Night after night for months, Alex Webber stitched her way through a pile of tiny colored beads, transforming them into an intricate mosaic depicting a pot of boiling crawfish.
It was her costume last year for Mardi Gras, the celebration that had routinely drawn her back to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. She held onto her creation for whenever she needed reminding of her capacity for withstanding tough times, and of the city that always helped her through them. Lately, that has been often.
Twenty years ago this week, Katrina took her home and job and essentially set her adrift, leading her to leave the city she had called home for roughly a decade. She eventually settled in the mountains of western North Carolina, where she raised her daughter, remarried, started a business, lost it to another natural disaster and opened it again.
Still, New Orleans has never felt that far away. She routinely cooks Camellia red kidney beans, visits her friends there as often as she can and maintains her membership with one of the Mardi Gras krewes that puts on parades and parties in the city during the Carnival season.
“I didn’t stop loving the city,” Ms. Webber, 55, said. “I’ve loved her ever since I met her.”
Katrina forced a brutal calculus upon hundreds of thousands of New Orleans residents. Their affection for the city was suddenly balanced against the daunting struggles that they would confront if they stayed in a place where physical devastation and emotional trauma were so widespread.
For many, the realization was as obvious as it was painful: They couldn’t do it.
The storm caused a mass migration, draining the city’s population. In the years that followed, as New Orleans fitfully clawed its way back, the vast majority of those who left returned home — it might have taken them a few months, or a decade, but they made it.
Yet there is still a sizable contingent — as many as 70,000, by some rough estimates — who planted themselves elsewhere and stayed.
The reasons varied widely, as did the destinations. But the anniversary was a milestone that reminded many of them how distance did not spare them from the heartache and hardships created by the storm, nor did it sever their ties to the colorful yet peculiar city where they had been rooted. In ways big and small, tangible and intangible, many people who were displaced back then say they can see elements of New Orleans and their experiences there show up in their lives, even now.
“It’s still home,” said Paula Johansen-Riley, who ended up in Colorado after floodwaters ravaged her house in New Orleans East in the last days of August 2005. “We left New Orleans, but New Orleans has not left us.”
In Louisville, Colo., between Denver and Boulder, her family’s new house stood out with its New Orleans Saints flags and fleur-de-lis decorations. After the team won the Super Bowl in 2010, her husband scrawled “Who dat?” on a bedsheet he draped across the garage door, and then had to explain to neighbors that it was the team’s rallying cry. Her dog is named Brees, after Drew Brees, the Saints’ longtime quarterback.
Ms. Johansen-Riley even keeps an account open with a seafood vendor near the New Orleans airport. Her orders of shrimp and crawfish are boxed up and put on a plane to Denver.
Her family was part of the abrupt exodus that began after Katrina made landfall in Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005, as a Category 3 hurricane. It walloped the Gulf Coast with a surge that overwhelmed the elaborate but insufficient flood protection system that allowed for a city of a half-million people to exist below sea level.
Roughly 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded, the water high enough to reach rooflines. A government response condemned as delayed, chaotic and even negligent contributed to an extended crisis that horrified the country.
One result was a form of purgatory that trapped many of the tens of thousands of people who were displaced, leaving them suspended between the old life they could never fully return to and a new one that remained frustratingly beyond their grasp. They crammed into hotels with no clear checkout date or moved in with relatives, friends and even strangers, all while navigating mazes of bureaucracy for government aid. It was a disorienting slog of anxiety, uncertainty and cabin fever.
Many ended up in Baton Rouge, the state capital 80 miles away, as well as Houston, Dallas and Atlanta. But people also left for Los Angeles and Chicago, following relatives who had abandoned the South long ago. Some went as far as Alaska, staying with families who had volunteered to take people in.
Eventually, a tide shifted and the migration began to reverse. A study using government data to observe the movements of New Orleans residents from 2006 to 2019 found that white residents were the first to come back in large numbers, and that Black residents had a more staggered return. Many of the low-lying neighborhoods that had the worst flooding were predominantly Black, one of the biggest factors fueling the racial imbalance.
When it came to the pace of return, “race and flood depth were, by far, the most important indicators,” said Elizabeth Fussell, a sociologist and demographer who started the study as a professor at Tulane University and is now a professor at Brown University.
