I’ll never forget the morning of August 30, 2005, a day after a vicious hurricane named Katrina nearly destroyed my hometown of New Orleans, flooding 80 percent of the city with up to 20 feet of water in places after levees failed, causing 1,400 deaths . I could not stay away from the CNN coverage.
At work I was glued to my computer screen, unable to do anything much. My co-workers seemed to understand why I was in sort of a daze. I felt traumatized and I was 800 miles distant. It was all so surreal looking, like the end of time. This was the city where I had grown up, and though I haven’t been back in more than 30 years, I love the place and its cultural uniqueness, its endless possibilities for exploration and discovery, and its food and music. However, for many complex reasons, I don’t know if I will ever see it again. That’s the subject for an entirely different essay.
I hadn’t planned, during the peak of our own hurricane season this summer, to think or write about the impact Katrina had on me. But just today I decided to observe the 20-years anniversary of The Flood by re-posting two essays I wrote years ago, the first right after the storm when the world watched in shock as people looked at the videos and photos of the flooded city and the horrible aftermath unfolding in live TV coverage. It was quite horrifying. Time’s passage, and the rather rapid recovery of the city, had put the events of two decades ago in a rarely, if ever opened, memory cupboard. The second essay is from my online journal two years later and the storm hit.
A recent article from npr was disturbing and jolted my memories. <
New Orleans still hasn’t fully recovered. Many people who left never came back. The city has about three-quarters of the population it had before the storm. Some areas in the French Quarter, the Garden District, and Uptown look fine. In many other neighborhoods, vacant houses, overgrown lots and the lack of businesses remind people of a disaster that happened before many of them were born.
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/24/nx-s1-5469888/hurricane-katrina-20-years-new-orleans
From the Memory Vault
My Journal entry for August 29, 2005:
A terrible, once-in-a-lifetime hurricane has all but destroyed New Orleans. I have been watching CNN, mesmerized by the unbelievable, appalling and tragic sights seen in the film clips. It’s as the mayor said, you think it must be a nightmare from which you will awaken, but it’s all too real.
The human drama of the suffering there is unbearable to think about. I sit here in a kind of dazed state, constanting thinking about the city, remembering what it was like, my favorite places to walk, bike ride, eat out, or just take in the ambience of that once beautiful and fascinating city. I can almost see the old, electric streetcars rumbling down St. Charles Avenue. I see the grand old live oak trees that blanketed the city and that symbolize it for me. How many of them are left? It’s almost unrecognizable now, from what I am seeing on TV.
I lived there for 23 years, through college. Then I left and only came back once or twice for brief periods. It has not been my home since 1973, but it’s where all my memories of childhood and youth reside, where I went to junior and senior high. It’s where I mowed lawns, and made forts and played basketball and football with the neighborhood kids.. I find myself thinking about my favorite sandwich shops, the bookstore on Maple Street I so loved to visit, the pastry shops, all the delicious food, and the unique people of that city. I remember my first apartment in the Gentilly area. The Lakefront. The University of New Orleans. The Garden District and Uptown. The ferry boats that crossed the Mississippi River. Mardi Gras parades. It’s all there in my mind. The memories keep coming.
Now, much of New Orleans is under water. People are suffering and in increasing danger in the stifling Superdome and high rise hotels. There is looting and near panic. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people who did not or could not leave the city in advance of the storm still need to be rescued, and time is running out. It’s a tragedy of immense proportions that is unfolding minute by minute and hour by hour. How can it be happening? It’s surreal. I feel so strange.
Will the once vibrant city be able to be resurrected from the destruction? How long will it take?
Images of those desperate people on rooftops waiting to be rescued from the flood waters will be seared in my consciousness forever. It is unimaginable. Words fail me.
Financially, help the organizations which are mobilizing to assist the victims of the hurricane. Pray for the city and it’s people. Be thankful for simple things such as electric appliances, air conditioning, and all the modern conveniences we take for granted.
