Katrina: The Levees Were the Disaster

The storm made landfall on August twenty-ninth, two thousand five, as a Category Three hurricane. By the time Katrina reached the Louisiana coast, it had weakened from what meteorologists feared most. The levees should have held.

They did not hold.

At the Seventeenth Street Canal, at the London Avenue Canal, at the Industrial Canal, the federal flood barriers failed. The failure was not because the storm exceeded design tolerances. That is the critical fact, the one that the Army Corps of Engineers' own subsequent investigation confirmed: the levees failed at storm-surge levels within the range they were designed to withstand. They failed because they were built wrong. Soil conditions were misread. Sheet-pile depths were insufficient. The engineering was inadequate, and the inadequacy was federal.

Water came into the Lower Ninth Ward at a speed and volume that gave residents almost no time to respond. Roughly one thousand eight hundred thirty-three people died across Louisiana, the most commonly cited documented figure from the Times-Picayune and Levees.org analysis. The majority of the dead were elderly Black residents who could not evacuate, or who had decided not to, or who had nowhere to go. They died in attics and on rooftops and in the Superdome and in the water. The Lower Ninth Ward, the neighborhood you are near right now, was among the hardest hit: a predominantly Black working-class community built on land that sat below sea level, behind levees the government had assured them would protect them.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency's response became a national study in institutional failure. Director Michael Brown's now-famous exchange with the president, in which he was told he was doing a heck of a job, was broadcast while people were dying in the streets of an American city.

The displacement that followed was the largest movement of Americans since the Dust Bowl. Between two hundred fifty thousand and three hundred thousand New Orleans residents were scattered across the country. The return was not neutral. Homeowners with capital came back faster. Renters came back slower or not at all. The federal government demolished public housing developments, including the St. Bernard, the Lafitte, the Magnolia, and the Calliope projects, before residents could return, replacing thousands of units of affordable housing with far fewer mixed-income units. The city that reconstituted itself was a different city from the one that had been there before.

What the levee maps had always shown, and what the flood confirmed, was that the geography of New Orleans was a geography of race and class written in water-table levels. The highest, driest ground along the natural levees of the Mississippi was where the French Quarter and the Garden District sat. The lowest, newest, most flood-prone land was where the poorest and Blackest communities had been concentrated for generations. August twenty-ninth, two thousand five, did not create that arrangement. It only made it impossible to look away from.