August 29, 2020 will be the 20-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall in New Orleans. I think it’s a critical event to understand for at least two reasons. First, it was an early, regional example of U.S. governmental failure to prepare, respond, and recover from a known risk. Now we have a crisis unfolding on a much larger scale, and the government is proving to be just as inept as it was in 2005, with far greater consequences. So I think Katrina was an early warning of government dysfunction that we failed to heed.

As far as coronavirus goes, we are past the prepare stage and it is getting late to mount an effective response. We can still recover though. New Orleans didn’t really recover fully, according to this article.

A year after the storm, over half the city’s schools remained shut; under a third of flooded-out residents had returned; and few buses were running in a city where more than a third of African American households did not own cars. By the second anniversary, no further schools had reopened and damaged rental units largely languished unrepaired. And in 2015, the number of children living in poverty, almost 40 per cent – nearly twice the national average – remained unchanged from when the levees broke.

TLS

So Katrina was a cautionary tale of the U.S. government (and I’m talking federal, state, and local) failing to prepare, respond, and recover from a known risk. On a more literal level, it will not be the last coastal American city to be inundated. Eventually they may all be inundated. It is time to learn from what went wrong in Katrina and figure out how to apply it nationally to prepare, respond, and recover from the disasters that are coming.