#hurricane-katrina

#hurricane-katrina

In August, 2005, Anand Irimpen, a cardiologist and a professor at Tulane University, evacuated New Orleans during the approach of Hurricane Katrina. He and his family watched it make landfall from a hotel room in Dallas. "The storm passed by and I was ready to go home," Irimpen told me. "But then my wife said, 'The levees broke. We can't go back.'" The damage to New Orleans lingered; they ended up staying in Dallas for months.

"I saw the physical signs of stress. There was a lot of insomnia, just a lot of worrying, constantly talking about what are we going to do next?" Like many first generation immigrants in their community, her parents had limited fluency in English. They struggled to figure out how to apply for funds for rebuilding. So, Pham and other youth in the community, who were fluent in English and computer savvy, stepped up to help the older generation.

We're joined now in New Orleans by independent journalist Jordan Flaherty, who was in New Orleans when the hurricane hit, returned to the city soon after being evacuated, to help with relief efforts and to report on what was happening in the streets, particularly to the poor Black communities that were most affected by the hurricane. He's won awards for his reporting on people left behind in the New Orleans city jail after the hurricane and is the author of Floodlines: Community and Resistance from Katrina to the Jena Six. He's joined us many times over the years.

While not officially a sequel to his two HBO projects ("When the Levees Broke" and 2010's follow-up, "If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise"), Lee's latest look at the Big Easy still feels like a capper - perhaps an epilogue, given its truncated length (88 minutes as opposed to four hours), revived themes, (when a subject mentions "systemic racism," Lee plasters the words onscreen like a title card),

Researchers have defined mass trauma as wars, natural disasters, mass shootings, and pandemics (Theodoratou, Kougioumtzis, Yotsidi, Sofologi, and Megari, 2023). The label of mass trauma also indicates that the trauma is persistent and widespread; the nature of mass trauma also results in human needs being greater than the available resources, thereby hindering the potential for those affected to be able to heal.

A few months after Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana in August 2005, Jenna Jordan went on a search for other queer women. She was looking for camaraderie with people like herself who had returned to New Orleans after the storm. Some neighborhoods with sizable gay populations such as the French Quarter were largely spared from flooding, but areas with queer people of color and lesbians, such as Mid-City, weren't as fortunate.

"Come on in," she says. "As you look to the left, you'll see one of the trademark X's. These were put here by first responders. Each symbol has a meaning. This is the date, September 22nd. This is the number of people deceased in the home." If searchers find hazards like gas or a collapsed structure, they note it in the X. A musty smell lingers inside the home, re-created by artists. "This is actually all carefully placed, even though it looks like chaos," Rosenthal says. "This is what the survivors would have seen when they returned home," after the water receded.

This series is a devastatingly precise illustration of systemic failure, political impotence and media distortion.

Ivor Van Heerden's early warnings about the vulnerability of New Orleans to hurricanes went unheeded for years, emphasizing systemic failures in disaster preparedness and response.