For the 20th Anniversary: Four Shows About the Impact of Katrina on New Orleans

20 years ago (August 29, 2005) Hurricane Katrina made its second landfall, hitting Louisiana well east of New Orleans, then moving north through Mississippi. In previous days it had cut across South Florida, just glancing Cuba, and swelled in intensity to a Category 5 storm. When it made land the second and third times it was down to Category 3. Since it had not hit New Orleans directly, once the storm passed, for a brief moment many breathed a sigh of relief. But the heavy rainfall and the storm surge caused several key levees to fail, flooding 80% of the city, endangering the over 100,000 people who had not been able to evacuate, most of them people of color. Over 1% of those people died by drowning, suffocation, injuries, and other causes related to the storm and the flood. The rest suffered a torturous ordeal lasting several days: lack of food, water, sanitation, and basic human comforts, combined with the loss of all their worldly belongings, all experienced in the harsh tropical heat and humidity of the Gulf Coast.

As the nation watched the slow motion catastrophe on their television sets, one thing was readily and horrifyingly apparent: the cavalry was slow in arriving. For several days, there were shots of people trapped on their rooftops, or in gathering spots like the Superdome, the local convention center, and elevated highways. A certain amount of lawlessness set in across affected areas. As a spectacle it resembled the aftermath of disasters in places like Haiti or the poorer nations of Africa. But this is the richest nation in the world. What was taking so long? The U.S. Coast Guard has been universally praised for their fast and efficient efforts (invariably the case, when it comes to that branch of the service). Naturally local Nola first responders and volunteers did their best but were stretched beyond their limits. No real shade to throw there. But where were the State and Federal authorities? President Bush and his FEMA director Michael Brown seemed awfully casual about prioritizing rescue and recovery; distribution of food, water and shelter; and the subsequent evacuation. The Federal authorities claimed that the State of Louisiana under Governor Kathleen Bianco resisted their efforts and were uncooperative. These claims were naturally rebutted. What was clear was that something like chaos and inaction prevailed; the response to this admittedly unprecedented disaster was not well coordinated, and the resources to respond to the crisis were slow to arrive.

The peculiar nature of American governance does create special challenges in events like this. Who is in charge? Someone has to be. Federalism can create confusion. But something else is also clear. When a President of the United States wants to, rightly or wrongly, he (or she theoretically) can seize control of a situation, bark a few orders into the phone, and get things done. Sometimes whether or not he has the authority to do so can be questionable. At the moment we have someone in that office who has been seizing authority he does legally possess in order to wreak all sorts of domestic and international havoc. This is to be opposed. But there have been occasions when Presidents have taken such actions for the right reasons, to save lives and livelihoods. Why wasn’t saving New Orleans a priority for George W. Bush?

Since Trump has set a new standard for ignorance, corruption, and incompetence in the White House, many seem to have forgotten the guy who set the previous high bar for awfulness. The man who didn’t actually win the 2000 election, and who waged a multi-trillion dollar war based on lies, merely to profit his allies. Bush was apparently too stupid to know or or too insensitive to care that New Orleans is the birthplace of jazz, and the home of one of America’s most precious, unique, and beloved cultures. Bush snickered when reporters brought stuff like this up. The best he could muster was acknowledging that it was a “party town”, and that he was glad to have been able to rescue the home of his Republican ally Trent Lott. THERE lies the crux of it. The people of New Orleans were predominantly poor and black and Democrats, so he didn’t go to the mat to save their lives. Even leaving aside New Orleans’ status as a cultural wellspring, the fact that this was allowed to happen to an American city, ANY American city, in the 21st century was an outrage. What DID Bush go to the mat for? Indiscriminate bombing of faraway countries under the false premise that it was in retaliation for September 11. I’ve never wavered in my conviction that he and his gang belong in jail. And just think, he and his people were but a sliver of what’s there now.

