Two decades ago, my husband and I were hurrying, in a vain attempt, to board up our Mississippi home as Hurricane Katrina intensified into a Category 5. It was August 2005, and the United States was pouring immense sums of money into the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of our neighbors had already left, some were out in the yard trimming limbs that could potentially pose a threat to a rooftop, an effort we would all learn was fruitless in the days to come. We were a young family, living paycheck to paycheck, and couldn’t afford to evacuate until my in-laws called, worried, and offered to pay our way.
That Sunday we left with no idea where we were going, but we were grateful to be going. We ended up at a hotel near Destin, Florida, before the weather started to deteriorate. The trip that would normally take about two and a half hours would take nearly six that day. Bumper-to-bumper traffic stretched as far as the eye could see. Still, countless others across the Gulf Coast had no one to call for help; they had no other option but to “ride it out.” Nearly 1,400 people lost their lives in the fight for survival that fateful Monday morning.
I recall finally making our way back to our house three days after Katrina hit. On the outside, for a brief moment, it looked seemingly normal. That was, until we noticed that water was still seeping from the bricks. On the inside, everything was destroyed. My brother-in-law, who was still evacuated in Florida, asked us to check on his home. He lived just down the street from us, in a beautiful new waterfront home right on the Mississippi Sound. It was dusk when we were finally able to walk down to his house. Walking down the long driveway, we were struggling to see in the absence of light. It became too dangerous to keep walking because we started to encounter what we thought were broken tree limbs from all the southern oaks that once lined the entryway to their home. Not able to make out anything, we decided to turn back — that’s when my husband and I both realized — it was not tree limbs we were walking on and stepping around but large pieces of my brother-in-law’s house. We couldn’t see the home. Nothing remained to see.
Only after returning to a total loss and struggling for months to rebuild did I understand: whether folks were able to evacuate or not, we were all left defenseless in some way. We were left defenseless by crumbling infrastructure that did not stand a chance against a 20-foot storm surge, by the fine-print clauses on insurance policies, and by bureaucratic trickery by those serving only the interests of capital. And more significantly, we were left defenseless by a government that chooses not to prioritize the real safety and security of its citizens.
It’s common for those watching a climate disaster from afar to blame victims who didn’t evacuate or were left unprepared in the aftermath. This is especially true for hurricanes, which, unlike tornadoes or earthquakes, come with advanced warnings. On the Gulf Coast, tracking storms and knowing preparedness tips is second nature. Still, that knowledge doesn’t guarantee safety.
Evacuation requires resources: money, a vehicle, gas, and a place to go. It requires job security and, for some, access to medical care. Stocking up on essentials like food, water, batteries, and medicine also costs money. For those living paycheck to paycheck, a grocery list is a tight budget with no room for extras. How can someone with no money left after rent and bills afford a hurricane fund? If you can’t save enough to fix a broken appliance, you certainly can’t save for a catastrophic storm.
According to a YouGov poll, nearly a quarter of adults said they most likely could not afford to relocate from their home due to severe weather. It is estimated that tens of thousands of people were unable to afford to leave New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina made landfall because of a lack of transportation, money, or medical needs and constraints. The conditions that prevented people from evacuating safely did not occur in a vacuum. Years of not investing in universal healthcare, jobs with living wages, and affordable and low-cost housing left many households defenseless in the face of a climate disaster before the first forecast model was ever cast.
Much of a community’s safety during a climate disaster is in the hands of decision-makers and policymakers, including the number of shelters that will be open, the number of emergency personnel on duty, and the strength and durability of the city’s infrastructure.
Mississippi took the direct hit from Hurricane Katrina, with the dangerous and deadly northeast quadrant pounding the state’s coast. However, a majority of the deaths claimed by Katrina occurred in New Orleans due to a weakened and inadequate storm levee system and a conscious choice by the federal government not to invest in improvements to the system.
“If you can’t save enough to fix a broken appliance, you certainly can’t save for a catastrophic storm.”
Between 2001 and 2005, the George W. Bush administration consistently underfunded hurricane protection for New Orleans, allocating only a fraction of the requested amount. This underfunding occurred alongside major tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. In 2003, the administration pushed a $125 billion tax cut while slashing funds the Army Corps of Engineers stated were critical for maintaining New Orleans’s flood-control infrastructure. These budget decisions directly led to a halt in major work on the city’s hurricane levees for the first time in 37 years, leaving the city dangerously vulnerable just before Katrina struck.
The entire population of New Orleans was left defenseless due to a decision not to invest in adequate infrastructure for the city.
I still cannot find words adequate enough to describe those first few days. I cannot capture the smell, the confusing geography, the utter devastation. Nothing looked the same. We got lost driving to my in-laws’ house because there were no houses. No tree lines that looked familiar. Every yard, every neighborhood looked the same — just random pieces of mud-stained debris on indistinguishable plots of land.
