MICAH: This is On the Media. I’m Micah Loewinger
BROOKE: And I’m Brooke Gladstone. Now we turn to our new original series, American Emergency: The Movement To Kill FEMA. Their investigation into how this agency came to be so despised and distrusted, Micah and OTM Senior Producer Eloise Blondiau looked at FEMA’s Cold War origins. How secrecy and kooky doomsday planning inspired wild conspiracy theories that haunt FEMA to this day. If you haven’t heard it, we highly recommend that you check out Episode One in our podcast feed. This week, we’ll hear about the disaster most associated with FEMA and its dismal reputation. I’ll let Micah take it away…

 

MICAH: Hours after Hurricane Katrina had passed through Louisiana, a man named Marty Bahamonde stepped off of a Coast Guard helicopter. He had short grey hair, a FEMA lanyard around his neck, and a look of deep worry on his face. He had just surveyed the Hurricane's damage to New Orleans from the sky and was ready to deliver the worst news of his career to a group waiting in the city's Emergency Operations Center.

Marty Bahamonde: ​There were probably about 15 people around that table, Mayor Nagin, the Homeland Security director and all of their staff. And I asked them to spread out a map of New Orleans and I went methodically where that helicopter had flown and what I had seen

Marty had been sent to Louisiana to arrange an upcoming press conference for the leader of FEMA, not to facilitate disaster relief. On paper, he was not the right person to be doing this job.

Marty Bahamonde: I was an external affairs guy. I was somebody who just talked to the media. And so I think some people didn't think I was qualified to make that type of an assessment.

But in that moment, he was the only FEMA official in the city. The only representative from an agency that had predicted years ago that a storm would one day swamp New Orleans.

Marty Bahamonde: This was the worst case scenario, and I spelled it out to them. There were people that started to cry at that meeting. I think the sense in that room was that our lives have changed forever and what do we do now?

This is episode two of our four-part series, American Emergency: the Movement to Kill FEMA. The Trump administration’s modern day assault on FEMA is the culmination of countless negative narratives about the agency. Some exaggerated or out-right conspiratorial. Some real, and deserved. 

This week, we’re looking at the true catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina.  A storm that took nearly 1,400 lives, washed away countless homes, and left a scar on the city and everyone who survived it. While FEMA is not a first responder, the agency had promised to prestage supplies and personnel and then woefully under-delivered. The historic failures forever marred public perceptions of the agency. As one former senior FEMA official put it to me, the memory of Katrina was "a monkey on our backs." And it intensified the suspicion that FEMA was doing more harm than good.

Archival news tape: FEMA's a dirty word. So it's just a four letter word. So I just say FEMA now instead of the other nasty words.

CBS: Criticism of the federal government response to the disaster mounts.

Archival news tape: FEMA is a disaster. 

CBS: Where's FEMA? Where's the mayor?

The aftermath of Katrina did usher in sweeping reforms, but last year whistleblowers at the agency warned that Kristi Noem's Department of Homeland Security had left FEMA vulnerable once again...

News tape: in a new letter to Congress, fema employees warn that the Trump administration is undoing two decades of progress since Katrina

News tape: it's called the Katrina Declaration and signed by 36 employees while dozens more chose to remain anonymous. 

News tape: They're very concerned that we could see the next. Katrina level disaster based on the stripping away of FEMA that we have seen

To understand what went wrong in 2005 and what could go wrong again today, we need to take a closer look at the agency before the storm hit.

Marty Bahamonde: FEMA was well aware of what the risks were to New Orleans. And just the year prior did a major exercise called Hurricane Pam to play out that scenario of a major levy failure in New Orleans because of a hurricane. 

Peter Standring: They're talking perhaps as many as 50,000 dead. Up to a million homeless and a city underwater, 

This is PBS correspondent Peter Standring, who spoke with researchers about the fictional Hurricane Pam exercise in 2004 for a segment that more or less predicted the events that occurred a year later. Just as the Pam-exercise anticipated Katrina would overwhelm levees and floodwalls that were built to protect New Orleans from the bodies of water that surround the city, Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River.

