Healing From Hurricane Katrina, 20 Years Later

As the anniversary of the harrowing event approaches, New Orleans natives still grapple with its effects on their mental health

- Dominique Fluker

It was silent. I'd never heard the city so quiet. There were no birds, dogs or cats, but more importantly, no music. In all my years of living, I had never heard New Orleans like that." This is how Ausettua Amor Amenkum, 69, recalls her return to her home, following the destruction Hurricane Katrina brought upon her native town in August of 2005.

It's now been 20 years since the crushing tropical cyclone submerged at least 80 percent of New Orleans. Many of us watched the storm ravage the city, the waters of Lake Pontchartrain pouring over houses and streets. Helpless Black people pleaded for aid atop the roofs of their homes as floods reached terrifying levels. In pure shock, we saw the destruction play out on the news, knowing that the people of New Orleans were trapped. Black American lives hung in the balance, the result of poor communication between state and federal agencies (due to a massive miscalculation of how bad the storm would be) and a slow and disappointing response from FEMA. The devastation gripped the nation.

For those who lived through it, the vivid memories run deep. “Can you imagine houses just pushed off their foundation on top of a boat? It was haunting,” Amor Amenkum says of the unrecognizable state of her neighborhood at the time. “When I got home, the streets were still impassable, because all the trees and wires were down.”

When Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005, it not only left nearly 2,000 people dead, but it displaced approximately 1.5 million residents, most of whom were low-income and living on the edge to begin with. Places like New Orleans's Lower Ninth Ward, as well as the Seventh Ward, were particularly hard hit, because of those areas' proximity to the Mississippi River and the clay-soil foundation on which the neighborhoods are built. As a result of the hurricane, those communities were left desolate.