The way a lot of people described it, and the way we tend to describe the aftermath of many climate disasters, is “it looked like a warzone,” or “it looked like a bomb went off.” The irony of those words, though, becomes even heavier when you consider that halfway across the world, the US was actually bombing neighborhoods. In 2005, the United States was nearly two years into the illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, wars that in the end would cost the United States between $4-6 trillion and, even worse, millions of deaths both directly and indirectly, according to Brown University’s Cost of War project.
The days and months after Katrina hit were a time of great uncertainty for most folks on the Gulf Coast. Do we rebuild? Do we relocate? How do we afford either? Because a significant amount of Katrina’s damage was caused by the massive 20-30 foot storm surge, insurance companies classified the damage as flood damage rather than hurricane damage. Very few homeowners had flood policies. This led to a majority of households without any means to rebuild or relocate — leaving them effectively homeless.
It was painfully clear as we sat on vacant lots that even though our communities, in comparison, might have looked like a warzone, we were not going to get a Pentagon-like funding treatment. The thoughts and prayers came fast, but the means to recover did not.
The willingness of our federal government to throw unlimited tax dollars and resources into an illegal war, resulting in the death of innocent people and destruction of a sovereign nation, versus the slow and reluctant response to providing for its citizens who had just lost everything, was jarring but not surprising. Our country has long prioritized funding war and imperialism over actual protection and safety. For instance, after a severe hurricane season in 2004, Louisiana requested $26 million to upgrade its levee system. In response, the federal budget instead granted just $4 million — a sum equivalent to what the US spent on average every 20 minutes in Iraq at the time.
Katrina did more than destroy communities; it heightened the contradictions to levels the country had never seen. Now, zooming out 20 years later, it is clear that no lessons were learned.
Back in 2005, the government put up over $100 billion for hurricane recovery, which included recovery efforts for Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. But that was nothing compared to the nearly $500 billion it spent on the military and wars that same year. In total, the so-called “war on terror,” that lasted nearly 20 years, cost us at least $8 trillion — all in the name of “defense.”
Today, Washington is funding Israel’s ongoing genocide, a years-long war in Ukraine, and the militarization of our cities. The government spends billions of tax dollars on preparing for a war on China, which we are provoking ourselves. All the while, national weather programs, such as the National Weather Service and NOAA, are being defunded. But what exactly are we defending? And what are we leaving undefended?
Meanwhile, the ever-worsening climate crisis and climate disasters like Katrina put US citizens in far more danger than terrorism. The National Climate Assessment says extreme heat kills over 1,300 Americans every year — and that’s not even including floods, hurricanes, or wildfires. Around 550 people have died in terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001. Those deaths are a real tragedy and should be prevented, but they amount to less than a single year of heat-related deaths. Since Hurricane Katrina, over 14,000 people have died from climate disasters here in the United States between 2020 and 2024.
If the juxtaposition of Hurricane Katrina and the ongoing war on Iraq in 2005 heightened conditions, then the current trajectory in 2025 is taking them to another extreme. The annual Pentagon budget is set to exceed $1 trillion this year, with more money being funneled into wars, occupations, genocides, and US militarization both abroad and at home that protects no one, while this year alone, at least 350 people in the United States have died in catastrophic flooding — including dozens of young girls attending a summer camp in Texas. As I write this, US warships are headed to Venezuela while a powerful hurricane churns in the Atlantic. The National Guard from many southern states, states that bear the brunt of many climate disasters, is being deployed to our nation’s capital to combat “violent crime,” even as the district has seen a decrease in crime.
What if, instead of dumping hundreds of billions into illegal invasions and forever wars, the US invested in structurally sound communities where the residents could thrive instead of barely surviving paycheck to paycheck? What if it had put more resources into affordable housing, healthcare, and jobs that pay a living wage? Could more people have evacuated? Could more lives have been saved? What if Louisiana had received the $26 million it requested rather than the $4 million? Could the levee failure not have happened, or perhaps not been as fatal?
What if, in the name of “defense,” the government had funded better warning systems and updated public infrastructure around rivers known to rise? Could those defenseless girls at the summer camp have been kept safe?
Even today, no one can answer these questions with certainty — our elected officials refuse to even hear them. Instead, they continue to serve the war economy and not the people. They define “defense” as the idea that we need weapons and war, and to protect us from abstract ideas about terror and foreign “enemies,” instead of defining it by the need for livable wages, affordable and safe housing, durable and up-to-date infrastructure, evacuation shelters, public transportation, and community warning and safety systems to protect us from the very real enemy — inevitable climate disasters.
Hurricane Katrina was a traumatic experience. All these years later, I still cannot watch any of the many documentaries on it — the memories are just too painful. I wish no one would ever have to endure what we all did 20 years ago, but unfortunately, as we continue to deny all warnings about increasing climate dangers, more and more people are going to be left vulnerable and defenseless. What will it take for things to ever change? How many more lives, how many more of our communities have to be destroyed?