Hurricane Katrina: New Orleans 10 years later

Ten years after Hurricane Katrina, you can still see the scars left by the storm — not just in places like New Orleans, but also in the region’s less inhabited areas.

NASA published stunning satellite images looking at swamplands around Delacroix, a fishing town southeast of New Orleans, one week before Katrina and 10 years after — showing how the flood changed waterways in the region.

10 years after Hurricane Katrina overran New Orleans, the city is still recovering from a disaster that was as much human-caused as natural.

Katrina, which formed on August 23, 2005, and hit the Gulf Coast of the US on August 29, was a massive storm that was likely to wreak havoc in the region regardless of how the government reacted. But the government response was so wildly incompetent that it allowed the worst of the catastrophe to continue and sometimes created entirely new, unnecessary problems.

As soon as Nick Shapiro turned into the parking lot of the Tumbleweed Inn in Alexander, North Dakota, he recognized the trailers. They were off-white, boxy, almost cartoonish, and unadorned with any of the frills — racing stripes, awnings, window treatments — that a manufacturer would typically add to set a trailer apart on a display lot.

But these trailers had never seen a display lot. Shapiro had first seen them when he was living in New Orleans in 2010, doing fieldwork for his Oxford University PhD. In New Orleans, everyone knew what they were, and the city was desperate to get rid of them. They had been built fast, and not to last. The fact that some people were still living in them because they had never gotten enough money to rebuild their homes, or had run afoul of unethical contractors, was an unwanted reminder of just how far the city still had to go to recover from Hurricane Katrina.

I don’t have a ton to add to the retrospectives and analyses prompted by the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I just want to make one small point, something that struck me about Katrina at the time and has been on my mind ever since.

There is a certain line of thinking that goes like this: Climate change may well be happening, but disrupting the world’s economic and energy systems to reduce carbon emissions is too expensive and difficult. Why launch some crazy, probably doomed effort to control the weather? We’ll just do what people have always done, which is adapt to the changes.

Hurricane Katrina pushed hundreds of thousands of people from their home in New Orleans, some never to return. After a decade, we know more than ever about what happened to them next — and about the hurricane’s lingering impact on their education, their health, and their happiness.

Some of the research came from following and interviewing displaced New Orleans residents to determine what effect the storm had on their mental and physical health. Others came from the “natural experiment” that Hurricane Katrina created: The hurricane forced people to move who might not otherwise have done so, and researchers investigated how that affected their lives in the long term.