It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina reshaped the city of New Orleans.
Spike Lee examined the disaster with two big HBO documentaries, the 2006 “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” just a year later, and a 2010 sequel, “If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don’t Rise,” and he was executive producer of a new work for Netflix, “Katrina: Come Hell and High Water,” a three-part series released Aug. 27 and now available to stream. Other nonfiction films have been made over the years, including “Trouble the Water,” winner of the grand jury prize at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival, Nova’s “Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Drowned a City,” “Hurricane Katrina: Through the Eyes of the Children,” and “Dark Water Rising: Survival Stories of Hurricane Katrina Animal Rescues.” The storm also framed the excellent 2022 docudrama set in a hospital, “Five Days at Memorial.” As a catastrophe with a human name and a weeklong arc, it remains infamous and indelible.
In the new, gripping five-part “Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time,” on National Geographic and streaming on Hulu and Disney+, director Traci A. Curry (“Attica”) necessarily repeats many of Lee’s incidents and themes. But she finds her own way through mountains of material in the series that is at once highly compelling and difficult to watch — though I suggest you do.
Though there are many paths to take through the story, they lead to the same conclusions. Curry speaks with survivors, activists, scientists, officials and journalists, some of whom also appear in archival footage, but her eye is mainly on the victims: the people who lost their homes, people who lost their people, those unable to evacuate, for lack of money or transportation or the need to care for family members. If the storm itself was an assault on the city, most everything else — the broken levees, the flooded streets, the slow government response, the misinformation, the exaggerations and the mischaracterizations taken as fact — constituted an attack on the poor, which in New Orleans meant mostly Black people. (“The way they depicted Black folks,” says one survivor regarding sensational media coverage of the aftermath, when troops with automatic weapons patrolled the streets, “it’s like they didn’t see us as regular people, law abiding, churchgoing, hard-working people.”)
Effective both as an informational piece and a real-life drama, “Race Against Time” puts you deep into the story, unfolding as the week did. First, the calm before the storm (“One of the most peaceful scariest things that a person can experience,” says one 8th Ward resident), as Katrina gained power over the Gulf of Mexico. Then the storm, which on Aug. 29 ripped off part of the Superdome roof, where residents had been instructed to shelter, and plunged the city into darkness; but when that passed, it seemed the apocalypse had missed them.
On Sept. 2, stranded victims were still waiting outside the Superdome to be evacuated. (Mario Tama/Getty Images/TNS)
Then the levees, never well designed, were breached in multiple locations and 80% of the city, which sits in a bowl between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, found itself under water. Homes drown: “You’re looking at your life, the life that your parents provided for you, your belongings being ruined, your mother’s furniture that she prided is being thrown against a wall.” Residents are driven onto roofs, hoping for rescue. Dead bodies float in the water. This is also in many ways the most heartening part of the series, as neighbors help neighbors and firefighters and police set about rescuing as many as possible, going house to house in boats running on gasoline siphoned from cars and trucks. A Coast Guardsman tears up at the memory of carrying a baby in her bare arms as they were winched into a helicopter.
And then we descend into a catalog of institutional failures — of governance, of communication, of commitment, of nerve, of common sense, of service, of the media — which, camped in the unflooded French Quarter or watching from afar, repeated rumors as fact, helping create a climate of fear. (Bill O’Reilly, then still sitting pretty at Fox News, suggests looters should be shot dead.) More people escaping the flood arrive at the Superdome, where the bathrooms and the air conditioning don’t work, there’s no food or water and people suffer in the August heat, waiting for days to be evacuated. Instead, the National Guard comes to town along with federal troops, which residents of this city know is not necessarily a good thing.
Before Katrina hit, the city — grotesquely unprepared — told residents to shelter at the Superdome. Here, survivors waited outside in the heat Sept. 2. (James Nielsen/AFP/Getty Images/TNS)
Many speakers here make a deep impression — community organizer Malik Rahim, sitting on his porch, speaking straight to the camera, with his long white hair and beard, is almost a guiding spirit — but the star of this show is the eminently sensible Army Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré (now retired), a Louisiana Creole who was finally brought in to coordinate operations between FEMA and the military. (We see him walking through the streets, ordering soldiers to “put your guns on your back, don’t be pointing guns at nobody.”) Honoré, who is free with his opinions here, had respect for the victims — “When you’re poor in America, you’re not free, and when you’re poor, you learn to have patience” — but none for foolish officialdom, the main fool being FEMA director Michael Brown, mismanaging from Baton Rouge, who would resign soon after the hurricane. (President George W. Bush had said, four days after Katrina, “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heck of a job.”)
When buses finally did arrive, passengers were driven away, and some later flown off, with no announcement of where they were headed; family members might be scattered around the country. Many would never return to New Orleans, and some who did no longer recognized the place they’d left, not only because of the damage but because of the new development.
On Dec. 15, 2005, at the corner of Caffin and Roman streets in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans, Shirley Welch Medine visited her home. The city had deemed it at least 50% inhabitable. The house was under 13 feet of water after the levee broke. Her son Michael came out to photograph the interior to prove she could not live there. (Rob Ostermaier/Daily Press file)
The arrival of this series and the Lee documentary is dictated by the calendar, but the timing is also fortuitous. Floods and fires, storms and cyclones are growing more frequent and intense, even as Washington strips money from the very agencies designed to predict and mitigate them or aid in recovery. Ken Pagurek, the head of FEMA’s urban search and rescue unit, has resigned, reportedly over the agency’s Trump-hobbled response to July’s flooding in the Texas Hill Country, following the departure of Jeremy Greenberg, who led FEMA’s disaster command center. Trump, for his part, wants to do away with the agency completely.
And yet Curry manages to end her series on an optimistic note. Residents of the Lower 9th Ward have returned dying wetlands to life, creating a community park that will help control the next storm surge. Black Masking Indians — Mardi Gras Indians — are still sewing their fanciful, feathered costumes and parading in the street.
