Twenty years later, it still seems unbelievable: an entire metropolis underwater, evacuated, and turned into a ghost town. That the city — slowly, eventually, painfully — recovered sounds little short of miraculous.

The story of Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast two decades ago this week, includes those elements and more. It features the fury of nature, the collective failures of institutions intended to protect the citizenry, and the indomitable fortitude of a people to persevere — sometimes with the assistance of their government, sometimes despite it.

Failure of Levees — and the Government That Built Them

Tragedies often unfold not as a single event, but as a catastrophic sequence of failures. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, a series of problems in rapid succession magnified mistakes into a cataclysmic event. 

So it proved with Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. The city’s levees and flood barriers, often constructed on shaky soil, failed in dozens of locations. A shipping channel intended to aid commerce magnified the effects of the hurricane’s storm surge. A hurricane the previous year that had created traffic gridlock on the roads — only for the storm to turn east and avoid southeastern Louisiana — made residents hesitant to evacuate yet again.

Every level of government failed. Many of the officials involved — from FEMA Director Michael Brown at the federal level to Democrat Gov. Kathleen Blanco to New Orleans Democrat Mayor Ray Nagin — looked well out of their depth. “Brownie” resigned 10 days after President George W. Bush infamously claimed he was doing “a heck of a job.” Nagin, who did not order a mandatory evacuation until hours before Katrina made landfall, was eventually indicted and convicted on federal corruption charges following his term as mayor. 

The Katrina response revealed a fundamental failure in the first and most important role of government: to keep people safe. And that failure had the worst effects on the city’s poorest residents, many of them African American, who had no means of transportation to escape the storm before landfall and were effectively abandoned by their government for days afterward.

One would have hoped the city would have learned the lessons of Katrina when it comes to storm cleanup and response. But four years ago, following Hurricane Ida, garbage piled up in the streets for weeks, rotting in the heat and creating another potential health hazard.

Resilient Residents

Yet, despite it all, the people of New Orleans and southeast Louisiana worked to reclaim their city and their homes. Federal assistance and private insurance payments helped, of course, but it also required countless hours of sacrifice by residents to battle red tape, their bank accounts, and Mother Nature to return to the city, fumigate and renovate their houses, and pick up the pieces of their lives.

To an outsider watching the scenes of devastation at the Louisiana Superdome and the New Orleans Convention Center 20 years ago, it seemed unlikely anyone would want to reconstruct these venues that became known for such human agony and suffering. Yet the people of New Orleans did not want those places and their city to be defined by a few days of devastation. And they certainly wanted their beloved football Saints to return, to provide a few hours of respite and distraction from their real-world struggles on fall Sundays.

This February, that Superdome, formerly the scene of chaos and destruction, again played host to the Super Bowl, the second time the famous venue has hosted one of the world’s biggest sporting events since the storm. And just like the Saints’ triumphant return to the city following the hurricane in September 2006, it represented yet another hallmark of New Orleans’ rebirth.

A Special Place

Having worked for the man who succeeded Blanco, Republican former Gov. Bobby Jindal, I have had the pleasure of traveling to Louisiana many times in the past decade-plus. Those visits have allowed me to witness the city’s renaissance over time and develop a deep admiration for the culture that makes New Orleans one of the most distinct — and one of my favorite — cities on Earth.

While scars from the storm remain — the Lower Ninth Ward and other parts of the city contain a fraction of their pre-Katrina population — some continue to heal. Train service between New Orleans and Mobile just returned a couple of weeks ago for the first time since the storm. As one passenger put it, “It’s almost like it’s one more step toward the healing,” not just for New Orleans but for the entire Gulf Coast that Katrina slammed.

Few would wish the horrors of that storm on their worst enemy. But the way the citizens of New Orleans, scattered and dispersed by the winds and waves, united to restore their home and regain their destiny should serve as an inspiration to us all.