Hours before sunrise on August 29, 2005, the concrete levees surrounding the most populated wards in New Orleans began to crack.
Hurricane Katrina had made landfall as a rapidly weakening Category 3 hurricane on the shores of Louisiana, a city which had weathered countless storms before.
This time, it was different.
Levees around the city crumbled, sending high levels of water well above sea level into communities.
‘I thought everyone was dead,’ Lucrece Phillips, a resident of the 8th ward region of the city, told Metro. She escaped the floodwater in her home through an attic window.
Other residents had no way to escape. As bodies floated through muddy water, others clung to roofs, trees, or desperately ran for higher ground.
It’s been 20 years since the storm of the century changed New Orleans forever, displacing millions, killing over a thousand people, and causing £92 billion in damages.
Time has stood still for the survivors, left to pick up the pieces of their communities with little help.
But from the moment the levees broke, residents say the narrative around what led up to it and destroyed the lives of millions has been misconstrued.
‘That was not the story’
Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath dominated international news headlines.
Distressing images were plastered all over the news. A mother who was photographed feeding her newborn outside of the Superdome as the National Guard marched past. The body of a young man who was seen floating beneath an overpass bridge.
85-year-old Milvertha Hendricks was pictured wrapped in an American flag blanket outside of the Superdome, where thousands sought refuge, waiting for help.
But there were other clips, smaller instances, which were broadcast and cast the victims of the storm in a harsh light.
Headlines were broadcast stating locals were ‘looting’ supermarkets in the aftermath after they waited days for help that never came.
Tracy Curry, director of Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time, told Metro news coverage at the time made it seem as though the people of New Orleans had descended into a sort of ‘animalistic’ state, preying on each other.
‘That simply wasn’t true,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘Of course, anytime there is a catastrophe or chaos, you’re going to have opportunists. But that was a small part of the story.
‘That was not the story. The story is how extraordinary the people in the city were, always, but especially during Katrina.’
New Orleans native Lynette Boutte adds: ‘The news kept saying people were looting. I thought, ‘No, they weren’t.’ They were looking for survival equipment. They were looking for food.
‘If the tables were turned and their skin colour was different, it would be a different story in the national media.’
‘There are no more children here’
Lynette was born and raised in Tremé, one of the oldest African-American neighbourhoods in the United States.
Coming from a musical family, she was immersed in the culture of New Orleans from a young age. She owns a beauty salon two doors over from where her grandmother was born.
After Hurricane Katrina, the sounds of homes filled with music and children in the street were replaced with silence. What was once a bustling ‘black neighbourhood’, as she calls it, is now quiet.
‘Before, every third house in her neighbourhood had at least one, if not more, children,’ she told Metro.
‘There were four schools within walking distance from where I am, which have all closed.’
The reason? Damages after Katrina and the cleanup meant those who had called the streets of New Orleans home for all their lives couldn’t afford to live there anymore.
The price of Lynette’s home has skyrocketed as wealthy developers have since come to the area, building homes with high price tags, meaning residents cannot afford to return to their old community.
What actually caused the devastation in Katrina?
Though Hurricane Katrina was a strong storm, New Orleans had been through worse before.
Katrina was different because of the levees breaking. But they didn’t break from the high levels of water, but crumbling infrastructure, which failed the residents.
Engineering failures in the federally constructed levees and other hurricane protection systems caused a major collapse, ultimately killing thousands.
Aid was also withheld for days due to fear of looting ongoing in the wards, which turned out not to be true. Many waited for days without necessary food and water in the chaos afterwards.
‘This is like Manhattan. You can’t afford to pay the rent over here. The average house, which previously sold for 25 to 50 thousand, is now selling for upwards of $400,000,’ she said.
‘We’ve had developers come in and buy these properties and rent them for an astronomical amount that the people of New Orleans can’t afford. But the love is still there, the culture is still there.
‘We have our music. We have our food. And there’s something that Mother Nature can’t even take away from us. As long as we keep each other together, we’re good.’
New Orleans, ‘The Big Easy’, 20 years later
For the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, the pain of the storm and its aftermath is still as fresh as it was 20 years ago.
‘I didn’t see any bodies, but my child and a lot of my friends and family saw bodies,’ Lucrece tells Metro.
‘There are times when you dream about it, and there are times when you have nightmares about it.’
Lucrece and Lynette both returned to their home town after the storm and found the city was a shell of its former self.
‘I came back a month later to see things and gather some belongings, it was horrible. Everything was brown. New Orleans used to be green and lush – there wasn’t a green leaf in sight,’ Lucrece remembers.
In the midst of the devastation, small glimpses of happiness appeared. As Lynette walked down Esplanade Avenue, she saw small notes left on the refrigerators placed curbside.
‘People wrote funny things,’ Lynette laughs. ‘They found the humour in it, which was good because that means that you’re going to heal. You’ve got to be able to have something to allow you to heal.’
Lynette is back in her family home in Tremé, still operating her salon. Her family picks up children from nearby neighbourhoods for music lessons each week to teach the children about a culture that was snatched away from them in 2005.
‘As long as we continue to make them understand where their heritage and where their roots are from, we’ll be all right,’ she said.
Recently, the mother of a three-year-old girl who sheltered on a bridge with Lynette called her to say her daughter was playing basketball in her last year of college.
‘I’m just so proud of her that she and the other kids who were with us on the bridge continued in life,’ she said. The young girl didn’t return back to New Orleans after the storm, like thousands of others.
Lynette’s family have been urging her to leave New Orleans as well, but she said the more they try, the less likely it is she’ll go. ‘It’s home,’ she said.
But both Lynette and Lucrece fear the US hasn’t learned from the disasters since the hurricane – crumbling infrastructure nationwide is a ticking time bomb.
Lucrece points out the recent damage in North Carolina during Hurricane Helene, where similar photos of bodies floating and survivors waving for help on roofs emerged.
She said: ‘We need to learn that people’s lives matter. Other places are finding out that if you don’t have a person who is compassionate running the system, you’d better get deep boots because you’re going to be walking in a whole bunch of crap.’
Lynette added: ‘Mother Nature is taking her trip around the United States right now, making everybody understand she doesn’t care where you are.
‘When you have poor infrastructure, poor responses by your people who are supposed to be helping, then you’re going to have death and destruction, no matter where you live.’
As for the Big Easy, Lynette is clear: ‘Everybody could leave New Orleans at some point, but like my mom said, it’s a boomerang.
‘You’re gonna come back to this bad boy. No matter how long you stay away, you come back.’
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