When I drove into New Orleans 20 years ago, crossing the Huey P. Long Bridge just a few days after the levee broke, I gripped the steering wheel of my van, suddenly awash in a sense of dizzying unease.
I was at the time a freelance stringer with a byline labeled “Special to the Monitor.” I happened to have a newborn at home and a head full of self-doubt. And at that moment, I wasn’t sure about the enormity of this particular assignment.
It’s different now, as I head back to New Orleans ahead of the 20th anniversary of that historic storm, looking to chronicle the growth that has taken place since that disaster threatened to wash away the soul of this vibrant city. I’m following some of the paths I took when covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, remembering that time, those scenes.
Why We Wrote This
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina threatened to snuff out the spirit of New Orleans. Two decades later, our reporter and photographer chronicle the city’s healing journey.
Twenty years after that catastrophe, New Orleans’ larger recovery has been a complicated story of progress, ongoing challenges, and missed opportunities.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
It was still a lawless city when I arrived in 2005. As dark descended and I settled into my van for the night, so did fear. Rumors abounded – most outrageous, but some not far from the truth about the human toll. About 1,800 people are believed to have perished during Katrina and its aftermath, most from the storm surge in Mississippi and catastrophic flooding in New Orleans. The most expensive natural disaster in United States history, it caused over $200 billion in damage.
I didn’t intend to be a storm rider, a reporter who embeds within natural disasters and writes about the communities they affect. I live in the hurricane-prone South, so proximity was part of how I got the gig. At the same time, it’s true I’m naturally inclined to bare-bones living in remote places.
Colleagues laugh about the various live-aboard vans I’ve guided through gathering clouds and flooded bayous. I often prefer to stay in my van, even when I can expense a hotel. Monitor photographer and friend Melanie Stetson Freeman, who goes by Mel, has the same question every time she sees a new old van: Does it have a name? No, I always chuckle.
There’s a picture of me from that time, kneeling in a collared shirt, grinning ear to ear after I joined others in a salvaged skiff with an outboard motor. I was accompanying rescuers looking for people and animals still stranded in the sunken parts of New Orleans. At one point, we pulled an older woman on board after she struggled to forge forward in chest-deep water toward safety. It’s confusing in some ways, to see that grin. I remember the emotional rush, but it takes a toll.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
That sense of unease I felt crossing the rusted span of the Huey P. Long Bridge seemed to become a recurring acquaintance. For a long time after that, every time I crossed a large bridge I felt like I was going to tip over.
Communities reemerge, but they reemerge differently. People search for what once was – a piece of flatware, a boat transom, a bent-up old .22 rifle. Or an old guitar. They drag the past from the wreckage and use it to imagine the future.
This year, I’ve brought my Guild A-20 dreadnought guitar, my road companion. I’m realizing that this reporting trip is also to build a connection across the decades – maybe one as rickety and rusty as that old Huey Long – and to see the effects on communities and people, including myself, and how they recover.
These days I take the low-to-the-water Interstate 10 bridge into New Orleans from Slidell. I’m driving the gray hulk of my 2008 Chevy Express, which is now surpassing 300,000 miles. But this time I am staying in a rental, a shotgun-style short-term place near the Tremé, the city’s iconic music district.
I go to a nearby coffeehouse the next morning, where schoolkids in uniforms are already plinking away standards on a well-tuned upright piano. Wrens are cajoling amid the Magnolia grandiflora. I sip chicory-infused coffee and chat with the shop owner about a day that’s dawning with surprising coolness.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Afterward, I find a great, steep stoop from where I can less watch but rather consider the city. I grab my Guild and sit down, strum some cowboy chords in B major, and noodle some lines from my reporter’s notebook: “She’s an angel, even when she’s falling down / She’s an angel, in the wrong part of town.”
As I hum, children on their way to school walk by. One is carrying a tuba. A girl smiles up at me and says, “Sounds good.”
The lasting impact of Hurricane Katrina
Brian Belknap traded a guitar for a life in New Orleans.
The Chicago native arrived a decade ago, well after the ravages of Katrina. Like so many before him, he fell for the languid city’s slow charms. With little money, he lived on the streets for a while, busking for change. But then he traded his 1942 Martin D-18 for a battered shotgun shack in St. Roch. (This 1942 Martin acoustic model is known as the “Elvis guitar.” Elvis Presley’s personal version sold for a record $1.32 million at auction in 2020.)
