Twenty years ago, a catastrophic storm changed the fabric of the southern United States.
Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast on Aug. 29, 2005, slamming directly into Louisiana before pummeling Mississippi and surrounding states. New Orleans saw the worst of the damage. Deadly floods inundated 80 percent of the city as levees and flood walls failed against torrential rain and storm surge.
The destruction was harrowing: More than 1,800 people died. Total damages, accounting for inflation, exceeded $200 billion.
Katrina’s impacts still linger today. The hurricane reshaped the South, fueling a widespread diaspora of disaster survivors into new areas that altered the economy and community connectedness. It also triggered a shift in disaster policy, prompting a reorganization of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and a more hands-on approach to preparation and resilience in the face of extreme weather.
However, experts say the Trump administration’s recent push to defund FEMA threatens to undo decades of progress—and they fear what could happen if another storm like Katrina hits soon.
A Dark Legacy: The direct impacts of Hurricane Katrina were devastating, but they were only the start. For months after the storm, doctors saw an uptick in hospital visits related to mold, cardiovascular issues, respiratory illnesses and outbreaks of West Nile virus.
Even now, survivors report lingering mental impacts from the storm, including signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. Scientists are just starting to learn how long the tail of a storm can truly be; a 2024 study found that tropical cyclones in the United States generate up to 11,000 excess deaths, in many cases years after they hit.
Receding stormwaters also revealed roughly 217,000 damaged or destroyed homes and the rubble of beloved community spaces like churches and restaurants. Predominantly Black neighborhoods were especially hard hit, including the Lower Ninth Ward, overwhelmed by floods after levee failures. The storm and struggles related to recovery laid bare the social inequities in the region, according to Allen Hyde, an associate professor of history and sociology at Georgia Institute of Technology.
“Black communities in cities [facing wealth gaps] are often particularly vulnerable to flooding, as property values tend to be lower in low-lying areas. … This was a really prime example in the Lower Ninth Ward,” he told me. He added that many low-income individuals were renters, and were not able to access as many grants during recovery as homeowners.
Economic disparities also influenced decisions to evacuate or stay behind because many lower-income individuals did not have cars or enough money for a hotel out of the storm’s path. The hurricane’s damage led to an exodus out of Louisiana and Mississippi and into other parts of the South that weren’t hit as hard, like Texas and Georgia. Survivors weren’t always welcomed with open arms; as Grist’s Jake Bittle reported, survivors resettling in Houston were often subject to racism and prejudice while trying to secure new jobs and housing.
Ultimately, many of these Katrina migrants were able to return to New Orleans or find a permanent home elsewhere. But others have spent decades hopping to new cities, struggling to find a stable living situation and develop communities as rich as those they left behind, NOLA.com reports.
Where Are We Now? In many ways, Hurricane Katrina was a wake-up call for states and the federal government. Analyses following the storm revealed major failures in evacuation communication, horrific conditions in the Superdome evacuation center and a lack of effective collaboration between FEMA and affected states.
This led to major shifts in disaster management policies, including the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006. This legislation reestablished FEMA as a separate agency within the Department of Homeland Security and developed new regional offices to facilitate disaster response with states. It also addressed discrimination in disaster assistance for non-English speakers and those with disabilities.
But this progress could be in jeopardy in the wake of recent changes spearheaded by the Trump administration. Earlier this summer, President Donald Trump pledged to dismantle FEMA following this year’s hurricane season, pushing more responsibility to states and local municipalities that don’t always have the funding or expertise to handle a major disaster. His administration has gutted grants aimed at helping communities prepare for disasters and now requires survivors to provide email addresses to secure FEMA aid, which could be difficult for people with limited internet access, The New York Times reports.
“Effective response and recovery from disasters relies on strong local and state leadership. While Federal assistance was always intended to supplement state actions, not replace those actions, FEMA’s outsized role created a bloated bureaucracy that disincentivized state investment in their own resilience,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, wrote in a statement to Inside Climate News. “President Trump is committed to right-sizing the Federal government while empowering State and local governments by enabling them to better understand, plan for, and ultimately address the needs of their citizens.”