Peter Standring: In this doomsday scenario, levees intended to keep water out. Trap it inside New Orleans,

But even though a Katrina-like storm was on FEMA's radar, natural disasters were falling behind on the list of national priorities. Following 9/11, Washington DC had been swept up in an all-consuming frenzy.  Just as Ronald Reagan had let Cold War paranoia subsume FEMA, the War On Terror had caused it to shapeshift once again. 

George W. Bush: The Homeland Security Act of 2002 takes the next critical steps in defending our country. Dozens of agencies charged with Homeland Security will now be located within one cabinet department

FEMA, with its dual focus on natural disasters and civil defense, was hoovered up by the Department of Homeland Security. 

Marty Bahamonde: FEMA was now buried, beneath several layers of other leadership within DHS.

FEMA's top leaders from the 90s, who had shown that the agency could respond to natural disasters quickly and efficiently, were replaced when President George W. Bush came into office. And even his new political appointees would find themselves out-muscled by their new bosses at DHS.

James Lee Witt: Let FEMA coordinate all of the catastrophic natural disaster events the way it has been doing it. It does not need to be fixed. It's working really well. 

Former FEMA administrator James Lee Witt - that Clinton appointee we heard about in episode one, sounded the alarm about the new bureaucracy at a DNC hearing in 2004, a year before Hurricane Katrina. Witt said he'd been hearing from staffers who were frightened by all the abrupt changes at the agency.

James Lee Witt: When we left in 2001, FEMA was ranked one of the top agencies in the federal government to work for. Just recently in the Washington Post it was ranked dead last - 28th.

Similar to what's happening today under Trump, the agency's true-blues were jumping ship.

Marty Bahamonde: Our workforce had dwindled by almost half - we were probably at our weakest state when Hurricane Katrina hit.

[ MUSIC UP ]

Archival news tape: a monster of a hurricane, a category five storm with winds of a hundred sixty, a hundred sixty five miles an hour…. A storm on track to be the biggest hurricane ever to hit the United States.

By Sunday, the morning before landfall, Marty Bahamonde had arrived in New Orleans. As a seasoned PR guy, he'd made these sort of trips many times before.

Marty Bahamonde: about 300 days out of the year I was working a disaster, all sizes, little floods, large hurricanes. And I did that for eight years

This time around, his assignment was to prepare a post-storm press conference for his boss, Michael Brown, Bush's director of FEMA, who was in DC watching the storm approach the Gulf...

Archival news tape: is FEMA ready for this because you guys have been pretty taxed lately with all the hurricanes of last year and this year's busy hurricane season.
Michael Brown: Well, we are ready. We're going to respond, and we're gonna do exactly what we did in Florida… [fade down]

Before coming to FEMA, Michael Brown had no prior emergency management experience. The press didn't pay much attention to him until after the storm, when they began to scrutinize his resume, which included a failed Congressional bid and a rocky stint leading the International Arabian Horse Association.

Judd legum: To give you an idea of of what he did there.

Investigative journalist, Judd Legum on Democracy Now back in 2005.

Uh, he spent a year investigating whether a breeder performed liposuction on a horse's rear end. So I think that the 11 years he spent there probably didn't serve him too well when he transferred over, to fema,

Brown was not qualified to lead the agency on a good day. And certainly not through the crisis that was about to unfold...

Marty Bahamonde: the seminal moment was four o'clock in the morning, prior to landfall, 

Marty Bahamonde.

Marty Bahamonde:  I got a bang on my hotel door and somebody was outside saying, we are evacuating the hotel. Everybody must get out. 

Marty scrambled to find somewhere to wait out the storm. The highways were clogged as thousands of people fled the city. None of Marty's contacts in New Orleans would even pick up the phone. He finally got a hold of a local official, who invited him to crash at City Hall, which is how he ended up across the street from the Superdome, the stadium where the Saints play.

Marty Bahamonde: The Superdome was identified in previous planning that it would be a shelter of last resort that they would put people in the Superdome because it had been rated to be able to withstand high winds from a hurricane.

