In the early hours of August 29, 2005, Arnold Burks woke to the sound of screams as 125-mile-per-hour winds whipped through his neighborhood.
When hit, the 13-year-old was one of the roughly 100,000 people still in New Orleans, a city in Louisiana near the US Gulf Coast. Many couldn’t afford to leave or didn’t have a car. Burks’ dad and older brother chose to rough it out at home, and he stayed with them.
As morning broke, it seemed the city had been spared. Burks even remembers having fun wading through the floodwaters.
But as the day wore on, the water crept higher.
New Orleans sits on low-lying marshland, much of it 6 feet (1.8 meters) below sea level. Its levees had been built to withstand a Category 3 storm but couldn’t cope with Katrina’s huge surge. When the levees broke, water engulfed the city.
Burks and his family were forced to flee. The water was 8 feet deep, and since Burks couldn’t swim he clung to a tire as they made their way to the top of a nearby parking garage. He passed a neighbor’s house with only the roof visible.
“And I don’t know if they’re in there or not…to this day, I still don’t know,” said Burks.
Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath
Katrina happened 20 years ago, but the storm has cast a long shadow on the lives of Burks and the thousands of other children — now adults — who lived through it.
The storm claimed some 1,200 lives and left New Orleans underwater for weeks. During that time the city’s infrastructure collapsed, power was out and medical care was unavailable. Many of the city’s poor and predominantly Black neighborhoods were disproportionately affected.
Residents experienced increasingly dire conditions as they waited to be rescued. Thousands sheltered in the city’s Superdome stadium, which many reports described as unsanitary, overcrowded and unsafe.
According to some estimates, around 5,000 children were reported missing immediately after the storm. Many waited weeks or even months before being reunited with their families. More than 370,000 school-age kids were immediately displaced and over a third remained uprooted for years. Countless numbers lost their parents and homes.
When it comes to dealing with disasters, children and teens have different , said Eric Griggs, vice president of Access Health Louisiana, one of the state’s largest networks of health centers.
“Imagine someone just taking your brain and taking everything you know, shaking up your head, shaking up your memory, shaking everything, and then ripping it away. And putting it back after it was destroyed,” said Griggs.
A study by Harvard researchers into the emotional impact of the storm on New Orleans’ youth found one in six had persistent following the event. Parents were often faced with limited access to professional support for their children.
Breaking the silence on children’s experiences
Many of these kids didn’t talk about their experiences for years, said E’jaaz Mason, who was also 13 when Katrina hit.
He woke in the early morning of August 29 to find his mother glued to TV reports. The day before she had driven him five hours north to escape the storm. Their house was one of the 150,000 homes inundated with water.
To unravel the impact Katrina had on a generation of children like himself, Mason, now a filmmaker and lecturer at Stanford University, was part of the film crew that interviewed dozens of people, including Burks, for the 2022 documentary “Katrina Babies.”
Interviewees spoke of being haunted by the lives lost in the storm, but also of entire neighborhoods being displaced, . Half of the city’s Black community never returned.
The disaster had a profound impact on Mason. But he didn’t realize it until he started getting in trouble when he was in college, eventually leading to a night in New Orleans’ most notorious prison.
“Had Katrina not happened, I don’t think I would have ever even gotten to that point,” he said.
Mason was one of the many children who evacuated before the storm. Three months later he returned briefly to his house to find it no longer looked like home. Possessions were scattered outside. Inside, it smelled of mildew and everything was still damp. The storm had destroyed every photo he had of his late father.
“I just lost all emotion at that point…it just did not feel real,” said Mason.
Healing from Katrina through storytelling
Mason said working on the documentary film was a healing experience as well as an important part of getting New Orleans to talk about hurricane preparedness, post-traumatic stress disorder and keeping communities connected.
He remembers the intense atmosphere at an early screening in the city. “There were audible tears and people crying during the film,” he said.
At one point, the director asked his parents how they imagined kids dealt with the disaster and they responded saying they thought they were fine and happy.
“There was an audible like ‘mmhh’ like just reverberated through the whole theater,” remembered Mason. “My mom, who was sitting behind me, she leans forward and she wraps her arms around me. And is just like, ‘I am so sorry. I had no idea that y’all was dealing with this type of stuff.’”
Are future generations in New Orleans vulnerable to climate change?
Two decades after Katrina, Mason reflected that while the trauma made him tough, it was a bitter trade-off for the levee failures that day. “We should have been prepared for this,” he said.
The American Society of Civil Engineers found in their 2007 report that the levee system failed in every way — it wasn’t high enough, strong enough or able to compensate for the fact that New Orleans is sinking.
In the years since, the levees and floodwalls have been upgraded and the city has withstood other hurricanes. But it’s still vulnerable.
Louisiana’s coastline is eroding fast, which makes it more susceptible to storms. The state is losing, on average, an area of wetlands the size of a football field every hour, according to environmental nonprofit, The Nature Conservancy.
This is in large part — specifically warming waters and rising seas, the same factors that are already making intense rainfall and flooding from hurricanes more likely.
Experts that the US is increasingly vulnerable to hurricanes, due to cuts to federal agencies.
The Trump administration has , vital to weather forecasting, and plans to dissolve the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which provides disaster response and was strengthened after Katrina.
Following Katrina, the people of New Orleans have often been portrayed as “resilient,” but Mason feels this narrative could make future generations more vulnerable, as it takes the pressure off those in power to act.
“It takes the onus off them and says, ‘You know what, it doesn’t matter if we, if we figure out , because the people who deal with it, they’re going to be fine, they’re going to bounce back,” said Mason.
Edited by: Jennifer Collins
Holly Young adapted this story from an episode of DW’s Living Planet podcast. Find the audio version here.
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