20 years down the line, numerous long term impacts can be reported. Population loss within New Orleans city limits was considerable: from around 450,000 to around 350,000. (The city had already been in decline for decades. Peak population in 1960 had been 627,500). Many hundreds of thousands had left the city in the immediate aftermath of the storm. Clearly around 100,000 never returned, opting to remain in places like Houston, Atlanta, and other cities. The racial balance in the city has shifted as well. Prior to the storm, New Orleans had been about 70% black; today the number is about 56%. The city is gentrified. Certain areas that once housed a predominately black population have not been rebuilt.

We hasten here to acknowledge what many seem to forget. Katrina didn’t just affect New Orleans. It caused damage and death throughout Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and even Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. There was tragedy all along the way, and that is not be minimized. But that was the kind of destruction and heartbreak experienced somewhere nearly every single year. What happened in New Orleans was a once-in-a-century kind of event, another level of catastrophe.

I was obsessed with this event at time, and remained so thereafter. We made a pilgrimage there in 2015, the ten year anniversary, and there were still signs of what had happened in evidence at that time. Several films and TV series have the story in unvarnished terms as well, and that’s what we come to tell of today.

When the Levees Broke (2006)

This two-part, four act series is to my mind Spike Lee’s greatest cinematic achievement. He went down there with his cameras when the disaster was still unfolding and had the series ready within a year. It’s just an incredible achievement. Lee’s father was a jazz musician. He surely has the city in his bones. Further, his friend and frequent collaborator Terence Blanchard is from New Orleans. Blanchard not only participates in the film as an interviewee, but wrote and performs the haunting score. Music is throughout the film. Its title is taken from a Memphis Minnie song about the Mississippi Flood of 1927. The soundtrack includes cuts like Fats Domino’s “Walking to New Orleans” and Louis Armstrong performing the Louis Alter tune “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?”. And there are lots of amateur street bands shown parading and so forth. While just about all of the key politicians and media figures and experts relevant to the story are interviewed, the most powerful presences in the film frequently ordinary people who experienced the pain of the event firsthand, like Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, who became something approaching the star of the film. (She literally became an actress subsequently. More on than anon).

Now that I’ve seen the series four times, and others have now been added to the mix, it has slowly dawned on me that the strength of the series, and Lee’s primary interest in telling it, is emotion, and the human experience within this big event. People tell harrowing and heartbreaking stories. The camera shows us appalling pictures of people wading and swimming through their own neighborhoods, or stranded on rooftops. There are many shots of dead bodies. While it’s quite clear who he blames, he has not edited the film into a clear polemic that makes that statement. Instead he prefers to let people talk, and offer their own takes on what happened, with the the whole thing adding up to something like a chorus of human cries. He gets every side, top to bottom, black and white, and even folks from affected areas outsides of New Orleans. In some cases, the perspectives are unfortunate, and threaten to mar the grace and elegance of the film. Some offer conspiracy theories. One old Louisiana racist uses the N word. (In that particular case I love that Lee left that in — it says something about the culture down there, something you probably won’t find in any tourist brochure. Something undeniably true about race relations in the Deep South even at this late date — and that man told it himself).

Further, unlike many in the news media, Lee stayed on the story. He followed up When the Levees Broke with a sort of sequel If God is Willing and the Creek Don’t Rise (2010), for the fifth anniversary, in which he interviewed folks from the first film and checked in on their progress. In plenty of cases there wasn’t any. Five years out, much had not been rebuilt or restored, and many had not yet returned home. Crooked government agencies (in Louisiana? Naw!) got their claws on the recovery process. And meanwhile, there had been another disaster, the Deepwater Horizon explosion and oil spill. These people can’t get a break.

By this point, though, Lee wasn’t the only one chronicling the events. There were two other major projects inspired by Katrina’s impact on New Orleans.