The afternoon before the hurricane hit the city, Marty watched the first wave of people lining up at the Stadium. Almost entirely Black residents. Some brought suitcases, coolers of food, and pillows. For Americans around the country, who were watching the crisis unfold on TV, the stadium would become maybe the clearest symbol of failure and neglect from city officials and FEMA. It became a hell on earth for evacuees like Chavon Allen. 

Chavon Allen:   I try to forget New Orleans, and bury what I went through… It is not something that I'm comfortable talking about or something I'm proud to talk about.

In 2005, the year of Katrina, when Chavon was 18, her family moved to a new house in New Orlean’s 8th ward, after her mom won a housing lottery...

Chavon Allen: she had received a Section eight voucher, so that was our first time living in like a huge house coming from the projects.
Micah: I know this is many years back now, but when do you first remember hearing that a big hurricane was coming to New Orleans?
Chavon Allen: when did I hear about Katrina?
Micah: Yeah, the first time.
Chavon Allen: My grandma was talking about this big major hurricane coming. It is supposed to be bad, We watched when Ray Nagin said, everybody needs to evacuate

Mayor Nagin: I am this morning declaring that we will be doing a mandatory evacuation

Chavon Allen: We like, where are we gonna go at? Where are we gonna go?

Chavon's family were among the 100,000 plus who did not leave the city. The Hurricane Pam report had correctly predicted that elderly, disabled, and poor residents, especially people without cars, were most likely to stay. Others just didn't believe the storm would be that bad. A year prior, some-600,000 New Orleanians had left the city ahead of Hurricane Ivan, a storm that pummeled the Caribbean and several states. New Orleans was largely spared. Which, to some, made the mayor's warnings before Katrina seem like another false alarm.

Chavon wanted to stay. She and her twin brother had been planning a party for their 19th birthday on Sunday, the night before the storm was supposed to hit. 

Chavon Allen: It started getting late, and that's when all our friends started arriving. So it was like a huge block party. We was listening to bounce music. Biggidy biggidy biggidy bounce music.

[ Bounce Music ]

Micah: So you had a nice birthday then
Chavon Allen: I had a nice birthday and it was a lot of drinking on that day....that was the last time I seen anybody I grew up with from New Orleans

Archival news tape: category five hurricane. Hurricane Katrina makes its way towards the city of New Orleans, expected landfall about five to 8:00 AM tomorrow morning.

Marty Bahamonde: I specifically remember at seven o'clock in the morning on Monday, the day of landfall,

 

Marty Bahamonde

 

Marty Bahamonde: The early speculation was that New Orleans had dodged a bullet

Archival news tape: By late this evening, onlookers were back in the French Quarter in the words of one, the fact that the damage wasn't worse was pure New Orleans luck, 

CNN: I would say there's nothing like the flooding that we might've anticipated. This was clearly a horrific storm. Clearly it is going to be a mess to clean up. But Wolf, they were expecting Armageddon here. Armageddon, it wasn't.

 

Marty Bahamonde: The media was down in the French Quarter where all the hotels were. And the French Quarter had fared pretty well. We didn't really discover what the true impacts were until about 11 o'clock in the morning. I was in the radio center at City Hall, and we got a report that the 17th Street Canal levee had broken and that water was pouring into the city. …. I said, wow, we need to go and see this.

This is how Marty ended up on that helicopter flight. When he first approached a Coast Guard pilot to ask him to fly him over the city, the man said no. Probably thinking: why is this public affairs guy trying to hog a precious helicopter?

Marty Bahamonde: So I told them a little white lie that I was there because the White House was counting on me to give them a situational awareness following the hurricane.

It worked. 

Marty Bahamonde: About 30 seconds into the flight I saw water for as far as the eye could see. 

He later estimated, correctly, that about 80% of the city was submerged. The biggest gut punch was the sight of the people standing on their roofs waiting to be saved. Many buildings had been pushed off their foundations and were jumbled together. He said they looked like someone had taken a bunch of dice and thrown them around.

