Twenty Years After the Water Came

Twenty years after Katrina, the water has receded but the lessons remain. The storm revealed not just broken levees, but broken systems—and two decades later, the fires, floods, and inequities continue. Will we finally learn?

Twenty years is long enough to forget, long enough for a generation to grow up not knowing the sound of helicopters circling above a flooded city, or the sight of grandmothers waving towels from rooftops. But for those of us who lived through it, who walked through the Lower Ninth Ward when it was nothing but water and silence, forgetting is impossible. Hurricane Katrina was not just a storm. It was a mirror held up to the soul of this nation, and what it reflected was devastating.

Katrina made landfall on August 29, 2005, and within hours the levees failed. Eighty percent of New Orleans was underwater. Nearly 1,400 lives were lost, and hundreds of thousands were permanently displaced. The damage totaled $186 billion—still one of the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history. But the real toll was measured not in dollars, but in broken families, erased neighborhoods, and the trust lost between a people and their government.

I was 26 years old when my church sent me to Louisiana in the aftermath of Katrina. I wasn’t a policymaker then. I wasn’t a federal official. I was a young man who couldn’t shake the feeling that if I had the strength in my body and a van full of volunteers, then I had a duty to help. We rescued families, we sat with them as they tried to piece together their lives, and we did what little we could. But when I left, I carried something heavier than exhaustion. I carried the question: how could the most powerful nation in the world let this happen?

That question never left me. It shaped the rest of my life.

Katrina as an Inflection Point

Katrina revealed what many of us already knew: that disasters are not “natural” in their impact. They expose what is unnatural about our society—who has resources, who does not; whose communities are fortified, whose are neglected; who is deemed worth saving, and who is left to fend for themselves.

The poorest residents of New Orleans—predominantly Black, many without cars or bank accounts—were stranded. They were told to evacuate, but with what money? With what transportation? They were told to wait, but for how long? Families crowded into the Superdome without food, water, or medical care. Others took refuge in the Convention Center, where the dead lay uncollected. And the federal government’s response was lethally slow.

Kanye West’s unscripted words on live television—“George Bush doesn’t care about Black people”—weren’t just celebrity shock. They were an indictment that rang true for millions of Americans who saw the same indifference in the images of suffering that played across their screens. It wasn’t just a president who failed. It was a system that had long underfunded levees, neglected infrastructure, ignored poverty, and treated Black life as expendable.

Katrina was not the exception. It was the preview.

Twenty Years On: The Unprepared Nation

Two decades later, I stand before you not just as that young volunteer, but as someone who went on to serve as a federal regulator, as Regional Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, leading the nation’s most environmentally impacted region. And I can tell you, with sobering honesty: we are still unprepared.

Yes, some levees are stronger. Yes, emergency plans are better on paper. But the deeper inequities that Katrina laid bare remain. We are still a nation where zip code determines survival. Where rural communities drink from poisoned wells, where cities like Jackson, Mississippi, lose water for weeks, where children in Flint, Michigan, still carry lead in their blood. Where wildfires reduce entire towns in California to ash. Where the Texas grid collapses under the weight of cold air, leaving seniors to freeze in their homes. Where train cars derail in East Palestine, Ohio, and families are left to breathe chemical smoke.

If Katrina was the drowning, the last two decades have been the burning. Baldwin told us it would be the fire next time, if we failed to reckon with our sins. Well, here we are. The fire is not metaphor. It is real. And it is everywhere.

The Cost of Displacement and Climate Gentrification

We must also speak of the displacement. Hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents never returned home. The Lower Ninth Ward, once a proud and thriving community, remains scarred by abandonment and gentrification. Developers saw opportunity where families saw loss. Wealthier newcomers rebuilt, while original residents were priced out or locked out by red tape, bad insurance, or the sheer impossibility of starting over.

This is climate gentrification—the new face of injustice. Those with resources move to higher ground; those without are left behind, or forced out. It is a phenomenon spreading far beyond New Orleans: from Miami, where high-elevation neighborhoods are being snapped up by investors, to cities across the country where climate risk and housing affordability collide.

If we do not change course, displacement will become the defining feature of American life in the climate era. Who gets to stay, who has to leave, and who can afford to return will determine the future map of this nation.

The Heroes We Must Remember

But even in the rubble, there were heroes. The first responders who braved rising waters. The neighbors who rescued each other in boats and on makeshift rafts. The grassroots organizations that stepped in where government failed—groups that fed, housed, and organized when bureaucracy faltered.

I want to salute them today, because history often forgets the grassroots. It elevates governors and generals, but it is ordinary people who carried this nation through its darkest hours. The pastors who opened their churches. The teachers who reunited classrooms in strange cities. The community leaders who fought to bring their neighbors home. Without them, Katrina’s story would be only tragedy. With them, it is also resilience.

Climate Security is National Security

There is a cruel hypocrisy in how we talk about national security in America. We pour billions into weapons, walls, and wars, while defunding the very agencies tasked with keeping our people safe from the threats that actually arrive at our doorsteps. FEMA, EPA, HUD, CDC—these are not luxuries. They are frontline defenses in a climate era. And yet year after year, they are under attack by those who would rather call climate a hoax than confront the reality that storms, floods, and fires are already destabilizing our communities.

If climate change is not a national security issue, then what is? When an American family loses everything in a flood, when an entire city is without water, when our energy grid collapses, when children die from heat waves—these are not acts of God alone. They are failures of policy. They are the wages of denial.

The Long Road Ahead

So where are we, twenty years after Katrina? We are at an inflection point again. The storms are stronger, the fires are hotter, the costs are higher. But the question is the same as it was in 2005: will we learn, or will we repeat?

To learn means to invest—not just in concrete levees, but in the social levees that protect communities: affordable housing, healthcare, education, and resilient infrastructure. To learn means to treat climate change not as a partisan debate, but as the defining public health and security challenge of our century. To learn means to center the voices of the most vulnerable, not as victims, but as leaders of the solutions.

The long road ahead requires courage, vision, and accountability. It requires leaders willing to say that democracy itself is weakened when its people are left to drown, burn, or suffocate.

A Call to the Next Generation

I am speaking now not just to policymakers, but to the next generation—the young activists, students, engineers, and organizers who will inherit this fight. Twenty years after Katrina, the work is not finished. The levees of inequality are still standing. But you have the power to unbreak them.

Run for office. Organize your neighborhoods. Study the sciences that will build our resilience. Demand that climate justice be treated as the civil rights struggle of our time. Do not wait for permission. Do not wait for another disaster.

And know this: optimism is not denial. It is discipline. It is the refusal to give up in the face of overwhelming odds. It is the habit of turning despair into coalitions, of turning crises into opportunities to reimagine what is possible.

Reflection

Katrina was a storm, yes. But it was also a prophecy. It warned us what happens when we neglect, deny, and delay. Twenty years later, the question is whether we will honor that warning.

I remember the families I helped into that van in 2005. I don’t know where they are now. Some may have returned. Others may never have made it back. But I know this: they deserved better from their country. And so do we all.

The storms are not waiting. The fires are not waiting. Neither can we.

If Katrina taught us anything, it is that we cannot build resilience on broken foundations. We must reckon, we must rebuild, and we must reimagine—together. Because the water is rising, the fires are burning, and the levees of inequality will not hold unless we all take responsibility for their repair.

That is our charge. That is our choice. And the time is now.