JACKSON, Miss.—On Hunt Street in West Jackson stands an inviting gray, single-story home. The front porch is spacious and has ample seating space. A wreath made of shimmering black and gold ribbons greets you at the front door.
A New Orleans Saints fan lives here.
Two decades ago, New Orleans, La., native Deirdre Jackson and her daughter, Destiny, evacuated their home with $200 and a small bag of clothes as Hurricane Katrina barreled toward the Crescent City. They would return about a week after the storm passed, Jackson thought then.
But that did not happen. The storm—and the flood waters unleashed by catastrophic failures of the city’s federal levee system—washed away the life she knew.
‘This Is My Sanctuary’
Upon entering Deirdre Jackson’s home in the Mississippi capital, relics of the city where she grew up are all around. Fleur-de-lis paintings, a black-and-white sketch of the New Orleans skyline and photos of loved ones, young and old, line the walls of her living room.
“This is my sanctuary,” the Jackson Public Schools teacher told the Mississippi Free Press as she sat on a couch in the living room of her home on Aug. 13. “I’m at peace when I’m at my house. I get that feeling of being back home again.”
But this time of the year is still tough for Jackson. Memories flood her mind: memories of fleeing, memories of the devastation and memories of how the government’s response to the disaster exacerbated an already dire situation.
A framed letter hangs among the photos and paintings in the living room. It details a 2017 settlement she received as part of a class-action lawsuit related to the Aug. 29, 2005, levee failures that let loose the rushing waters, destroying her two-story townhome in New Orleans East.
The settlement amount: $104. Near the bottom of the form she etched a handwritten message in all capitalized letters: “THANKS KATRINA!”
‘Have You Watched The News?’
Deirdre Jackson, who has a doctorate in philosophy, said she was awake and getting ready for church on the morning of August 28, 2005. It was her typical Sunday morning routine. During the week, she taught classes at New Orleans’ John F. Kennedy High School, but every Sunday she looked forward to singing in her church choir.
Before Jackson could head out the front door of her New Orleans East home that morning, the phone rang. On the other end of the call, her friend, Robert Lee, asked her what she was doing.
“I’m getting ready to go to church,” she told him.
“No, you’re not going to church today. Have you watched the news?” he responded.
Of course, she knew that Hurricane Katrina was coming. But stockpiling and prepping for a hurricane was a normal thing where she grew up. “You know, you have your water, you have your food. (You’re prepared) just in case the lights go out,” she said.
It was not until that Sunday morning, Jackson said, that she got the clearest warning that this hurricane was going to be unlike any other she had experienced before. At Lee’s insistence, she flipped on the local news and saw then-New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin deliver the city’s first-ever mandatory evacuation order.
“There’s not a meteorologist or an expert that I have talked to that says that this storm will not impact New Orleans in a major way. As a result of that, I am, this morning, declaring that we will be doing a mandatory evacuation,” Nagin said.
The mayor classified those who worked in the media, at hospitals, at hotels and with the Orleans Parish Sheriff’s Office as essential personnel. He urged all others to immediately leave the city. For those who could not evacuate, Nagin said, the City of New Orleans would designate sites like the Superdome stadium as “a refuge of last resort.”
“The storm surge most likely will topple our levee system,” the mayor warned. “This is a threat that we’ve never faced before.”
For Leslie Duvernay, it was not only Nagin’s words, but the expression on his face that spurred her family to escape from New Orleans that same day, she told the Mississippi Free Press nearly two decades later.
“I’m not a news watcher, but I saw a look on the mayor’s face that said ‘we got to get up out of here,’” Duvernay, a lifelong educator who grew up in the city’s Seventh Ward, said during an interview on Aug. 8.
As a result of the order, her loved ones—as many as could fit into five cars—packed up their things and headed out of the city. Before leaving, she grabbed a couple of work portfolios and her then-14-year-old son’s trumpet.
By 4 p.m., they were gone. It would take hours before they reached their destination.
Nagin would later tell the BBC that he should have issued the mandatory evacuation order sooner.
‘I Didn’t Know What to Do’
Mayor Nagin’s mandatory evacuation orders came less than 24 hours before Hurricane Katrina was set to make landfall in southeast Louisiana. Back at home, Deirdre Jackson was overwhelmed with fear.