Every day, Mr. Belknap walks into the French Quarter in the early, cooler parts of the day, setting up the instruments that now make up his One Man Swamp Band on Royal Street.
“There’s still desperation here,” Mr. Belknap says. “But out here it’s an intimate experience. The people are close. The music is everywhere. Even in hard times, the sense of joy is unmistakable.”
To punctuate that point, he grabs an accordion, gives a kick on a high hat pedal, and rolls into an original song about folks stomping the varnish off a dance floor.
Though he’s not a native, in some ways Mr. Belknap’s presence here is a small part of New Orleans’ recovery. The city lost a third of its population after the hurricane. But it has been bouncing back – though not to what it was before Katrina.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
There’s a new $15 billion system of levees, floodgates, and drainage canals built to better withstand storms like Katrina. The public school system, among the worst in the country before 2005, has been revamped. Today, graduation rates have risen significantly, and more New Orleans high schoolers are going straight to college than before.
But the city continues to grapple with the lasting impacts of the initial federally funded rebuilding plan, called Road Home. Over $9 billion in federal funds was allocated for residents to rebuild – but within a tangle of Byzantine application procedures. Disbursements, too, were based on property values before Katrina struck. This left mostly Black, low-income residents with far less to rebuild, and long-standing racial disparities continue today.
“Katrina in many ways reshaped the way we think about vulnerability in disasters,” says Jeannette Sutton, a sociologist who studies emergency preparedness at the State University of New York at Albany. Road Home and other programs, she says, have proved that “If you were poor before a disaster, the disaster [response] is not going to improve your well-being. If you were barely getting by before, you’re not going to be better off with the funding in the aftermath. But those who could ‘afford’ a disaster are probably going to recover pretty well.”
Gentrification has also changed the flavor of New Orleans in many ways. The city continues to debate limiting short-term and highly profitable tourist rentals – like the one I’m staying in – which create a demand for housing and cause other rents to rise. The checkerboard of empty lots in the hard-hit Lower Ninth Ward, too, still defines many of the failures of the federal rebuilding plan.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
“There’s no handbook of how to navigate Hurricane Katrina or something devastating on that level,” says Bill Taylor, executive director of the Trombone Shorty Foundation, which helps train young musicians and teach them about New Orleans’ musical history. “But a lot of us figured, hey, there’s a lot of work to do; it seems like this culture that we all love is in jeopardy because the city went silent. What do we do to bring it back?”
His foundation has grown from an idea to a bridge organization, he says, using the traditions that came before Katrina to rebuild a city still leaning on its vibrant culture of art and vice, desperation and exhilaration.
“It’s funny how these words came out of the Katrina experience: culture keeper, culture bearer,” Mr. Taylor says. “Those are the people that make the city so special. That’s why people fall in love with New Orleans, because of those who create and uphold the culture – the Indian chiefs, the brass band musicians, the funk and jazz musicians. Everybody in their own way tried to get back to be part of the rebuilding experience.”
Art as a catalyst for change
Liz LeFrere was 8 years old, living in New Orleans East, when Katrina struck. She thought she’d miss a day or two of school. Four months later, the family returned to live in the broken city, since her father was a police officer.
Ten years ago, when she was a student at Tulane, the campus flooded on Aug. 29 – the Katrina anniversary. Ms. LeFrere broke down in uncontrollable tears. “It came out of nowhere,” she says. “It’s definitely part of a communal trauma.”
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Yet the storm’s indelible impact also created a new life for her. Today, Ms. LeFrere is part of an artist collective dedicated to understanding Katrina and its aftermath through art – including massive portrait murals that now dot and define the city.
Artists like Ms. LeFrere are committed to telling a tangibly redemptive story. “The art is where expression can be a catalyst for change,” she says. The murals “help create a sense of people seeing themselves reflected in the face of the city. The narrative of New Orleans expanded.”
A Waffle House shrouded in hurricane lore
Mel and I are driving out of New Orleans toward Baton Rouge, sharing memories of a similar drive we took 20 years ago.