Marty Bahamonde: I kept thinking to myself, I just need to let people know so that we can start to help people. I called Mike Brown directly.

The director of FEMA.

Marty Bahamonde: And I told him what I had seen, what the damages were, and he said, thank you. I'm gonna let the White House know. And we subsequently got on a conference call with fema, leadership in headquarters and FEMA leadership that was over in Baton Rouge. And I explained to them what I had seen and their response was, thanks for the information. We'll try to get you out of New Orleans as soon as possible. And that was it. No questions asked. No delving into what I had seen. 

No questions, no delving. Why was there so little curiosity among FEMA's leadership about a crisis that the agency had predicted years ago? How had it been left to a PR guy to sound the alarm? All while, with every passing hour, the situation seemed to be getting worse...

Archival news tape: it's almost like being in a war zone. If a home's not destroyed it's full of water and lives just torn apart here We can see these rooftops just barely sticking outta the water . Look at that. Those are homes. Those are homes. 

Coming up on American Emergency... 

CNN: I told you earlier today, I didn't think this had turned out to be Armageddon. I was wrong.

This is On the Media.

MICAH: This is On the Media, I'm Micah Loewinger. While FEMA's only guy on the ground was trying to alert the agency's leaders about the breach at the 17th street canal levee, Chavon Allen, had just celebrated her 19th birthday with a raucous block party in the 8th ward.

She slept through most of the storm and woke up with a head-splitting hangover when her dog, sopping wet, jumped on her bed. The first floor of their home was quickly filling with water. Her family was lucky to have a two-story house. Most of her neighbors didn't. Her mom, grandmother, and siblings waited on their balcony. They burned sheets to try to get the attention of helicopters buzzing above them. Eventually some guys from the neighborhood showed up in a little boat and offered them a ride to the Superdome.

Chavon Allen: My grandmother and my mom were like, no, we're not getting on the boats. We're gonna stay here. And I remember looking at my mom and saying, I cannot die on my birthday. I can't die here. And my mom and my grandmother stared back and I just remember telling them I love them. And whatever happens, happens. I remember I was real scared on the boat. And we saw a dead body. And that's when I knew Katrina was, it was real.
Chavon Allen: I'll never get the picture of this man outta my head for the rest of my life….
I remember it was a black guy. He had on a white shirt, he had on some black pants, and he was just face down in the water. I just remember screaming on the boat, just screaming and screaming and screaming and screaming all the way to the Superdome.

Not long after she arrived, Chavon was faced with more death.

Chavon Allen: it was a guy that took his life. He lost his whole family in a hurricane…He jumped. He jumped and landed at the bottom of the Super Dome
Micah: oh, that's so awful.
Chavon Allen: Everybody was just like shocked, everybody trying to talk to the national guards, begging the national guards to help, And the National Guards was just like, they didn't care about us at all.

Within a day Chavon discovered that her family had made it to the Superdome safely. Her grandmother reassured them that the floodwater would recede and they'd be able to leave in a day. But that’s not what happened.

Archival news tape: Thousands of evacuees sought refuge in that shelter of last resort only to be subjected to an unspeakable breakdown of law and order.

As the crowds at the Superdome grew, so did the wild rumors.

Archival news tape: There was a lot of looting going on. There was a shootout today as well. There were rumors of rapes, murders.
Archival news tape: Violence erupted, and there wasn't enough security to stop it. 

Tales of armed gangs. Babies, raped and killed at the Superdome. Mayor Nagin and law enforcement officials repeated some of these claims. As did CBS and FOX. Though investigators failed to find proof or first-hand witnesses. The reports about looting were true – sort of. It wasn't as if swarms of people were seizing on the moment to get some free swag and flat screen tvs. They were hungry. Chavon says she saw people trying to break into vending machines to get something to eat. FEMA had promised to deliver 15 trucks of water and 360,000 MREs (ready to eat meals). Only a fraction arrived:  5 trucks of water and 40,000 meals.

Marty Bahamonde: This is now becoming a disaster into its own right because of the conditions that were developing.