The Big Uneasy (2010)

This one is a sort of intentional “corrective” to Lee’s efforts, if you will, directed by Harry Shearer, of all people. While previously a frequent visitor to New Orleans, Shearer had purchased a place in that city shortly before Katrina, and it only became his primary residence (of three) in 2013, after this film was even made, in fact. So there is something of a “carpet-bagger” energy to this independently made, narrowly distributed independent film. I mean, we ALL care about New Orleans; why’s Harry Shearer sticking his nose in?

Except this movie actually serves a valuable purpose. It possesses something which news media coverage and Lee’s series, affecting as it is, lacks, and that is focus. What’s more, it eschews facile emotion in favor of facts. Shearer’s fans know how dry his comedy is. Imagine how dry he is when he’s SERIOUS. But if you ask me, one thing a drowning town could use is a little dryness! So this is the Shearer NPR fans know from Le Show, not the voice-over actor from The Simpsons (other than the fact that his salary from doing that show allowed him to buy a home here, and probably underwrote a big portion of the film’s modest budget). Shearer also enlisted fellow NOLA resident John Goodman to narrate.

The film’s thesis, and it’s pretty incontrovertible if you ask me, is that the primary people to blame for what happened in 2005 are the people who built the levies in the first place, and the politicians that denied them the resources to do it properly. It was done on the cheap, and obviously wasn’t strong enough to contain the flood waters. You can argue that elected officials and appointed functionaries have had little to no experience dealing with disasters on this scale. But the Army Corps of Engineers has a fund of knowledge going back centuries. Not for nothing, there have been deadlier hurricanes and floods in the nation’s history: Galveston in 1900, the Johnston Flood of 1889, the Sea Islands in 1893. And hurricanes have struck the Gulf periodically. The system that failed in 2005 was put in place in the wake of Hurricane Betsy in 1965. If they had done the job right in the first place, there’d have been no drowned city for Bush, Brownie, and Bianco to have to deal with.

For this reason, Shearer insists that the flooding of New Orleans was not a natural disaster but a man-made one. The kind of thing he provides that Lee hadn’t (and which I was most grateful for) includes animated graphics showing where and how the flooding took place over a map of the city. Shearer has a knack for putting things in stark mathematical terms that bring home the scale of the event. A hurricane lasts a day, he reminds us, but this flood lasted six weeks. He paints pictures like 10,000 cars abandoned on the highway, and a debris pile a mile long and three stories high. This descriptive interpretation is just as vital to getting a bead on what occurred as images of flooded streets and the anguished faces of the victims.

There couldn’t be a better time to watch this film, what with FEMA and other similar agencies being gutted to within an inch of their lives even as I type this. I know that voters aren’t real good at cause and effect though. After all, they voted for the current President despite the fact that the biggest disaster in American history in terms of human lives had occurred on his watch, and his denial and inaction actively and demonstrably contributed to making it worse. The Covid-19 pandemic took over 1,100,000 lives, literally ONE THOUSAND TIMES the death toll of Katrina. Whatever the next disaster or crisis on Trump’s watch will prove to be, you can rest assured that his Federal government won’t even try to meet the challenge, nor be able to do so even if the effort is made. You will hear cant about “We couldn’t have known” and “No one could have prevented this” and so forth, but that will be a lie, as it almost invariably is.

Treme (2010-13)

In my town there’s one of those little honor-system book exchanges near the train station. I always pop by to see if there’s something worth grabbing. I am normally so self directed and purpose-driven in my reading habits that I actually love encountering a wild card that takes me in a random, new direction from time to time. So once I picked up this little book called Why New Orleans Matters by Tom Piazza. I didn’t get very far into it before a light bulb went off: “This is the inspiration for Treme!”. I quickly learned that that was partially the case. Piazza worked on the HBO series, and some was drawn from the book, but it took from other sources as well.

