The Next Storm: Lessons From Katrina

For a kid that grew up in the bitter cold of Massachusetts, going to college in New Orleans provided all kinds of education. The steamy Big Easy was worlds apart from everything I had known. In New Orleans, you sweat the jambalaya, not the weather. Tulane University taught me a lot about the world; New Orleans taught me how to live in it. It was a fantastic place to go to school. 

I was living in New York City when Hurricane Katrina hit. Even with thousands of miles between us, I felt nothing but sick and sad. Suddenly the carefree spirit that had defined the city for centuries gave way to the immediate horrors of levees breaking and desperate people on the move. I’ll never see the Superdome again without thinking of it as a refugee camp. It’s now ten years later, and the storm season is again upon us—so what have we learned?   

As Americans, we take particular pride in our decentralized system of government; the founding fathers meant for us to balance federal power with “state’s rights,” not simply because that was fair but because it was a source of political and economic dynamism. In a country as large and diverse as ours, state and local governments play crucial roles that Washington can’t or shouldn’t. But one of the most terrifying aspects of Katrina—both for the people in Louisiana forced to flee their communities and for Americans watching at home—was the abject failure of every level of government in dealing with Katrina. The Mayor of New Orleans waited until Katrina was less than 24 hours away before evacuating the city; New Mexico’s National Guard wasn’t authorized to assist emergency efforts until five days after the hurricane hit. President George W. Bush remarked that New Orleans had “dodged a bullet” a full day after Katrina ravaged the city. None of our elected leaders was able to comprehend the totality of the devastation Katrina wrought. Their incompetence and inaction compounded the hardships that the people of New Orleans faced at a time when they needed leadership.      

More storms are coming. Climate change makes this a certainty—according to the World Meteorological Organization, natural disasters (floods, storms, droughts and heat waves) are already occurring at five times the rate they were in the 1970s. These events are also increasing in severity; natural disasters were 5.5 times more costly on average than they were in the 1970s. Katrina is estimated to have cost roughly $150 billion in damages. Even worse is that in the last 40 years, natural disasters have claimed the lives of 2 million people.  

Faced with disasters of this scale, government can’t go it alone. We need to invest in public-private partnerships to build the resilience we’ll need, come what may. There are so many different organizations and NGO’s out there doing terrific work already, and we need to find some way to bring them into the fold. This will mean better coordination by federal officials. The traditional government-dominated approach just isn’t enough. 

Katrina taught us to be better prepared—but New Orleans taught me, and anyone who had the good fortune of living there, how to take joy in the simpler things in life. We all carry the spirit of the city wherever we go, and we always will. New Orleans is a resilient place—and resilience is exactly what America will need in years to come.

(Photos h/t: Expert Infantry, Infrogmation of New Orleans, Mark Gstohl)