After wading back and forth through the flooded streets to visit the Superdome, Marty decided he'd be of more use just staying there 24 hours a day. Sleeping on the concrete while he relayed dispatches to FEMA headquarters. 

Marty Bahamonde: The Superdome had become a toilet bowl.
Chavon Allen: The bathrooms was like disgusting. They didn't have any running water. I saw a guy taking a poop by the concession stand just out in the opening.
Marty Bahamonde: The smell and the toxicity inside... was unbearable.
Chavon Allen: People were peeing in their seats in the Superdome. It was not safe and healthy for anybody to live in. 

Like so many survivors, Chavon had brought no supplies with her to the Superdome.

Chavon Allen: I left my house with the skirt I had on the maxi pad that I had on.

There was no toilet paper, let alone any sanitary products.

Chavon Allen: So I walked around every day with a bloody skirt on. I was covered in my own blood.

It was hot and humid. With little drinking water and no power for air-conditioning, people were fainting.  FEMA's medical staff, which was supposed to arrive before Katrina, came late and were quickly overwhelmed. Chavon's grandmother had a stroke.

Chavon Allen: And we didn't even know if she was gonna live if she was gonna die. She had no medical attention. It was a lot. It was a lot.

Chavon says her grandmother pulled through. But in that moment her family decided that whenever they could leave the Superdome, they were done with New Orleans. On Wednesday, the third day after the storm hit, Marty pulled out his Blackberry and sent an email to his boss. 

Marty Bahamonde: I sent this email to Mike Brown and it said, sir, I know that you know the situation is past critical. Here are some things you might not know. Hotels are kicking people out. Thousands are gathering in the streets with no food or water. Hundreds are still being rescued from homes.Plans developing for dome evacuation, but the hotel situation is adding to the problem. We are out of food and running out of water at the dome. Plans are in works to address the critical need… Phone connectivity is impossible. More later.

Brown was staying 80 miles away in Baton Rouge preparing for a TV hit on MSNBC that night. He never replied, but a few hours later Marty received an email about the FEMA director's activity. His press secretary was concerned that Brown's schedule was too packed and that his dinner would be rushed, especially considering the wait times at Baton Rouge restaurants. Another FEMA colleague forwarded the email chain to Marty as if to say "get a load of this."

Marty Bahamonde: Now this is Wednesday afternoon at 2:44. So we were well into our third day at the Superdome, and I responded, oh my God, in capital letters with eight exclamation points. Just tell her that I just ate an MRE and crapped in the hallway of the Superdome, along with 30,000 other close friends. So I understand her concern about busy restaurants. Maybe tonight I will have time to move the pebbles on the parking garage floor so they don't stab me in the back while I try to sleep. But instead, I will hope her wait at Ruth Christ's is short, so you can tell sarcasm in my response. Those kinds of emails that were going around, told me they really do not understand the human crisis that we're dealing with here.

And there were other signs. Some Katrina survivors had been directed to a different impromptu shelter a mile away at the city's Convention Center. Just like at the Superdome, thousands of mostly Black residents awaited rescue there without access to basic supplies. The day after Marty sent that email CNN's Paula Zahn asked Director Mike Brown about the lack of preparations.

Michael Brown: We just learned about that today, and so I have directed that we have all available resources to get to that convention center to make sure that they have the food and water.
CNN/Paula Zahn: Sir, you're not telling me you just learned that the folks at the convention center didn't have food and water until today are you?
Michael Brown: Paula? The federal government did not even know about the Convention Center people until today.

Outside the convention center, one man held up a tiny baby to the news cameras.

CBS: We got a baby, out here, they don't have no formula, no water, and they want us to survive out here. Where's FEMA? Where's the mayor?
BUTT CUT:
George W. Bush: Right now, the immediate concern is to save lives and get food and medicine to people so we can stabilize the situation.

Later that week, President Bush did a now-iconic presser with his beleaguered FEMA director.

George W. Bush: And Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. The fema directors working 24. They're working 24 hours a day. [FADE OUT]

On Friday DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff removed Brown from Louisiana.

