On August 29, 2005, the world watched as Hurricane Katrina made landfall, forever altering the landscape and spirit of New Orleans and the broader Gulf Coast. Two decades later, the scars of the storm remain fresh for many, but so too does the resilience that emerged in its wake. As the city commemorates the twentieth anniversary of one of America’s deadliest natural disasters, new voices and stories are surfacing to illuminate both the devastation wrought and the remarkable recovery that followed.
Trymaine Lee, who was a young police reporter at the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2005, remembers the chaos and heartbreak that engulfed the city. “There was so much loss and so much death and so much uncertainty,” Lee told Amsterdam News. “Until you experience an American city and it feels as if the bottom of society has dropped out, where the least and hungriest among us are even more so in desperation… I can’t forget the smell—the smell of death, the smell of despair. But then also, within that, moments where neighbors stood up for each other.”
The numbers from Katrina are staggering: more than 1,300 lives lost, one million people displaced, and around 300,000 homes destroyed across Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, according to Amsterdam News and Teen Vogue. In New Orleans alone, roughly 80 percent of the city was flooded after the levee system catastrophically failed. Black neighborhoods, particularly the Lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly, bore the brunt of the devastation, with at least 100,000 homes lost in the city itself.
Yet, as Lee’s new documentary “Hope in High Water: A People’s Recovery Twenty Years After Hurricane Katrina” demonstrates, the story of New Orleans is not just one of loss. It is also a testament to the unyielding spirit and ingenuity of its people. “The hope in high water—even in the high water of being Black in America, there is always hope,” Lee reflected. “To be able to show how we are working to help and heal and save ourselves when everything else fails us—it’s a story that I’m privileged to tell, honestly, so I don’t take my role lightly.”
Lee, now 46 and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, has returned to his roots with “Hope in High Water,” which is currently streaming on Peacock. The documentary, co-produced by Lee’s I Am Somebody Media and Haimy Assefa’s Blue Black Studio, and supported by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, shines a light on the many facets of recovery—environmental activism, arts and music, Black maternal health, education, technology, and agriculture—within the New Orleans and Mississippi communities.
The foundation, which now invests about $34 million annually in the New Orleans and Jackson region, played a critical role in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, providing millions in grants and emergency funding. “It is important we honor the strength and leadership of communities who are reimagining and rebuilding—not just their homes and neighborhoods, but systems rooted in equity, culture, and care,” said La June Montgomery Tabron, president and CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in a statement. “As more communities across the country and world face climate threats and systemic disruption, we have much to learn from the Gulf South.”
“Hope in High Water” features the stories of nonprofit grantees such as Sankofa Community Development Corporation, Grow Dat Youth Farm, STEM NOLA, Saul’s Light, Ashé Cultural Arts Center, Black Education for New Orleans, and Boat People SOS. These organizations represent the ongoing efforts to rebuild not just infrastructure, but the social and cultural fabric of the city.
But for all the progress, the wounds of Katrina remain. FEMA’s response in the days following the storm was widely criticized as slow and insufficient. Supplies arrived three to five days after the hurricane, and much of the immediate aid came from private organizations like the Red Cross, as reported by Teen Vogue. President George W. Bush faced harsh criticism for his administration’s delayed mobilization of FEMA, especially as he was on vacation when the storm struck.
The impact was especially severe for the city’s most vulnerable: Black residents, low-income families, women, and children. Thousands of childcare centers were damaged or destroyed, with only 25 of more than 200 centers for low-income families reopening after the storm. Nearly 30 percent of women in New Orleans lived below the poverty line at the time, and the years after Katrina saw a dramatic increase in gender-based violence. Reports of physical victimization for women nearly doubled, from 4.2 percent to 8.3 percent, according to researchers cited by Teen Vogue.
The long-term effects of the disaster are still being felt. By October 2006, about 410,000 evacuees had not returned home, and many who did were forced to live in cramped, poorly constructed FEMA trailers—some of which exposed residents to toxic formaldehyde. New Orleans’ population, which was 455,000 in 2005, plummeted to 223,000 a year later and had only rebounded to 383,997 by the 2020 census.
Even two decades later, New Orleans remains vulnerable. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers rated the city’s levees as “minimally acceptable” in 2019 and has not updated that assessment since. The city, built below sea level, is sinking further—a fact made obvious by sunken sidewalks, damaged roads, and frequent flash flooding. As climate change accelerates, bringing more intense storms, floods, and wildfires globally, the threat to New Orleans and similar communities only grows.
Policy reforms have followed in Katrina’s wake. Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act in 2006, aiming to strengthen FEMA’s infrastructure and improve disaster response. Yet, critics argue that federal disaster management has regressed in recent years. Under the Trump administration, FEMA faced funding cuts and a shift toward state-led disaster management, which some experts say could undermine progress and leave vulnerable communities exposed.
Local advocacy groups like Levees.org continue to push for better maintenance and reinforcement of the city’s flood defenses. Independent university studies have become increasingly important as federal funding for weather research wanes. “Whether it’s the carceral system and police, or the violence of hunger, or the violence of segregation, children are bearing the weight of all that,” Lee told Amsterdam News. “So I think there’s this wild juxtaposition in New Orleans because they love life… but children to adulthood are facing stark odds, and so to highlight folks who are working to mitigate some of that, it was beautiful to see.”
For the younger generations who did not experience the horrors of Katrina firsthand, Lee hopes his work will serve as both a reminder and an inspiration. “Hope in High Water” is, above all, a love letter to a city that refuses to be defined by disaster, but instead by the courage and creativity of its people.
As New Orleans marks twenty years since Katrina, the lessons of the past remain urgent—and the hope for a more just, resilient future endures.