Back then, we were hoping to land an interview with then-Gen. Russel Honoré, who had gained fame as the no-nonsense leader of New Orleans recovery efforts. On this spring day two decades later, we’re heading to an interview we’ve already scheduled with him.
Somewhere near the town of Gonzales, we look for a Waffle House shrouded in our personal hurricane lore. The Southern breakfast chain is well known for its smothered hash browns, but for storm riders it has also long served as a gauge of a storm’s severity: If the Waffle House is closed, then you’ve got real problems.
But the particular restaurant we’re looking for now was a refuge for Mel and me. We would sit, eat, and talk about the day and what we had seen. It was a simple, necessary slice of normalcy amid the destruction we were witnessing. It was the first time we covered a storm together, and we hardly knew then that we’d keep covering them for the next two decades.
Everything looks different. Much of the recovery money that came from Washington was funneled into the suburbs along this drive – more malls and parking lots have cropped up. It’s strange to see so much concrete in the bayou.
When we finally find a Waffle House, we realize after sitting down that it’s not the same one.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
In 2005, we had just covered events at the New Orleans Convention Center, where masses of people milled in the middle of an airlift. Soldiers with M16s leaned lazily against lampposts as bedraggled women, men, and children, many just holding bags of their only belongings, lined up to be airlifted and flown to some other place with a functioning society – Houston; Atlanta; maybe Birmingham, Alabama.
After reporting on the airlift, Mel and I left for Baton Rouge, where we retreated for a night. Then we headed to Camp Shelby on the off chance of snagging an interview with General Honoré, who was already becoming known to survivors as the savior of New Orleans. He had famously told New Orleans police to “Put those damn weapons down!” and instead focus their efforts on rescue and relief rather than on perceived threats.
State and federal authorities were also bungling the initial recovery effort. It was slow and poorly coordinated, and officials could not make important decisions in a timely manner, even as existing emergency plans proved both inadequate and inefficient.
When we arrived at the gate of Camp Shelby in Mississippi, we didn’t know what to expect. An Army communications specialist said she’d see what she could do. She returned to say the general would see us – in the morning. We were assigned bunks in nearby barracks.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
The next morning, we met General Honoré, a native son of Louisiana, who was standing in the reddening dawn as helicopter blades cut through the air. He wore a tilted beret and a determined smile as he gathered staff and turned his attention toward the pair of reporters.
As I asked him about the plans to secure the city, he started talking about the unique nature of the storm. Then, in a moment I’ll always remember as a reporter, he suddenly grabbed my notebook and pen and started scribbling, drawing a battle map of Katrina’s “perfect attack.”
His hand-drawn map was rudimentary and messy, but it still stuns me. It’s a snapshot of truth, a cultural memento in a reporter’s notebook, and I’ve had it framed.
We drive to a horse farm on the outskirts of Baton Rouge. General Honoré is sitting on a small porch. He greets us, and later points out his chestnut sire, Old Red, in the paddock.
The six weeks he spent in New Orleans after Katrina defined his career, and much of his life afterward. What stays with him are, yes, the rows of body bags. But 80% of those who perished in Katrina, he says, were alone: old, homeless, or simply isolated from others.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Then he once again grabs my notebook and starts scribbling another rough map, illustrating some of the same failures he saw during the recovery efforts in western North Carolina last year after Hurricane Helene. Helicopters sent to help failed to launch at critical moments.
“When it comes to disaster recovery, very little is working right,” says General Honoré. “But one thing that is working is that we are learning to assign value to what culture means for storm recovery. … It’s become clear that the people who deserve the real credit for the recovery of New Orleans are the street people.”
The ocean-side Victorian houses are gone
Of the 11 communities hit by Katrina in Mississippi, the town of Waveland has been the slowest to recover. The small, Gulf-front town was almost destroyed by Hurricane Camille in 1969.
When Mel and I first went to Waveland after Katrina, we came upon an apocalyptic scene – acres and acres of empty slabs where houses used to be. But on those slabs, people were already erecting tents. RVs pulled in. And from across the U.S., hundreds came to help, including church groups and other volunteers.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff/File
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
“It was strange,” says Bryan Frater, a resident who returned the day after the hurricane. “If there is a tornado in Oklahoma, I don’t think to run up there to help. But here came all these people. And they stayed for a long time.”
