Nearly 20 years ago to the day, New Orleans fell victim to what became one of the deadliest, most expensive disasters the U.S. has ever known. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina approached the city of New Orleans with wind gusts topping 140 miles per hour, pushing storm surge water ahead of it. Though the storm hit as only a Category 3, the region’s faulty federal levees, built to protect a city partially below sea level, breached in more than 50 places.
Water surged through the streets, flooding 80% of the city, wrecking whole neighborhoods and forcing tens of thousands of people to shelter for several days in the Convention Center, which had not been supplied with food, water, or medicine, and in the Superdome, the city’s football stadium.
“The system as a whole broke down,” said Samantha Montano, an emergency management expert and co-founder of Disaster Researchers for Justice, who helped with recovery in New Orleans after the flooding.
Even as New Orleans marks the 20-year anniversary of one of the federal government’s greatest failures, close observers warn that recent FEMA changes could set the stage for history to repeat itself. The Trump administration’s cuts—the loss of expertise, the confusion over mission, the slowing of recovery funds—are recreating the exact same problems that immiserated New Orleans in 2005, experts say. With today’s short-staffed, unfocused FEMA, there is potential that even a modest hurricane, flood or fire could now turn tragic.
Official government rescue crews lagged at nearly every step in 2005. Though the Superdome was packed with people, buses did not arrive to evacuate the crowds until several days after the storm. Families spraypainted messages across their roofs as they waved their arms futilely at helicopters, while federal officials dragged their feet on rescue deployment, contributing to the death toll.
More than 1,300 people died as a result of the disaster. Some died from drowning; many others from neglect, stress, injuries, and heat in the flood’s aftermath. Altogether, the disaster we call Katrina wrought $161 billion worth of damage and displaced over a million people in one of the largest mass migration events the country has ever seen.
New Orleans, a city older than America, has not been the same since.
FEMA Failed, Then Learned from Lessons
Many of the deadly failures to deliver relief in those catastrophic first days have since been ascribed to Michael Brown, then the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Brown, a Bush appointee, had no background or qualifications in emergency management. He ignored dire warnings about conditions on the ground: while the highest-ranking FEMA official in New Orleans emailed him stressing that “many will die within hours,” the director was busy getting dinner at a restaurant.
Meanwhile, thousands of people were stranded at the Convention Center without food, water, or baby formula – but Brown did not know of the massive de facto shelter until a CNN newsperson told him about it on air.
For those who work in emergency management, Katrina remains a singular event, Montano said. “It was an instance where emergency managers specifically, and FEMA even more specifically, failed to respond to an event that we knew could happen,” she said.
On Monday, nearly 200 FEMA staff sent a signed letter to Congress raising this very alarm. The letter details how the Trump administration has been undoing safeguards created after Katrina, and seeks to warn “the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration.” The letter writers list six specific points that must be addressed “to prevent not only another national catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina, but the effective dissolution of FEMA itself and the abandonment of the American people.” On Tuesday evening, some of the employees who signed the letter were put onto administrative leave, the AP reported.
Over the last two decades, FEMA had developed better internal guidance and a more professionalized workforce, Montano said. Operations grew more effective and people were better trained.
While there was still much to improve, the agency had come a long way since its post-Katrina failures. “That changed very abruptly in January,” Montano said.
As Trump Suggests Elimination of FEMA, the Agency Bleeds People
Just days after Trump’s inauguration, the president suggested to a crowd recovering from Hurricane Helene that FEMA should be eliminated entirely. Then he and his administration began recreating many of the same vulnerabilities that left FEMA flatfooted in 2005.
A major one is staffing. Just as Michael Brown was inexperienced, current acting FEMA Director David Richardson has zero emergency management experience. After deadly flooding in Texas inundated communities along the Guadalupe River, it took Richardson more than a week to show up there, a delay that Montano called “incomprehensible.”
“I would go so far as to say even Michael Brown was more qualified than David Richardson,” she said.
Since January, nearly one-third of FEMA employees – 2,000 of its 6,100 employees – have left the agency. That’s a problem because it takes experienced agency leaders to make FEMA bureaucracy move quickly, as exemplified by New Orleans’ long, brutal wait for rescue.
“There’s a handful of people, really, who know how to make FEMA move in the way that we need it to move to be effective when we’re responding to a major crisis, and at this point, it does seem like the majority of those people have left,” Montano said.
Stephen Murphy, who today leads the Disaster Management Program at Tulane University, arrived in New Orleans just weeks before the levees broke. He wound up working for the city’s newly formed Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness by 2006. While there, he developed better communication between local and federal agencies like FEMA, which resulted in crucial agreements that allowed Amtrak trains and airlifts to be used in New Orleans’ first successful city-assisted evacuation, in 2008 ahead of Hurricane Gustav.