Michael Chertoff Mike Brown has done everything he possibly could. To coordinate the federal response to this unprecedented challenge. I appreciate his work, as does everybody here.
CNN: That's how it sounds when you get fired in Washington. As for what Mr. Brown may think of it all, we do not know he wasn't allowed to answer questions.

His side of the story came out in the following months, when he appeared in a series of televised Congressional hearings about FEMA's Katrina response...

Michael Brown: My biggest mistake was not recognizing by Saturday that Louisiana was dysfunctional.

In his testimony, Brown said the blame should lie with the state and city officials who waited too long to order a mandatory evacuation. That FEMA's slow response during the storm could be explained, in part, by the fact that DHS officials had sat on reports about the levee breaches, including the calls from Marty Bahamonde after his helicopter ride.

Michael Brown: It's my belief that had there been a report come out from Marty Bahamonde that said, that a terrorist has blown up the 17th Street Canal levee. Then everybody would've jumped all over that. But because this was a natural disaster, that has become the stepchild within the Department of Homeland Security.

He argued that the focus on terrorism before Katrina had hampered its ability to prepare.

Michael Brown: We asked for money to follow on Hurricane Pam to do the implementation of those plans. 

Lawmaker: Who did you ask it from?
Michael Brown: We asked the Department of Homeland Security for it, sir. Okay. And we did not get that money.
Lawmaker: And who denied you that?
Michael Brown: What You have to ask DHS the process.

There was some truth to what Brown alleged. Katrina was a catastrophic breakdown of government at all levels -- there was plenty of blame to go around. When asked why he didn’t act sooner on Marty's warnings, he deflected by calling Marty an exaggerator. But, looking back, Marty’s assessments were accurate. Perhaps it was easier for Brown to blame the messenger than take responsibility for the horror that unfolded. 

Lawmaker: so how many total FEMA people were pre-positioned approximately at the Superdome?
Michael Brown: Uh, counting the team, which I will count as FEMA people, you know, a dozen.

When asked the same question by lawmakers, Marty contradicted his former boss.

Lawmaker:  was there anyone else, um, from FEMA in, uh, new Orleans on that Sunday?

Marty Bahamonde: No. 

Lawmaker: Uh, Monday?

Marty Bahamonde: no. 

Lawmaker: You took on the enormous responsibility and it goes beyond public affairs…. You were the chief life guard.

 This is the reason I wanted to speak with Marty Bahamonde in the first place. To me, his story symbolized the complexity of this agency's failures during the storm. That beneath the dysfunction among its leaders there were still FEMA workers who would do anything to help people. Even if it meant sleeping on cement floors at the Superdome or testifying against his boss in Congress.

Marty Bahamonde: I was honest, I wasn't trying to protect myself or protect anybody else. I was an emergency manager and what I saw in Katrina infuriated me, and we needed to do better.

After the hearings, lawmakers took the lessons they had learned and passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, PKEMRA. The law requires that FEMA's top leader must have professional emergency management experience. FEMA remained part of the Department of Homeland Security, but the act gave the agency more freedom to spend money and mobilize aid before and during disasters.  It also shielded FEMA from funding cuts by the Secretary of Homeland Security. Or at least it was supposed to….

Last year, whistleblowers at FEMA signed the Katrina Declaration – the letter that was shared with Congress claiming that the current administration has violated PKEMRA left and right, leaving the agency vulnerable once more. Trump has yet to nominate a permanent FEMA director for Senate confirmation. And insiders I’ve spoken to say his rumored pick, Cameron Hamilton, does not have the required experience to lead the country through the coming hurricane season. 

The whistleblowers also pointed to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s vendetta against FEMA. How she bullied workers at the agency; calling them names, while withholding funds and attempting to slash preparedness programs. All this was too much for Marty. Last year he decided to retire after 3 decades at FEMA.

