Twenty years ago this week, Hurricane Katrina ripped into Louisiana and left New Orleans flooded. Nearly 2,000 people died. Entire neighbourhoods were lost. It was the costliest storm in US history, and it reshaped how the country responds to disasters.
But the systems built in Katrina’s wake are now under threat.
Scientists and emergency managers are warning that cuts to forecasting and federal response systems risk leaving the US exposed in the midst of hurricane season, and as climate change fuels ever stronger storms.
The storm that changed America
Katrina made landfall on 29 August 2005 as a Category 3 hurricane. The wind was brutal, but it was the flooding that devastated New Orleans.
Built by the Army Corps of Engineers to help ships navigate the Mississippi River, the flood walls and concrete levees surrounding the city failed, leaving 80 per cent of it submerged for weeks.e
Thousands clung to rooftops waiting to be rescued. Others were crammed into the city’s Superdome stadium without food or medicine.
In all, 1,833 people died across five states, and the economic cost was staggering. Adjusted for inflation, damages topped $200 billion (€170 billion), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The city’s population has never recovered. From nearly half a million before the storm, it has dropped to 384,000 today. Many who fled Katrina never returned.
Forecasting gains are suddenly under threat
The scale of the failure forced many changes. FEMA was restructured. And NOAA launched a major research effort to sharpen its hurricane forecasts. New levees were built to protect cities from floodwaters.
Since 2005, forecast accuracy has improved 50 per cent, according to NOAA data cited by the non-profit Ocean Conservancy. Tracking and intensity predictions have become more precise, saving billions by allowing tighter evacuation zones and faster response.
In the last three years alone, predictions about the tracks hurricanes will follow have improved 8 per cent and intensity forecasts 10 per cent, according to Ocean Conservancy.
Those gains have come from long-term investment. NOAA’s Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, launched in 2007, built the research backbone for better models and data. Its Hurricane Analysis and Forecasting System, operational since 2023, now provides seven-day forecasts on storm tracks, intensity, surge, rainfall and even tornado risk. Upgrades planned for 2025 now aim to capture how multiple storms interact across vast distances, providing unprecedented detail to forecasters.
But all of this depends on NOAA’s full system being operational – its satellites, ocean sensors, planes, supercomputers and data from international partners. US lawmakers are now weighing cuts that would slash that system and reduce the staff who oversee it.
“NOAA saves lives. Period,” Jeff Watters of Ocean Conservancy said in a press release this week. “Cut any link in that chain and you weaken the whole and put people at risk.”
The warning comes as the Atlantic has started producing stronger storms than ever.
Hurricane Helene in 2024 was the eighth Category 4 or 5 hurricane to hit the US in just eight years – equal to the number that struck in the previous 50 years combined.
FEMA in crisis
NOAA is not the only American agency in turmoil.
According to a letter signed by more than 180 current and former employees at FEMA – the US Federal Emergency Management Agency created by President Jimmy Carter in 1978 – around one-third of the agency’s permanent staff have left since January. It follows criticism and threats of closure from the Trump administration. Senior officials were pushed out while inexperienced political appointees took over, the authors note.
In the letter – titled the ‘Katrina Declaration’ – they accused the Trump administration of ignoring the lessons that lawmakers wrote into the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act.
“Hurricane Katrina was not just a natural disaster, but a man-made one,” they wrote. “Two decades later, FEMA is enacting processes and leadership structures that echo the conditions [that law] was designed to prevent.”
The letter comes in the middle of a hurricane season that NOAA expects to be above-normal, and just a month after deadly floods in Texas killed at least 135 people, including 37 children. Experts say FEMA’s weakened capacity worsened the death toll.
New Orleans remembers Katrina’s devastation
In New Orleans, the 20th anniversary stands as both a memorial and a warning.
Survivors and community leaders plan to gather in the Lower Ninth Ward, where a levee breach inundated a predominantly Black neighbourhood.
The commemoration, organised by Katrina Commemoration Inc. and Hip Hop Caucus, will include a wreath-laying ceremony, exhibitions from local artists and a brass band second line parade – a New Orleans tradition rooted in African American jazz funerals.
Organisers say the event is also meant to highlight the city’s fragile infrastructure, gentrification and growing vulnerability to climate change. Local leaders are hoping to keep these issues at the forefront of people’s minds as they push for the anniversary to be recognised as a state holiday.
Could Hurricane Katrina happen again?
Experts say yes. Stronger storms, a weakened FEMA and threatened cuts to NOAA make another Katrina not only possible but also more likely.
“The inexperience of senior leaders and the profound failure by the federal government to deliver timely, unified and effective aid left survivors to fend for themselves,” the FEMA letter warns.
Two decades later, those same conditions are being recreated, the authors argue.
“Hurricane Katrina took nearly 2,000 lives and caused [billions] in damage. We learned hard lessons and built world-class forecasting as a result,” says Watters.
“Cutting those systems now – on the 20th anniversary and at the height of hurricane season – would be reckless.”
