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More news is below. But first, a look back on Hurricane Katrina, 20 years later.
Living with Katrina
Every New Orleanian had a unique experience of Hurricane Katrina. My parents fled on different days and in different directions, reuniting on the other side of the country. Many of my friends lost their homes. I watched the levees break from my desk in a Washington, D.C., newsroom. Experiencing the devastation through TV news and internet chat boards was much safer — nearly 1,400 people died from the storm — but still surreal. I’ve never felt more helpless. Katrina made landfall 20 years ago today. What happened since then? It’s hard to sum up, really. A city basically ceased to exist for half a year. Many of its residents never returned. Officials wrestled over culpability and eventually settled on the Army Corps of Engineers. It took years and billions of dollars to rebuild; the new structures look different from the old ones. A distinctive culture changed in ways that are easier to feel than to measure. But most of all, several hundred thousand people processed a trauma that was both personal and collective. That trauma, as well as what people made of it, is the theme of several stories The Times published recently about the legacy of Katrina. An object lessonThe best thing you can do after a tragedy is learn from it. But that’s easier said than done. Diagnosis. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is still the subject of local grumbling for its performance during Katrina. Its leader back in 2005 had no disaster experience, and the agency was slow to deliver supplies or help stranded residents find places to sleep. Congress passed a law in 2006 requiring experienced leadership and better preparedness. But events this week suggest the government is not following those mandates. A revolt. President Trump came to office arguing that states should handle their own disasters. He has threatened to close FEMA, and funding cuts have already hampered its work. A third of the staff is gone, plus hundreds of call center contractors. Days after their firing, when the deadliest floods in generations hit Texas, two-thirds of the calls to FEMA’s disaster assistance line went unanswered. This week, 186 current and former employees said in a letter that the agency was unlearning the lessons of Katrina, writes Maxine Joselow, a climate policy reporter. The administration fired some of the signatories.
On the ground. New Orleans, too, is sort of muddling along. “Where are we heading?” one resident asked in an interview with Eduardo Medina, who covers the South for The Times and spent this week taking the pulse of New Orleanians. The mayor is under indictment, home and car insurance premiums are unaffordable, residents are leaving and the local economy still relies mostly on tourism, which provides low-wage jobs. As one expert put it: “Traffic lights aren’t working, the streetlights aren’t working, the drainage pumps aren’t working and City Hall is not working.” At the same time, crime is down. Restaurants continue to innovate some of the finest food on the planet. The city survived an Islamist terror attack on New Year’s Day to host the Super Bowl a month later. New Orleans’s problems today are mostly the same ones it had when I grew up there in the 1980s, which itself is something of a miracle. The survivorsWhat was it like to grapple with the disaster? New Orleanians have spent two decades seeking ways to cope. Art therapy. I was haunted by this story about the drawings children made shortly after Katrina, before they could even speak about the tragedy that had upended their lives. One girl didn’t learn for three months that her mother had survived the floods. Another drew this picture, with more bodies below the waterline than above:
Documentary. The director Spike Lee saw the hurricane and its aftermath as a parable about racism in America. The city’s Black majority disproportionately lived in flood-prone areas. Unsubstantiated stories after the storm cast many Black survivors as looters, and government reconstruction aid appeared to favor white residents. As the city came back to life, some historically Black neighborhoods filled up with Airbnb units and the tourists enjoying them. And the Black share of the population fell from 67 percent before Katrina to 55 percent today. Lee just released “Come Hell and High Water,” the third installment of his docu-trilogy about all this and more. The showrunner talked to Reggie Ugwu, a culture reporter, about what the filmmakers found: You see a lot of gentrification happening. The housing projects have been knocked down, and they pushed those people into other neighborhoods, out of places where they had generational family connections. So what is lost? The culture. … New Orleans, this cultural mecca of America, is losing what made it so. Film. A new series at the Museum of Modern Art focuses on the lives of survivors. It features Lee’s earlier Katrina work; an episode of the HBO series “Treme”; and my favorite piece of post-Katrina art, “Beasts of the Southern Wild.” I didn’t experience anything like what the people living there at the time did. But watching the literal submergence of my youth, even from afar, left me bereft. For the last big anniversary, I poured my heart out in an essay about misunderstanding the significance of my hometown. We’re all processing.
The Fed
The C.D.C.
More on the Trump Administration
Minneapolis Shooting
Middle East
Other Big Stories
Since Trump sent federal agents to Washington, D.C., two weeks ago, arrests have increased slightly. But a Times analysis reveals that, instead of the targeted crime-fighting operation that Trump promised, federal officers often cast a wide net for low-level offenses. They’re conducting traffic stops, performing low-dollar buy-and-bust drug operations or checking if someone is drinking liquor from an open container.
Democrats colluded with Republicans to create the cruel and deadly immigration system Trump oversees today, Jean Guerrero argues. The political center should be thought of less as a point on a spectrum between the left and the right and more as a mind-set that takes ideas from both sides, Kristen Soltis Anderson writes. Here’s a column by David Brooks on defining love. Morning readers: Save on the complete Times experience. Experience all of The Times, all in one subscription — all with this introductory offer. You’ll gain unlimited access to news and analysis, plus games, recipes, product reviews and more.
August in Paris: With so many away for long vacations, the French capital transforms into a more friendly place. The new mating economy: The gold digger was an archvillain. Now, she’s an aspiration. Seeing double: The N.Y.P.D.’s facial recognition tool doesn’t always work. This is how it implicated a man |