“My heart sank. I didn’t know what to do,” she recalled this month.
She scrambled to find a way out. She called one friend in Texas who told her that she and her then-4-year-old daughter, Destiny, were welcome to stay with her family. But Texas was too far a drive, her friend Robert Lee told her.
He had relatives in the city of Hazlehurst, Mississippi, who were ready to make space for her and her daughter; he invited her to leave the city with him. She accepted his offer.
Jackson made a few more calls before heading out, including one to her mother, a resident of the city’s Sixth Ward, who said that she was not leaving.
Jackson, her daughter and their cat Adam packed into Lee’s car, joining the thousands of other evacuees who drove out of the city that day. They were caught for hours in contraflow traffic as state and local transportation agencies allowed motorists to flee the city using both outbound and inbound lanes.
‘Third Time That Year Evacuating’
It took a little bit of convincing before Thea Faulkner agreed to leave New Orleans with her family. The Friday before Katrina’s arrival, she and her husband, Jackson native Larry Faulkner, had gathered with some other relatives at her sister’s house for a fish fry.
They were just about to head out the door that evening when another family member called with a warning.
“Tell everybody you care anything about to get out of the city because this is the one that we have feared for generations,” the family member warned, as Thea Faulkner told the Mississippi Free Press in an Aug. 6 interview.
Faulkner grew up in Pontchartrain Park, a neighborhood near Lake Pontchartrain historically populated by middle-class Black families.
“I absolutely had the best childhood I could have imagined,” she recalled in an interview with the Mississippi Free Press.
At the time of the storm, she and her husband lived just outside the Gentilly neighborhood with their three children. He worked as a commercial building engineer while she served as the director of admissions at Xavier University Preparatory School (now St. Katharine Drexel Preparatory School).
Having already been through two other weather-related evacuations that year, Faulkner was fatigued and initially considered staying in the city to ride out the storm instead of leaving that weekend.
“I was just tired of it,” she recalled.
But after her husband told her sternly he and their children would leave the city whether or not she went with them, she listened.
“He said, ‘Well, the children and I are leaving at 10:00 in the morning.’ I said, ‘I’ll be ready for 9:30.’” she told the Mississippi Free Press.
So they left the city that Saturday morning and headed toward his hometown in Mississippi.
Everyone who talked with the Mississippi Free Press about evacuating that weekend said it took hours to get away from New Orleans. With the congested contraflow traffic, what normally would have been a three-hour trip took Leslie Duvernay’s family nearly 12 hours, she said.
“People were just bumper to bumper on the interstate,” she said.
They finally arrived in the early hours the next morning.They eventually found themselves in a parking lot in South Jackson, where members of the New Jerusalem Church welcomed them.
The church was one of many sites throughout Mississippi’s capital city where volunteers set up disaster aid centers to assist Katrina evacuees.
‘The System Failed’
Stewpot Community Services Executive Director Jill Buckley was one of the people who provided assistance to displaced families in Jackson in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. At the time, she served as the associate pastor for community ministry at Northminster Baptist Church.
Buckley remembers working one-on-one with families in the days and weeks following the storm, helping people who’d lost almost everything—their homes, their jobs, their sense of normalcy—acclimate to life in a foreign place.
In an interview, she noted the evacuees’ resilience and said that many of those she came in contact with expressed anger over the situation they were now forced to reckon with.
“There was a lot of anger at the way the system failed in New Orleans, and not just the levee system. The way that all systems failed in New Orleans at the local and the state and the federal level,” Buckley said.
Hurricane Katrina was a category 3 hurricane with winds of around 125 mph when it reached the outskirts of New Orleans on Monday, Aug. 29, 2005. The storm tore through Mississippi coastal cities like Biloxi, Waveland and Bay St. Louis later the same day.
“When it came into Mississippi, it pretty much leveled everything,” Robert Latham, the former executive director of the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency, recalled in an interview with the Mississippi Free Press on Aug. 14, 2025. “From the beach all the way to the railroad tracks, it was pretty much (concrete) slabs.”
As he reflected on how the hurricane devastated the Mississippi Coast and claimed at least 238 lives, Latham remarked that what unfolded as the storm ravaged New Orleans was “a totally different disaster.”
