The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s much-criticized response to Hurricane Katrina is a stain on its history.
But at a time when the Trump administration is threatening to overhaul and weaken the agency, Louisiana lawmakers and others who were involved in the storm’s aftermath have a mix of views about what it should look like, with many of them arguing it’s still key to disaster recovery.
August marks 20 years since the devastating storm made landfall as a Category 3 storm, pounding the Gulf Coast with winds as fast as 140 miles per hour. The storm flooded about 75% of New Orleans’ metropolitan area, resulted in nearly 2,000 deaths and caused billions of dollars in damage — defining an entire generation in the South. The period of time that followed exposed cracks in FEMA’s design by showing the agency’s lack of coordination and planning when it came to distributing aid, and it has often been pointed to by lawmakers as an example of bureaucratic red tape getting in the way of federal storm response.