He and his wife, Beverly, found that their house, which they had just finished building the week before Katrina struck, was completely washed away. “You stand there on the slab and you feel sorry for yourself, and you want to cry about it and you do. But then you look around and realize that everyone is experiencing the same thing.”
In some ways, much of Waveland had been a playground for the upper middle class, and it was full of second homes for wealthier New Orleans residents. Ornate Victorians, home-hewn furniture, and wooden boats helped define the lifestyle – as well as its tourist beaches and catfish joints.
Ms. Frater remembers how a “slab culture” also grew up in the community after Hurricane Camille. Locals would visit and hang out where houses once stood, fish together, and congregate at the Catholic church on Sundays.
This time, “Not everyone has returned,” she says. “Since a lot of people had to deal with homes that were also damaged in New Orleans, it has taken a while. Some just couldn’t do it.”
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
To streamline ongoing efforts, the Federal Emergency Management Agency no longer requires a clear title for people to qualify for rebuilding monies, just a document to show legal residency. New flood maps guide flood insurance policies. Thus, homes are perched “in the trees,” as Ms. Frater says.
But the town lost much of its home values and thus its tax revenues. Despite organized state efforts to rebuild, Waveland continues to struggle, even though monuments and institutions, including the Ground Zero Hurricane Museum, mark the new Waveland.
“Yes, the old Victorians are gone and the new houses are mostly just boxes, because it’s so expensive to build,” Ms. Frater says. “And the truth is, another Katrina would wipe us off the map again. But I still love it here. It’s still a great community. I don’t want to be anywhere else.”
A musical powerhouse who helped New Orleans rediscover its groove
My teen daughter recently joked, “Are you stalking Anders Osborne?”
I usually prefer the truth so I replied, “Maybe a little bit.”
Courtesy of Anders Osborne
I’m back home in Tybee Island, Georgia. I had really wanted to meet with Mr. Osborne when I was in New Orleans, an award-winning guitarist and songwriter whose oeuvre spans from muddy blues to zydeco. He’s a wily, magical powerhouse, whose bouts with trauma and addiction found healing through music.
His 17th and latest album, “Picasso’s Villa” – perhaps a stand-in for his own sun-splashed abode near Bayou St. John – hums less with regret than with reminiscence, how the darkness of his experiences in America resolves into light.
As a familiar-feeling stranger, he as well as his music holds a mirror to my experience. When my wife threw my old Gretsch guitar off our porch in anger – the one with the worn stickers from when our daughter was a toddler – it felt like a line out of an Osborne song. So did how I got its severed neck repaired – and then, intending a lighthearted joke, put it under the tree at Christmas. After I opened that present to myself, it wasn’t very funny, it turned out.
Mr. Osborne’s publicist had offered me a face-to-face interview two days after I was set to leave. And when he calls me a week later, I get caught in fanboy mode, rambling on.
Finally, he interrupts. “Is there a question I can answer?”
His life story is intricately entwined with New Orleans, and he vividly recounts his experiences. It was here, he explains, where he found camaraderie and foolishness, love and pain. But after Katrina, he found new purpose.
“It was at a scale that, what you’re looking at, it’s not that it’s flooding, it’s everything that you stand on,” says Mr. Osborne, a suggestion of Norse in the words. “It’s your past, high schools, grocery stores, post office, smiling neighbors, the street, colors, temperature, humidity, dialect, every nuance of the personality identity that you have created in this beautiful illusionary life.
Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
“Now all that has been taken away from you, from all of us, who no longer have any of that to stand on. It wasn’t just despair. It was trauma, a complete elimination of who you thought you were. The question was not, Where are we going to move? The question was, How am I going to go on now?”
He had the answer in his hand. His big Gibson J-45 guitar had made it through the storm.
Almost immediately, his guitar made some of the first celebratory noises in the city. Part of a group of perhaps 2,000 musicians, artists, and various cultural accomplices, they gathered a small band every weekend at a joint on Magazine Street. National Guard members tapped toes along with survivors as the generator-fueled electric chords flew out the front door.
Those sessions became the first flashes of resurgence – a glimpse of understanding and meaning that gave form to what would come.
“The music was where we all rallied,” Mr. Osborne says. “We needed it to just kind of have that as our central focal point where we could see each other, touch each other, cry together, laugh together.”