‘Unfortunate Choices and Decisions’
Under the barrage of wind and waves surging from the storm, there were at least 50 breaches of floodwalls and levees in New Orleans—leaving water from Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River pouring into neighborhoods, just as Mayor Ray Nagin had warned the day before.
What happened in New Orleans was, in fact, far different from what happened on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, but scientists had predicted for years that it could happen. Researchers like geologist Dr. Ivor van Heerden, the co-founder of Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center, had forecasted that a powerful hurricane might breach the city’s flood-protection system.
“A slow-moving Category 3 hurricane or larger will flood the city,” he warned in an Oct. 29, 2004, PBS interview less than a year before Katrina. “There will be between 17 and 20 feet of standing water and New Orleans as we now know it will no longer exist.”
Van Heerden said in a 2005 PBS interview after the storm that part of the blame for the catastrophic flooding should fall on the shoulders of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“The failing that is the absolute most damning of all was the Corps should have been monitoring the levees, and they should have warned everybody when they let go. People went to bed on Monday evening—houses dry—and woke up in the middle of the night with water up to their waists,” Van Heerden told PBS in 2005. “Those are the people that were forced up into their attics, many of them old and frail, because those are the ones who couldn’t evacuate. And they didn’t have the power to kick out their roofs, or couldn’t get an axe or a chainsaw to do so.”
The American Society of Civil Engineers’ Hurricane Katrina External Review Panel said in an August 2006 report that the levees and floodwalls “breached because of a combination of unfortunate choices and decisions, made over many years, at almost all levels of responsibility.”
Engineering design flaws, as well as a “lack of inter-agency coordination” to maintain the infrastructure, left the city vulnerable, they found. “Furthermore, the many existing pump stations that could have helped remove floodwaters were inoperable during and after the storm,” the report continued.
Both the Corps and The Orleans Levee Board—a board of commissioners tasked with overseeing the maintenance of the federal flood control system—faced a number of lawsuits like the class-action suit Deirdre Jackson joined.
In November 2009, a federal judge ruled that negligence on the part of the Corps of Engineers contributed to the devastation. Three years later, however, a federal appeals court ruled the agency could not be held liable for paying damages related to the disaster.
LSU fired Van Heerden in 2009, and the professor alleged in a subsequent lawsuit that university officials had been unhappy with him over his persistent criticisms of the Corps, which was a major source of federal research funding for LSU. The university agreed to a $435,000 settlement in 2013.
‘Lack of Leadership’
After the storm passed, nearly 80% of New Orleans was underwater and more than 200,000 homes were flooded, leaving thousands of people from the New Orleans metro area displaced. Those who spoke with the Mississippi Free Press shared that in the days and weeks after the storm, communication with loved ones who’d stayed in the city was non-existent.
The communications blackout added to an already delayed emergency response for the more than 100,000 people now stranded in the flooded city after the storm. Flooding brought on by the levee failures thwarted the City of New Orleans’ original evacuation plan to use city buses to relocate those at designated emergency shelters like the Superdome within 24 hours after the storm passed. The day after the hurricane hit, those buses sat under feet of water like almost everything else in the city, a Sept. 23, 2005, NPR report detailed.
Thousands of those who had remained in New Orleans—either by choice or by circumstance—and sought safe haven at designated sites like the Superdome and New Orleans Convention Center suffered for almost a week through deplorable conditions, with sweltering heat, overrun bathrooms, and an inconsistent supply of food and water.
Many of those who remained in the city were elderly, needed special medical care, lived paycheck to paycheck and lacked a personal vehicle, relying on the city’s public transit to get around.
Some of the people who initially survived the hurricane and subsequent flooding died while waiting to be rescued.
Then-President George W. Bush’s Federal Emergency Management Agency Director Michael D. Brown—highly criticized for his handling of the disaster—resigned in September 2005 amid a firestorm of criticism (though not from the president, who infamously praised him with the words, “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”).
In a 2006 Senate report, members of Congress wrote that they were “heartened by acts of initiative, perseverance, and heroism by local responders and the U.S. Coast Guard.” At the same time, the lawmakers wrote that they were “horrified when the response to the Katrina catastrophe revealed—all too often, and for far too long—confusion, delay, misdirection, inactivity, poor coordination, and lack of leadership at all levels of government.”
