Twenty years after Katrina, turning the pages of my mental scrapbook

Published August 29, 2025

There’s little to say about Hurricane Katrina that I haven’t already said over 20 years. I wrote so many words about it in 2005. The risk of trying to write only a few words for today is that they’ll swell to thousands. The squalls will get you, won’t they?

Typing still isn’t a thing I can do yet. Since my July 10th fall, my fingers, hands and wrists have turned into my enemies. And so I wait. And dictate.

Randy Newman will be in heavy rotation today in many Louisiana places where Katrina will be in people’s thoughts. I hope they remember that Mississippi, Alabama and Florida were also hit hard and suffered so much loss. Friends in those states were dealt cruel blows.

The Randy Newman song that’s been on my mind lately is not “Louisiana 1927.” I’m not sure I know how to explain that to you.

It’s not supposed to rain here today. I’m not sure I could handle that, or that other, more Katrina-associated Newman song about rain today.

Twenty years on, others will make more important contributions to the conversation than mine. This one is just my deep-breathing exercise of experiencing some of what time hasn’t washed away.

Last weekend I was explaining what the week leading up to Katrina’s second landfall was like. For those who didn’t remember or never knew, I mentioned that the first landfall was on the southern part of Florida.

Katrina wasn’t yet the massive hurricane we would come to know, its eye struggling to maintain whatever organization it had managed in the waters of the Atlantic.

In the Gulf of Mexico, that changed. Everything changed. I mean, look at that featured image way up top.

What it means to miss New Orleans

There’s another song many people associate with Hurricane Katrina, and the subheading above may have brought it to mind for you. It’s the opening music in the Spike Lee documentary “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts.” It’s an immediate callback to August 2005 and everything after.

I got chills when I heard the song again this week. The concept of “what it means to miss New Orleans” hit me in a way I hadn’t thought about in years.

If you’re going to be touched by a hurricane, you want to be to the west of it. The worst things tend to happen in the upper-right or northeast quadrant, especially if you live along the coastline as it comes ashore.

Katrina’s second landfall was around Buras, Louisiana, decidedly better for New Orleans than if its eye had chosen, say, Cocodrie as a landing place. As bad as things got in the Crescent City, a place that had survived Betsy and a few scares after her could almost breathe a sigh of relief and count itself lucky.

Do you know what it means that Katrina missed New Orleans? Do you?

Then again, look at the size of that thing. Even if you were on the “good” side, you were in for a world of hurt if you were between its outer bands. I was in Baton Rouge, an hour’s drive away on a good day, and I still went without sleep for 63 hours and without electricity for much longer.

And as Garland Robinette says in the video above, the levee failures made things significantly worse.

My front-row seat to the news

You don’t want to be without electricity or air conditioning in south Louisiana in late August. Check any weather app today for details.

Every day after the storm hit, I showered before 6 a.m. and headed to the newspaper office, which had power and AC. I’d figure out where to find food as the day wore on.

The Associated Press, displaced from its New Orleans offices by the hurricane, set up a temporary base at desks on a row next to mine. Editors fielded calls or read text messages to get updates. In some cases, when calls wouldn’t go through, text messages would.

(A month after Katrina made landfall, I got a voicemail message from a columnist friend in Phoenix. She’d placed the call in early September, but it took almost four weeks for the message to find me.)

AP editors needed to place calls, not just receive them, and they asked me how to get an outside line, then how to call long distance. Whoever had put them next to me hadn’t told them any of that, and there was no time to waste.

“Just use my calling code,” I said, and their fingers went flying over the keypads of the landline phones.

Hour after hour, day after day, I’d hear the news from New Orleans from a few desks over, then read it as it came across the newswire and appeared on our newsroom TVs.

Weeks later, someone in accounting called me. “You recently placed an unusually high number of long-distance calls,” they said.

It was one of the most interesting interactions I had with them since they called to ask about a receipt for something I bought on expense account from ilovetoscore.com.

I hope we catch a break

Five years after my hometown took a horrific one-two punch, I hope we get lucky the rest of this hurricane season. What this administration is doing to FEMA and other federal agencies is criminal.

There are so many ways to reflect on Hurricane Katrina, with and without the art of people who are trying to put a hand to where we are. Repeated viewings of Spike Lee’s documentary have made the people he interviewed seem like family to me. I got a taste of that with HBO’s “Treme,” and with much more.

At times this week I’ve traveled back in time to 2005, sitting in my car at midnight to recharge my cellphone, listen to rescues and reports on WWL and drive until I found food. The gas station southeast of Baton Rouge that still had bread, Gatorade and SPAM was a godsend.

The ending of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” also came to mind this week, specifically the water rising and washing up toward … well, see for yourself.

Fiction, I know, but after revisiting the real thing lately, it was the closest I wanted to get to Hurricane Katrina.

That summer was the last one my mom lived through from start to finish. She died the following July, the day before the 4th, and we’ll always wonder if toxins stirred up by Katrina and Rita played a role in her succumbing to complications related to lymphoma. Her symptoms started showing up in late 2005. Minutes after she died, a bird flitted past her window. I tell myself it was a hummingbird, her favorite.

A special person in my life was in the hospital to have her first child on August 29, 2005. The circle of life. Her son is 20 years old today. It’s impossible to forget his birthday.

No, I don’t think it’s going to rain today. Not here. Our summers are mostly rain-free, so the big threat we worry about is from wildfire season, which is ongoing.

I hope human kindness will be overflowing everywhere today.

Stay safe, wherever you are. Sending love.

♥