Katrina's 20th: Vann R. Newkirk II on What We Owe Climate Disaster Survivors Today

Twenty years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina—still the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history—made landfall in New Orleans. Many mark the storm as the transition point to a new age of extreme weather impacts. The Federal Emergency Management Agency more than tripled the size of its Disaster Relief Fund going forward as a result of Katrina and two other major hurricanes in 2005.  

Yet two decades later, disasters of this scale have become so common that FEMA has been on track to run out of its Disaster Relief Fund for the second year in a row, unless Congress issues an emergency aid package.  And in this anniversary week, more than 180 FEMA employees have endorsed a letter submitted to members of Congress, urging their defense of the agency's continued operations in spite of the President's stated intent to eliminate or severely curtail its funding. The 36 co-signers that opted to use their names have been placed on administrative leave until further notice, The New York Times reports.  

This is the context for today’s conversation with the host and co-creator of the Peabody Award-winning podcast miniseries “Floodlines”, Vann R. Newkirk II.  Vann traces the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina as a demonstration of the ways a community's risk exposure and recovery assistance are often determined by race and class.  These disparities became nationally visible both in the immediacy of the disaster and long after, as some New Orleanians were able to return and recover their homes and livelihoods, while for many others such recovery still remains out of reach.    

Duke and Vann also look at Hurricane Katrina’s invigoration of a national and federal movement for environmental justice. Now that this work is being targeted and dismantled, they discuss how to maintain focus in the face of such dramatic reversals and the implications for the next major storm.   

Be sure to tune in again next week when we look further into the post-Katrina recovery period with one of its primary leaders, HR&A President and CEO Jeff Hébert, who formerly served as first deputy mayor for the City of New Orleans, executive director of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, and as one of the first chief resilience officers appointed under Rockefeller’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative.  

Relevant content from Vann R. Newkirk II 

Listen to the “Floodlines” podcast series, including “Part 9: Rebirth”, released five years later  

“Why the EPA Backed Down” (The Atlantic, September 2024)  

“What America Owes the Planet” (The Atlantic, June 2024)  

“The Coronavirus’s Unique Threat to the South” (The Atlantic, April 2020)  

“Climate Change is Already Damaging American Democracy” (The Atlantic, October, 2018)   Relevant articles and resources  

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