Disaster experts have criticized Trump’s appointment of David Richardson as acting FEMA administrator due to his lack of experience, echoing the situation two decades ago, when the agency’s chief had a background in the horse-show industry. Though the Trump administration pulled back a bit on its language surrounding a total unraveling of FEMA in the wake of the recent Texas floods, the agency’s full-time staff has fallen by a third since the start of the year and major additional cuts may still loom, The Associated Press reports.
Jackson told Inside Climate News that the new “FEMA Review Council, comprised of top experts in their field, will recommend to the President how FEMA may be reformed in ways that best serve the national interest.”
Some experts are concerned that cuts could lead the U.S. to repeat mistakes from the past.
“The misery and death caused by Hurricane Katrina should serve as vivid reminders of why many existing emergency management programs emphasize the needs of socially vulnerable populations,” Eric Kevin Stern, an emergency management expert at the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York system, wrote in a piece for The Conversation. “As efforts to reform — and possibly rebalance — the U.S. emergency management system continue during the Trump administration, it is essential to remember and heed the costly lessons of Hurricane Katrina.”
FEMA employees issued a similar warning this week. In a letter to Congress, titled the “FEMA Katrina Declaration,” more than 180 FEMA employees lambasted Trump’s existing and proposed cuts to the agency, and his censorship of climate science.
“Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office, and our mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration,” the letter reads.
As global warming supercharges extreme weather events, disaster management is increasingly crucial, the authors write, adding that they hope this petition comes “in time to prevent not only another national catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina, but the effective dissolution of FEMA itself and the abandonment of the American people such an event would represent.”
More Top Climate News
A new study found that heatwaves can accelerate signs of aging, with manual laborers such as farmers and fishers facing the steepest impacts, Damian Carrington reports for The Guardian. These signs of aging include changes in blood pressure, inflammation, cholesterol and lung, liver and kidney function. After analyzing the impact of heat over 15 years for 25,000 people in Taiwan, the researchers found that experiencing four heatwaves days in just two years can accelerate biological age by about nine days on average and more than 30 days for outdoor workers—an unsettling prospect as extended periods of warming become more common with climate change.
Renewable energy investments in the U.S. have plummeted by 36 percent compared to the second half of 2024, according to data from analytics consultant BloombergNEF. This equates to a drop of $20.5 billion in funds, and “reflects a rush of construction toward the end of last year as developers sought to lock in lucrative tax credits, followed by a sharp drop this year as policy conditions worsened,” according to the firm’s report. Those worsening conditions include Trump’s assault on wind power, which I wrote about earlier this month. Meanwhile, renewable investments in other countries around the world are rising, with the European Union increasing spending by 63 percent in the first half of this year.
New research revealed that massive amounts of critical minerals can be found in mining waste, which the U.S. is currently disposing of rather than tapping into, Tik Root reports for Grist. For instance, the researchers found there is enough lithium in one year of U.S. mine waste to power 10 million electric vehicles. Despite the dip in renewable support, critical minerals are still in high demand, and the Trump administration is keen to ramp up supply. The study’s authors say tapping into mining byproducts could eventually be one strategy to do that, while reducing unnecessary waste.
Postcard From … California
For this installment of “Postcards From,” one of our readers sent a photo of an earlier wildfire raging in Bonsall, California. In the past eight years, this reader has experienced three major fires near their home. As climate change drives up temperatures and fuels droughts, research shows wildfires are becoming increasingly severe.
Today’s Climate readers, please send in your own nature photos for us to feature in our “Postcards From” section. Email them to [email protected]. We would love to see more photos from urban areas, where nature can thrive in unexpected places.
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Kiley Price is a reporter at Inside Climate News, with a particular interest in wildlife, ocean health, food systems and climate change. She writes ICN’s “Today’s Climate” newsletter, which covers the most pressing environmental news each week.
She earned her master’s degree in science journalism at New York University, and her bachelor’s degree in biology at Wake Forest University. Her work has appeared in National Geographic, Time, Scientific American and more. She is a former Pulitzer Reporting Fellow, during which she spent a month in Thailand covering the intersection between Buddhism and the country’s environmental movement.
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