A year after the storm, 56 percent of displaced residents had returned to New Orleans. By 2019, 85 percent had done so, according to data tabulated by Dr. Fussell. The data did not indicate whether they stayed in New Orleans after that.
For all the fresh hell the storm presented, Katrina also magnified to a glaring extreme the chronic challenges that had long afflicted New Orleans — and that continue to do so. A declining population is one of them.
In the decades before the storm, the city bled residents as industries withdrew and the rise of suburbs and the highway system opened up alternatives. More recently, one of the biggest forces driving people away has been affordability, with the costs of housing and property insurance growing out of reach. Yet again, many have seen no choice but to leave.
The dispersal of New Orleanians out into the country has come with culture shock. The lore of New Orleans is full of clichés and hype, but they saw the ways their city, its landscape and its traditions were so distinctly different from the rest of the country, trading rows of shotgun houses and neighborhood dives for subdivisions, chain restaurants and ample parking.
Art Bouvier, a New Orleans native who moved to Indianapolis before Katrina, saw his parents’ struggle to adjust when they joined him there when they were in their 60s, after Katrina destroyed the family home. Both have since died. “They tried,” he said of their honest effort at adapting. “Settled as well as you can in a strange town, with a strange culture and none of your possessions.”
For many of the displaced, it wasn’t just traditions and an abundance of pride they carried with them from New Orleans. There was a lot of pain, too, lingering for years.
“To be completely honest, I was not in my right mind,” said Ms. Webber, who fled to Houston and then Atlanta before settling in North Carolina. “I had terrible insomnia for a decade after that.”
In Richmond, Texas, southwest of Houston, Nicole Eugene keeps a teal stuffed Care Bear on a shelf that was a gift from one of her sisters. “This is all I have from Katrina,” she said.
In 2005, she had just moved back to New Orleans after receiving her master’s degree in Ohio. Practically everything else was ruined by floodwaters that reached nearly to the ceiling in the duplex her family owned. Her clothing, her books, years of artwork that she had created — gone.
One of the most persistent things that she and others took with them was the fear of reliving the nightmare. The reality of a changing climate has meant that no matter where they have ended up, the threat of disaster increasingly looms over them.
Dr. Eugene, a communications professor at Texas A&M University in Victoria, bought a house in 2020, and she worries about losing it to another storm. “I definitely have an extra anxiety,” she said.
For Ms. Johansen-Riley in Colorado, it’s difficult to look back on the storm that upended her life with appreciation. But with the benefit of time and some healing, she could recognize that she knew how to handle herself in a crisis.
She could be decisive, like when she told her husband she thought staying in Colorado was the best option for their children. She could lose nearly everything and figure it out. And there were people in this new place, including some she barely knew, who were generous and caring.
“That’s what Katrina taught us,” she said.
A wildfire near Louisville in 2021 forced Ms. Johansen-Riley to evacuate her home. She did not panic, nor did she scramble to pack. “Here’s what I took — my kids are right here, my dog is right here,” she said. “Here’s my laptop and my documents, and I brought some beer and wine. That’s it.”
When Ms. Webber moved to a small town in North Carolina called Marshall, part of the appeal was her belief that the turmoil and loss caused by Katrina could never happen there. But last year, Hurricane Helene caused furious floods in her mountainous, rural region. A 29-foot wall of water crashed into the bicycle and coffee shop she had opened with her husband, debunking her theory.
Cleaning up and rebuilding is much more arduous at 55 than it was at 35, her age when Katrina hit, she said. But in other ways, the past experience helped her.
“You kind of knew what the first steps were,” she said. “You know that life comes back because you lived that.”
The theme for her krewe’s Mardi Gras parade last year was Southern nights — “anything between sundown and sunup.” She drew inspiration for her costume from “a very particular crawfish boil at a friend’s house,” she said.
It had taken place a little over a decade ago, during another turbulent time in her life. Her previous marriage was faltering. She felt hurt, confused, depleted. Her friends insisted that she come.
She did not make a costume for Mardi Gras this year. Recovering from Helene and reopening her shop did not leave her with energy to spare, much less the 200 hours that the beading required.
With or without one, she knew that New Orleans would take her in and give her what she needed.
Rick Rojas is the Atlanta bureau chief for The Times, leading coverage of the South.
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