LouisianaHistory.info

This site is dedicated to those who lost their lives because of Hurricane Katrina. This site is also dedicated to those who lost their loved ones or their homes or their livelihoods because of the storm. Finally, the first responders and everyday neighbors who worked tirelessly and selflessly to help others are remembered and honored.

This site is a collection of links to the digital records of Hurricane Katrina. The work on this site was begun in 2020. Given the passage of over 16 years since the storm struck, one might wonder if further study of Katrina will bring additional insight. But, as recent news has shown, society consistently underestimates the likelihood of infrequent events. In a November 2021 New York Times article, author Steven Johnson wrote on the legacy of the COVID pandemic. He notes that his son’s generation has grown up with both proms and plagues, “There is a loss of innocence in that, but also a hard-earned realism: the knowledge that rare high-risk events like pandemics are not just theoretically possible but likely…” In finance, Nassim Taleb, a former professor and quantitative trader, focused his studies on low probability catastrophic events. In his book The Black Swan–The Impact of The Highly Improbable, Taleb define the term “Black Swan” as rare, unpredictable, but devastating occurrences. Examples of such events include the stock market crash of 1987 and the real estate panic of 2008. Black Swan events are infrequent, unexpected, and unplanned for. But to Taleb, the failure to plan is a costly mistake.

And, even when we do plan for such events, we fail to imaginatively envision what may occur. As will be discussed in future posts, state and local officials had years, if not decades, of explicit warnings of the precarious nature of New Orleans and coastal Louisiana. In 2002, the Times Picayune ran a series of prophetic articles entitled Washing Away. Each installment of the series detailed what might happen if “the big one” hit New Orleans. Just months after publication of that series, Tropical Storm Isidore hit New Orleans and although the damage was not severe, several critical infrastructure weaknesses were identified by the city of New Orleans but no action was taken. Similarly, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, one year before Katrina, ran a hurricane preparedness exercise to examine how government agencies would respond to a catastrophic storm. And just weeks before Katrina struck, LSU professors warned parish officials how geography and man-made navigation canals would focus storm waters directly at the city’s defenses. Despite this foreknowledge–city, state, and federal governments were woefully unprepared for what happened. The question becomes, why is that?

This site is intended to help historians, students, researchers, and others answer that question. KatrinaArchive.org has assembled links to hundreds of records that document the events leading up to the disaster we call Katrina. The links point to books, memoirs, legal decisions, expert reports, articles, videos, diaries, Congressional hearings, and more. These links are presented in the form of Timelines that are grouped by major periods. The Timelines begin as far back as the French founding of the city because the original siting of the city was critical to New Orleans’ economic development and environmental vulnerability. The Timelines also include events that detail the social, racial, and economic history of southern Louisiana because Katrina was much more than a weather event.

KatrinaArchives.org shows how private citizens and city, state, and federal officials responded to the storm. Through the actions of those who lived through Katrina and its aftermath, the site illustrates how these actors responded to the crisis, individually and in groups. It is in this sense that history is biography. The intention is to illustrate, not blame. 

Wendell Pierce, the New Orleans native son, activist, and actor in a Meet the Press interview given five years after the storm, expressed the importance of properly understanding Katrina. As he said, ”I think the thing you have to remember is…that the disaster lifted the veil of issues of race, of class, not only in this city, but in the country. If we’re to move past it…we can’t look at it through rose-colored glasses. It is not an indictment of any one person or whatever, it’s an indictment of us all…It’s easy to play the blame game, but I would rather take that energy and effort and let’s put solutions on the table.” Today, in the wake of Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and other recent social movements, the call to “lift the veil” on unspoken history is vital.

KatrinaArchives.org and its sister website LouisianaHistory.info present 7 groups of Timelines. The Colonial Period begins with the Indigenous presence in what we now call Louisiana and ends with the Louisiana Purchase in 1802. The American Period includes the enormous economic boom of the early 19th century, the explosive growth of slave labor, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the reversal of Reconstruction. The Modern Period records events from the beginning of the 20th Century up to the formation of a tropical depression that would become Hurricane Katrina. The Warnings period spans from 8/23/2005 to 8/28/2005 and chronicles the formation of and preparations for the storm. The Storm (8/29/2005 to 10/11/2005) spans from when Katrina made landfall in Louisiana to the draining of New Orleans. The clean up and recovery period is recorded on the Recovery page (10/12/2005 to 9/30/2015) and the Legacy page records Katrina related events from 10/1/2015 to the present.

KatrinaArchives Timelines:

Period                               Start                                      End
Colonial Period                      –                                  5/1/1802
American Period       5/2/1802                            12/31/1899
Modern Period          1/1/1900                               8/22/2005
Warnings                  8/23/2005                              8/28/2005
Storm                        8/29/2005                            10/11/2005
Recovery                 10/12/2005                              9/30/2015
Contemporary        10/1/2015                                        —

Users of this site are encouraged to review the About Page. Many simplifying but necessary assumptions have been made in the collection of these data. This site focuses on New Orleans and Louisiana, but six other states saw deaths because of the storm and countless municipalities all over the Gulf Coast were devastated. To make data collection more focused, this site has not collected data on these other areas despite their similar and equally tragic plight.

Finally, Katrina and its aftermath is not just an area of study. It is not an event to be taken lightly. Social commentator Melissa Harris-Perry reminds us of the import that is Katrina. In a Nation article that discussed the HBO series Treme and its treatment of Hurricane Katrina she writes:

Eighty percent of the city flooded when the levees failed. More than 1,500 people were killed. Tens of thousands were permanently displaced. Billions in property was lost. The levee failure caused by Katrina wiped away entire communities, irreparable damaging homes, schools, churches, and stores. It stole decades of family memories. It altered centuries of tradition in a matter of moments. It left a legacy of blight, economic devastation and personal suffering in its wake. Each time Katrina, whose fifth anniversary is on the oil-soaked horizon, is evoked as a political metaphor, we risk dangerous mediation of experience. These metaphors reduce catastrophe to an object lesson…But when we reduce Katrina to fiction–even really good fiction–we risk making it little more than a trope.

Katrina is not a trope. Although it may serve as a societal marker for government dysfunction or the indifference of racism, it was, at its core, a human and personal tragedy. History is biography. This site hopes to help preserve the records of those who experienced the storm in the hope that as a society, we can learn how ignoring the inevitable only serves to deepen its harm.