A tale of two disasters and their far-reaching consequences
by Kristen Miller

Around the same time the United States was entering its first days of COVID-19 lockdown, “The Atlantic” launched “Floodlines,” a podcast about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and its effects on the people of New Orleans.

The timing was eerily prescient. New Orleans was being ravaged again, this time by the novel coronavirus. Revisiting Katrina somehow seemed newly compelling, so I began listening, and I was astounded by how familiar the story felt. With every episode, parallels between the storm’s repercussions then and what was happening around the country at that moment became more apparent. It was almost like we were given a checklist of things not to do after a disaster—and there we were again, working our way down from the top.

Misinformation is the mother of chaos

Hurricane Katrina was not the “big one” for New Orleans: the city largely withstood the storm’s punishing attack. But events that happened before and after the storm threatened to bring the city to its knees, and much of the pandemonium was spurred on by a deluge of misinformation.

First, the decision to evacuate the city was slow in coming. After some debate, the final call came the day before the storm hit, which left little time to move thousands of residents (particularly those without places to go or access to transportation). Then, after the storm had passed, the media was quick to shift their focus from the plight of those left behind to the story that Katrina had rendered New Orleans a lawless city. Looters—often looking for lifesaving provisions—became the headline. Unconfirmed reports about gangs of armed thieves roaming the streets were passed around even by government officials, who sometimes used the rumors to explain shortcomings in their response. After the fact, many of these reports were proven to be complete fiction (something podcast host and “The Atlantic” staff writer Vann Newkirk II calls “disaster myth.”)

The mythology is dangerous because people act on the information they receive from supposedly reputable sources, whether or not that information is fact. Stories about the spread of crime across the city resulted in calls for the government to impose martial law. Rumors about violence in the city’s shelter of last resort, the Superdome, convinced some citizens to gather instead in the convention center where there was no water, no electricity, and no help. Days later, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security still denied there even were any evacuees at the convention center, so efforts to mobilize supplies to that location were delayed.

It doesn’t take much more than a quick check of your Facebook page these days to know we’ve again been inundated with misinformation about the coronavirus. We’re told masks aren’t helpful, then they are, then they’re a sign of lost personal liberties. Health officials have been forced to fight the false notion that exposing yourself to the virus is the only way to build herd immunity. Trained physicians were accused of skewing the number of reported positive cases.

Today, as in the days after Hurricane Katrina, when there’s a lack of clear direction and when responsible parties breed distrust in verifiable facts, the misinformation that fills that vacuum only makes a bad situation worse.

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Same storm, different boat

In the first days of the coronavirus quarantine, there seemed to be a wave of solidarity sweeping the country. People reassured each other that “we’re all in this together” and “we’re all in the same boat.” It felt good to hear, but of course, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Soon, those reassurances gave way to something more accurate—“we’re all in the same storm, but we’re not in the same boat.”

BIPOC communities have been hit particularly hard by this virus, with mortality rates that far exceed those of white patients. Jobs considered essential during the lockdown are predominantly filled by women and minorities; they don’t have the luxury of working from home to keep them and their families safe. Even following CDC guidelines by wearing a mask in public is fraught with peril for black men. “Floodlines” paints a similar picture of the devastatingly disproportionate effect Katrina and its aftermath had on New Orleans’ black communities. Once the levees broke, water rushed into historically black neighborhoods, neighborhoods that had been intentionally sacrificed once before during the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, when a levee was breached to save the French Quarter from damage.

The false crime narrative that distracted the country’s attention from the meager relief efforts underway in the days post-Katrina was highly prejudicial. In a city with a large black population—a city whose celebrated culture comes from the slaves who were brought into it against their will and their ancestors—stories about looting were at the very least a dog whistle. In the podcast, a nurse who rode out the storm with her family in the Lower Ninth Ward puts it this way: “It was the way everything was framed. It was like, if it’s a certain group of people they’re commandeering. Where if it’s another group of people, they’re looting.”

Recounting the optimism many New Orleanians felt in the first days after the hurricane when they were still reassuring each other that relief would soon be on the way, Newkirk II said, “We’d been telling ourselves a story that America comes together in the face of hard times. That it doesn’t leave its own people behind.” That depends on which boat you’re in.

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Using tragedy as a tool

Before Katrina, the government introduced a plan to demolish New Orleans’ public housing projects and replace them with mixed-income developments. A controversial proposal, it hadn’t gotten much traction yet, but a year after Katrina, as residents of those projects remained largely scattered across the country, the government saw its chance to act. Officials announced the plan to tear down the buildings—whether they suffered damage during the storm or not—would soon get underway. The hurricane had cleared the way for officials to move forward while those most affected were unable to protest.

The pandemic is not yet over, so we still have time to make sure we don’t use this crisis to advance specific agendas, but actions thus far don’t give me a lot of confidence. Millions in relief loans meant for small businesses were instead given to large public corporations, and minority-owned businesses were largely shut out from the program altogether. Stimulus funds were denied to U.S. citizens whose spouses are immigrants, even though they pay taxes. While government officials restricted landlords from evicting tenants for failure to pay rent during the shutdown, most of those restrictions are scheduled to be lifted in late spring or early summer, leaving renters unprotected even though the economy has not yet started to rebound. We have the opportunity to reverse course and stop using this tragedy as a tool—but will we?

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We are the virus

For me, the saddest story in the podcast belonged to a woman named Le-Ann, who had just started a prestigious new high school four days before the hurricane hit. An honor roll student, she had big plans: She wanted to graduate in the top of her class and become the first in her family to finish college.

But then, Katrina happened. After the storm, Le-Ann and her family waited for days without help at the convention center. Unable to go home, they zigzagged across the country for the next year, looking for a place to land. She was bullied for being a “refugee,” and when she fought back, she spent a night in jail. She eventually went home to New Orleans, but the housing projects where she lived were still closed; soon they’d be gone. She never got to go back to her high school; it never reopened. It just wasn’t the same city she knew growing up. So, she worked part-time jobs, went to community college, and had a baby. Le-Ann lives in the eastern part of the city now, far away from the neighborhood that raised her and set her off on a path she’d never get to take. You could suppose that Hurricane Katrina washed her dreams away, but that wouldn’t be true. She survived the storm—it’s the promise that was taken away from her afterwards that did the damage. She told Newkirk II: “I just had this drive, this just bright light. It is just like it’s—just, after Katrina, it just dimmed and dimmed.”

Natural disasters and pandemics happen, and unfortunately, they will continue to happen. But that doesn’t mean we as a society have to repeat the same mistakes afterwards that compound the personal damage and destroy the solidarity we need to get through the struggle to the other side. When will we realize that being responsible for washing our own dreams away will always be the biggest disaster of all?

Kristen is a management, legal, communications and public relations consultant for Well-Red Consulting and Creative, her new main hustle after several unfulfilling years as an attorney. A native of Louisville, KY, she owns way too many Kentucky Derby hats for someone who is super-allergic to horses. She is an anxious traveler, a bourbon lover, a college sports fan and a music snob. Check out her random musings on Instagram at @kmillerwku.