Twenty years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina—still the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history—made landfall in New Orleans. Many mark the storm as the transition point to a new age of extreme weather impacts. The Federal Emergency Management Agency more than tripled the size of its Disaster Relief Fund going forward as a result of Katrina and two other major hurricanes in 2005.  

Yet two decades later, disasters of this scale have become so common that FEMA has been on track to run out of its Disaster Relief Fund for the second year in a row, unless Congress issues an emergency aid package.  And in this anniversary week, more than 180 FEMA employees have endorsed a letter submitted to members of Congress, urging their defense of the agency's continued operations in spite of the President's stated intent to eliminate or severely curtail its funding. The 36 co-signers that opted to use their names have been placed on administrative leave until further notice, The New York Times reports.  

This is the context for today’s conversation with the host and co-creator of the Peabody Award-winning podcast miniseries “Floodlines”, Vann R. Newkirk II.  Vann traces the events surrounding Hurricane Katrina as a demonstration of the ways a community's risk exposure and recovery assistance are often determined by race and class.  These disparities became nationally visible both in the immediacy of the disaster and long after, as some New Orleanians were able to return and recover their homes and livelihoods, while for many others such recovery still remains out of reach.    

Duke and Vann also look at Hurricane Katrina’s invigoration of a national and federal movement for environmental justice. Now that this work is being targeted and dismantled, they discuss how to maintain focus in the face of such dramatic reversals and the implications for the next major storm.   

Be sure to tune in again next week when we look further into the post-Katrina recovery period with one of its primary leaders, HR&A President and CEO Jeff Hébert, who formerly served as first deputy mayor for the City of New Orleans, executive director of the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority, and as one of the first chief resilience officers appointed under Rockefeller’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative.  

Relevant content from Vann R. Newkirk II 

Listen to the “Floodlines” podcast series, including “Part 9: Rebirth”, released five years later  

“Why the EPA Backed Down” (The Atlantic, September 2024)  

“What America Owes the Planet” (The Atlantic, June 2024)  

“The Coronavirus’s Unique Threat to the South” (The Atlantic, April 2020)  

“Climate Change is Already Damaging American Democracy” (The Atlantic, October, 2018)   Relevant articles and resources  

“Banks accounts for $20B climate program frozen amid Trump administration scrutiny” (The HillI, February 2025)  

“The Color of Coronavirus: COVID-19 Deaths By Race and Ethnicity in the U.S.” (APM Research Lab, October 2023)  

“An Exodus Unlike Any Other: Why Half the People in This Community Moved Away After Hurricane Katrina” (ProPublica, December 2022)  

“Flooding Disproportionately Harms Black Neighborhoods” (Scientific American, June 2020)  

“Hurricane Flooding and Environmental Inequality: Do Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Have Lower Elevations?” (Socius, 2017)  

“Remembering Katrina: Wide racial divide over government’s response” (Pew Research Center,  August 2015)  

Related Ten Across Conversations podcasts  

Catherine Coleman Flowers: A National Voice for Rural and Unincorporated America  

Financing Our Future: Justice40’s Legacy Beyond November  

Envisioning a Just Future for All with Dr. Robert Bullard  

Credits:
Host: Duke Reiter
Producer and editor: Taylor Griffith
Music by: Hanna Lindgren, Lupus Nocte, Hushed
Research and support provided by: Kate Carefoot, Maya Chari, Rae Ulrich, and Sabine Butler  

About our guest:
Vann R. Newkirk II is a senior editor at The Atlantic and is host and co-creator of the 2021 Peabody Award-winning podcast miniseries “Floodlines,” which documented Hurricane Katrina, and of the 2023 podcast miniseries “Holy Week”. He is an ASU Future Security Senior Fellow, Fellow of the New America Political Reform Program, and 2022 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. In 2024, Vann was named Journalist of the Year by the Washington Association of Black Journalists.