Treme was actually the brainchild of David Simon and Eric Overmyer, who’d worked together on Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-2001) and The Wire (2002-2008). With Treme, the team aspired to do for New Orleans what they had done for Baltimore: tell a story about a city in trouble, through the eyes of a cross-section of local citizens, with lots of location shooting and input from the actual community. Treme is fictionalized but largely based on composites of real people. The story starts three months after the disaster, when folks who’d left are just starting to return home and resume their lives. The neighborhood of Treme (actually spelled Tremé) is right next to the French Quarter, but sustained much worse damage. (The historic French Quarter is on higher ground, and was miraculously part of the 20% of the city that didn’t get flooded).

Apart from the music and the location shooting, and the stories that are told (at least initially) the best thing about the show is the cast. Several of the actors were veterans of Simon’s precious shows, including Wendell Pierce, Clarke Peters, and Melissa Leo. Pierce is not only a native New Orleanian but was also in Spike Lee’s Katrina docs. John Goodman, also a resident and the narrator of Shearer’s movie, also has an important role in the first season. There’s also Khandi Alexander, Kim Dickens, David Morse, Steve Zahn, and many others, with lots of cameos by local characters. Including the always entertaining Phyllis Montana LeBlanc (see above).

We binged the show prior to our trip to NOLA in 2015 and I’m glad we did, for it taught me to pronounce it correctly as “tre-MAY” and not as “treem”. Anyway, I really loved the first season, about the ordeal of recovering and restarting lives, and keeping traditions (like Mardi Gras and live music) alive. But along the way, the show kind of lost its reason for being. After awhile, when Katrina gets very far in the rear view mirror, it’s just a show about these characters, and there doesn’t seem to be anything for them to do but bump into each other at restaurants and engage in chit-chat. It lasted three and a half seasons. Two probably would have been sufficient.

Come Hell and High Water (2025)

This one dropped two days ago and you can bet I watched it the first day it was available. It was directed by a team of three, each taking a separate episode: We Gonna Ride It Out Like We Always Do by Geeta Gandbhir, Shelter of Last Resort by Samantha Knowles, and God Takes Care of Fools and Babies by Spike Lee.

By this point, you might assume that coming back to the well periodically as Lee has done would have an effect like Michael Apted’s Up series. He does after all, check in with so many of the same people from the 2006 and 2010 films. Won’t we have diminishing returns? But this series covers a lot of new ground. For one thing, there is a lot of video footage that has turned up that was unknown and unavailable back then. There are home videos of people in the affected neighborhoods just prior to the storm’s arrival, and amazingly lots of footage of flooding from affected houses! And some rescues shot from up close, not just from a news copter. I remind you, this is before smartphones. Nowadays we see lots of such footage during disasters. 20 years ago it was pretty rare.

The first two episodes are much more focused than Lee’s, and there are aspects (such as graphics) that echo Shearer’s approach. Permanent changes to the city are discussed in the context of how this country neglects the lives of people of color in general. And systemic problems in New Orleans that have always been there are discussed. One of the strongest voices is a man widely credited with saving the day and finally turning the recovery effort around back in 2005, Lieutenant GeneralRussel L. Honoré, the plain-spoken Louisiana Creole in charge of Joint Task Force Katrina. It’s a pity that that guy reviles politics so much; he’s just the kind we’ve always needed, and need now more than ever.

One tidbit in the film reminded me of another I heard in a podcast the other day. Someone proffered the opinion that Louisiana National Guardsmen serving in the Iraq War meant they weren’t available to be on hand on their home turf to help with the disaster. Sounds plausible, but I’ve no time today to hunt that one down and verify the truth of it. Anyway it reminded of something Tim Miller said on The Bulwark podcast a few days ago. Miller moved to New Orleans a couple of years ago, and was outraged to learn that Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry had volunteered Louisiana guard troops to serve among Trump’s unnecessary, ill-considered peacekeepers in Washington, D.C. What if there’s another disaster, he wondered? Shouldn’t they be nearby, in their home state for stuff like that? After all, it’s what most of them signed up for. And, as it happens, there’s another hurricane season approaching. What new national disgraces do we have on the horizon?