Marty Bahamonde: when my leadership tells me that I'm worthless and that I'm part of a conspiracy to do wrong in this country. That's a hard thing to swallow. You say, I don't know that I see a future here.
Micah: fema, as you know, is sometimes a kind of a punchline. There was a Gallup poll from October of 2025, that found that it was the third least popular agency in the federal government. How much of that do you think is the product of FEMA's own failures?How much of that is the product of conspiracy theories and baseless allegations?
Marty Bahamonde: I think it's a product of human nature, when there's a disaster and you're impacted, you're angry, you're hopeless, you're mad. Life's changed, and all that you want is to be back to normal the next day. And that can't happen. And no FEMA can make that happen. We don't take it personally when you hear these ratings and everything, but I can tell you to this day, whenever there's a disaster, the first thing people say is, where's fema? Where's fema? Because they know that we're gonna be there to help and they want us. They need us.

After leaving the Superdome, Chavon Allen got on a bus to Texas and ended up in Houston, where she still lives today. For 16 years, she refused to celebrate her birthday.

Chavon Allen: I just felt like it was a lot of lives lost on my birthday and it wasn't worth celebrating. My mom told me that I can't keep living my life in the past, that I have to move on. I finally celebrated my birthday on my 35th birthday. I rented out a park and I gave myself a big, huge party. But even right now to this day, I feel like when I celebrate my birthday, I'm celebrating, the people that was lost in New Orleans

Last year, on the 20th anniversary of Katrina, her 39th birthday, Chavon worked up the courage to do something she'd never done before: she watched a documentary about the storm. A new Hulu series titled, "Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time."

Chavon Allen: I sat in my bed on my birthday and I actually cried. Like I said, this is what we actually went through during Katrina,

She was moved, in particular, by the film's media criticism — its analysis of the exaggerated news coverage of violence and looting.

Chavon Allen: I have three younger brothers that was in middle school going into high school and they caught the hate from the kids in the Houston schools. They used to get jumped on all the time just from being from New Orleans. The kids used to say, all y'all do is kill, steal, and rob people. And that's not my brothers and them, that's not their personalities. 

After watching the documentary, Chavon decided to tell her story, in her own words, for the very first time — on TikTok.

Chavon Allen: So I'm gonna talk about my stay in a Superdome for Katrina and how horrible it was to relive that trauma all over again.

At time of this recording, her video has been viewed nearly 90,000 times.

Chavon Allen: I guess it started hitting the algorithm of people from New Orleans… everybody started commenting on the video and started sharing my video, I was just like, I could finally let the past be the past and not be afraid to talk about it.

In the years since the storm, FEMA and climate change experts have begun to tackle one of its most salient lessons: natural hazards hit poor communities and people of color the hardest. Studies show that marginalized groups are less likely to trust government officials during big disasters, more likely to live in flood-prone neighborhoods, and less likely to receive adequate aid during the recovery process. These are basic facts. And yet, under orders from Trump's DHS, references to these disparities are being scrubbed from FEMA literature as part of a larger censorship campaign against language related to so-called DEI and climate science.

For most of my life, when I heard the word "FEMA," images from the tv coverage of Katrina, pictures I'd seen in a newspaper, flashed into my mind -- and I don't think I'm alone. The agency may never succeed in decoupling itself from its greatest failure. But even as it tried to build on lessons from Katrina, there were new challenges and new threats. 

Next week on American Emergency… 

 

News Anchor: an anti-government militia group known as Veterans on Patrol is claiming Hurricane Helene was caused by government controlled weather weapons. The group called Hurricane Helene an act of war.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in 2024, FEMA was hit by a tidal wave of disinformation.

 

Jaclyn Rothenberg:  I don't think any of us knew the magnitude of what this storm would mean in FEMA's history

 

MICAH: That’s it for this week’s show. This series is reported and hosted by me, Micah Loewinger. With additional writing and reporting from…

ELOISE: Me, Eloise Blondiau, On the Media’s Senior Producer. Jared Bartman designed the artwork for this series. Our fact-checker is Tom Colligan. Original music and mixing from Jared Paul. 

 

MICAH: Special thanks to Brenda Valdivia and Justin Knighten.