Most of all, though, I am thankfful for friends and loved ones, and life itself. Basic things. This tragedy puts other worries and concerns in perspective. This is life and death right now for those people who are attempting to survive.
What is happening to this country, to our planet, and to our sense of security and well being? All I want to do is escape to some refuge, or to the ocean to hear the surf and wind and be lost in my thoughts as I try to sort through my emotions and feelings. Everything seems so fragile and capable of being lost.
I just can’t comprehend it.
From the Memory Vault,
Journal entry for September 15, 2007
Two years after Katrina, I still find myself pulled almost daily to Web sites and news about New Orleans. I read articles in magazines and struggle to comprehend the devastation that was brought to the city where I grew up by that most awful storm. It still seems surreal, knowing that whole areas of the city are still blighted and empty, vast stretches of wasteland, forlorn and deserted. I think about the Gentilly area where my first apartment was during college, and can’t bear to realize whole sections of that part of the city were under eight feet of water for weeks.
But I also see and read about the glimmers of hope, about how the spirit and will of the people are being reasserted in the return of so many exiled from the storm who can’t or won’t live anywhere else. New Orleanians are stubborn people. Home is their anchor, their very physical soul. Generations stay there. They never leave unless they have to.
I have as many good as bad memories of New Orleans from my youth and later as an adult when I returned from time to time during a prolonged period of uprootedness and wandering in the 80s. But one thing I will always remember fondly is the food, specifically, the comfort food of red beans and rice with sauage, seafood gumbo, jambalaya, and beignets (fried dough with powerded sugar doughnuts) and coffee at Cafe du Monde in the French Quarter. Above all to me, is my favorite New Orleans food, the fried oyster po boy sandwich, an unforgettable eating experience.
When I was working summers in college on the Mississippi River, my co-worker buddy and I would sometimes walk a few blocks to a sandwich shop where we could get one of those delectable meals, hot fried oysters, lettuce, tomato and mayo, on a slightly hard crusted piece of French bread which no one anywhere else in the country seems to be able to emulate or reproduce. When you have been working out in the sun all day, and are young and in college, you work up a powerful appetite, and those sandwiches disappeared in no time flat, downed with ice cold Barq’s root beer. I also loved the shrimp and roast beef po-boys.
In happier times then and now, the people of New Orleans celebrate their rich traditions and heritage of food and cooking. I am sure that many of the countless corner neighborhood bars, restaurants and grocery stores that sold po boys are coming back, slowly but surely. Families in New Orleans will always get together for meals, whether it be gumbo, huge steaming plates of boiled blue crab, po boy sandwiches, or countless other favorite dishes. Just as the music of New Orleans is unique, so is the food. When I go back at last for a visit, I will know where many of my favorite memories reside.
Here are some of the riches of New Orleans food discussed above.
https://forums.egullet.org/topic/68293-eating-new-orleans-po-boys-pictures/
I want to end with this quote from my ChatGPT research on Katrina which sums up the situation now 20 years later, and offers hope for the future:
…New Orleans is a miracle of endurance—but also a reminder that recovery is never only about buildings; it is about people, memory, culture, and belonging…
If ever there was a city where memory and culture encapsulate nearly everything about a place, New Orleans would be it.
From ChatGPT:
How fully has New Orleans recovered?
• Infrastructure: Strong
• Tourism: Fully recovered
• Population: ~85% recovered
• Neighborhoods: Uneven
• Culture: Resilient but pressured
• Inequality: Still deep
• Psychological scars: Long-lasting
Photographic records of the aftermath of Katrina:
Robert Polidari: After the Flood
https://prix.pictet.com/cycles/water/robert-polidori
Getty Images Archive of Katrina photos:
https://www.gettyimages.com/search/2/image?phrase=hurricane+katrina+aftermath&tracked_gsrp_landing=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gettyimages.com%2Fphotos%2Fhurricane-katrina-aftermath
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