was a lot of finger pointing. Mayor Ray Nagin was blamed for not evacuating the city earlier, for the lack of a clear plan, or for not anticipating the obstacles that existed for low-income people who wanted to evacuate but couldn’t. Nagin pointed his finger at the federal government for designing the levees so poorly, and also said that the government was very slow to respond and incompetent in helping New Orleans residents.
Others attributed the lack of urgency to the fact that the victims of the storm were largely poor and black. New Orleans was a majority black city and nearly 30 percent of the city lived in poverty. African-American political leaders stated that when hurricanes have hit predominantly white cities like Palm Beach, Florida, the federal government has moved extremely quickly in its response, whereas in New Orleans, even a year and a half after the hurricane, much of the city had not been rebuilt and many neighborhoods, like the predominantly black Ninth Ward, were still in ruins for years.
When help finding shelter did come, it came in the form of unstable government trailers that were often filled with toxic levels of formaldehyde. Ultimately, the debacle had a range of political consequences. The director of FEMA, Michael D. Brown, was viewed by many as unsuited for his duties and was forced to resign. The New Orleans Police Department superintendent was also forced to resign, and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco did not run for re-election in 2007. 17 years later, the events of Hurricane Katrina still remain in the minds of many. The storm left thousands of black Americans destitute, displaced and dead. The demographic landscape of the city was forever changed as well, with many of the black families who had lived in the city for generations unable to afford to move back and rebuild. The process of gentrification was supercharged, with younger white Americans possessing the means that many black New Orleans families did not.
The Army Corps of Engineers were held liable for the worst parts of the damage in the Lower Ninth Ward and Saint Bernard Parish. This was the first time that a specific government agency was held liable for Hurricane Katrina flooding.
The events of Katrina made clear the interconnectedness of racism, economic inequality and climate change. Awareness of these challenges seems to be on the rise, yet it is rare that they are considered in tandem. Climate change is impairing the ability of the Army Corps of Engineers to produce safe environments for residents of places like New Orleans, and it is largely the smaller, previously colonized islands and low-lying coastal regions that will be disproportionately impacted by the increasing frequency and ferocity of storms.
The legacy of Hurricane Katrina is still relevant nearly two decades later, and it serves as a warning of what can result from this dangerous cocktail of issues.