It’s those strides that are now at risk. “I feel like that is what is in jeopardy,” said Murphy, “Because you’ve had a mass exodus of FEMA personnel.”
Proposed cuts in funding, for deployment, recovery and rebuilding
Another vulnerability is lack of money. Though contested by multiple ongoing lawsuits, massive cuts to FEMA seem inevitable under the Trump administration. The president eliminated the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which helped to pay for some of Louisiana’s levees and elevate homes at risk of flooding. He also scaled back a Hazard Mitigation and Grant Program that sent billions to protect Louisiana properties from floods. And he slowed down recovery money for Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, where federal funds have covered less than 8% of recovery costs, far less than was typical.
Bottlenecks in deployment also present a major hurdle to effective recovery. In 2005, FEMA ignored or mishandled offers of water-tanker aircraft, Amtrak trains, medicine, ice, bottled water, doctors, medicine, and more. This year, Kristi Noem, who leads the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA management, has created a backlog of contracts after she required her personal signoff on any disaster response expenditures over $100,000. That means virtually everything.
“You can see how that becomes deadly very quickly,” Montano said.
Confusion within FEMA abounded in 2005 partly because of a reorganization following the September 11th attacks. In March 2003, FEMA, an independent agency, was absorbed into the newly created DHS which dedicated itself to the ideal “Preserving our freedoms, protecting America – we secure our homeland.” As a result, FEMA’s focus turned to counterterrorism. Today’s FEMA is also running into questions about leadership and mission. Who’s ultimately in charge—Richardson? Noem? And are they supposed to be preparing for disasters or pursuing immigrants?
“There are growing examples of FEMA being used to support immigration efforts within DHS,” Montano said. Earlier this month, more than 100 FEMA employees were reassigned , to help hire more ICE agents.
Lastly, the same racism that was abundantly on display 20 years ago still impacts who gets access to disaster resources and recovery today. The overwhelming majority of those stranded at the Superdome and Convention Center in 2005 were Black. The majority of those who died were also Black.
‘Hurricane Corruption and Hurricane Racism’
“We got hit by three hurricanes,” explained New Orleans activist Malik Rahim. “Everybody knows the first one, Katrina. But then we got hit by Hurricane Corruption and Hurricane Racism.” To fill the void left by FEMA in 2005, Rahim founded a nonprofit called Common Ground which helped with storm rescue and recovery.
Desperate residents stranded in New Orleans were portrayed as violent and dangerous, with unchecked rumors amplified by both media and officials, leading to high-profile violence by both police and civilians against Black residents. Racist rumors also hindered relief efforts—rescue helicopters were at one point told to halt operations amid false rumors of snipers and the American Red Cross also initially claimed that the city was too dangerous to enter.
In the months and years that followed, Black New Orleanians were also less likely to receive enough resources and support to move back home, partly because of historic racism that left Black residents more likely to live in the low-lying, hardest-hit areas of the city.
Today, FEMA recovery still disproportionately reaches white residents. In 2022, about 58% of FEMA elevation money in Florida went to communities with populations more than 90% white or with median household incomes of more than $100,000.
The desperation and anger that emerge amid crises are also fodder, then and now, for another threat: armed militias driven by white supremacy. In the chaos following the failure of the federal levees, white vigilantes shot at Black residents, killing some. Rahim recalls being targeted.
“Those vigilantes [were] having barbecues, and at the barbecue, they [were] celebrating how many young Black men they killed,” he said. A visiting documentary filmmaker recorded the conversation— and “when he heard about how they was [sic] gonna come and shoot up my house, he came and told me.”
From then on, one of Common Ground’s co-founders, who is white, stood guard on Rahim’s front porch.
Likewise, after Hurricane Helene, militias driven by antisemitic and white replacement theories menaced local officials. The Cape Fear Proud Boys posted on social media that there wasn’t an “effective FEMA response,” and amid calls for violence, FEMA was briefly told to suspend their work.
What Katrina made clear was how everyone— not just Louisianans— will be affected by a kneecapped FEMA. In September 2024, in the Deep South alone, more than 1.1 million adults reported being displaced by natural disasters within the previous year.
Sadly, as FEMA sheds much of its staff, there will be very few people left who remember what failed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 – and what could fail in the future.
For Montano, the memories of 2005 are still vivid. “FEMA is supposed to be our last line of defense in these moments of crisis. And in this one in particular, FEMA wasn’t there,” she said.
Disaster researchers predict that there will be a next time. It remains to be seen if FEMA will be there.
Editor’s Note: This story was copublished in partnership between The Lens and Sierra Magazine.