On Monday, 180 current and former FEMA employees warned in a letter that the Trump administration’s cuts to the agency risk another catastrophic response like the one the nation witnessed 20 years ago after Hurricane Katrina. In response, the Trump administration has put at least 21 of the FEMA employees who signed onto the letter on administrative leave.
‘Having Absolutely Nothing’
With the help of a friend, Deirdre Jackson and her daughter, Destiny, reached Hazlehurst safely eight hours after leaving New Orleans and had a place to lay their heads. But she would not know for weeks what had happened to her mother back home.
In the days after the storm, television news coverage was dominated by images of people who had escaped the flood waters and were now stranded in attics and on the roofs of their homes, boat rescue operations in the flooded streets, and the overcrowded conditions at both the Superdome and Convention Center.
Jackson remembers crying a lot during that time.
“Within that week and a half, I went from having everything I thought I needed to having absolutely nothing, and I’m stuck in these people’s house that I don’t know,” she told the Mississippi Free Press. “I don’t have a job because the school is closed. So you just sit there.”
It would be Thursday after the storm before military officials could initiate the full-scale evacuation; loading buses—and planes—to move people out of New Orleans and to other cities that could provide adequate shelter and aid.
They told evacuees little about where they were going.
‘Didn’t Know Where My Dad Was’
Toinette Jackson, who by 2005 had worked for eight years at a Hilton hotel near the New Orleans Riverwalk outlet mall, told the Mississippi Free Press that after evacuating the city, it took weeks before she and her husband, Leonard Jackson, could locate several members of their family.
The pair left their home in Jefferson Parish with their then 8-year-old daughter, Eronisha, and a cousin who needed a ride out the day before Hurricane Katrina made landfall. But her mother, father and two brothers stayed behind.
“I didn’t know where my dad was. I had a little brother that had cerebral palsy. I didn’t know where my mom was,” Toinette Jackson told the Mississippi Free Press on Aug. 14. “The situation was just a lot.”
Amid the federal government’s forced relocation of those people at the city’s designated evacuation sites, their loved ones ended up spread across multiple states. Toinette Jackson said her mother and two brothers were flown to South Carolina; Leonard Jackson’s mother ended up in Alabama, and his sister went to Texas.
“It was crazy. Everybody just had to find their way,” he told the Mississippi Free Press.
Twenty years after the forced exodus, New Orleans remains majority Black, but the demographics of the city look a lot different than they did pre-Katrina.
“In 2019, there were nearly 100,000 fewer Black New Orleanians in the city than in 2000, accounting for a nearly 6 percent drop in the share of the city’s population,” a 2021 Princeton University study states.
The majority of evacuees—more than 200,000—ended up in Houston, Texas, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It was one of the largest weather-related forced migrations of people in U.S. history.
Some evacuees who might have moved back to the city in the years after the catastrophe were left to compete for housing with an increasing number of transplants while the price of homes skyrocketed.
“We somehow managed to create a worse housing system than we had pre-Katrina. More vulnerability. More housing insecurity,” Andreanecia Morris, the executive director of Housing NOLA, told WWL in 2023.
As evacuees in Jackson came to terms with the reality of their new normal, they searched for a new place to make home. Toinette and Leonard Jackson stayed in a hotel for nearly a month with their 8-year-old daughter Eronisha as they went around the city looking for more permanent housing—initially having to navigate landlords who refused to rent to the couple because their income was now unstable.
They eventually settled into a neighborhood in West Jackson where they still reside today. The couple said that leaving New Orleans that day in 2005 and starting over in Jackson put their lives—and their relationship—on a better track.
‘Losing Everything’
Recovery looked different for everyone.
For Thea Faulker, recovering meant she and her husband had to travel back to New Orleans to survey the damage. She still remembers gripping onto furniture to avoid falling as she walked through their home just outside Gentilly. A slippery, black sludge left behind by water from the nearby lake now covered the floor.
Almost everything was coated in mold or mildew, she recalled.
A few feet from the ceiling, a horizontal water line left its imprint on the walls. In the storm’s wake, it left homes submerged—on average—in 6 to 9 feet of water. In some areas, homes took on more than 15 feet of water.
Faulkner believes she would have died had she not listened to her husband and instead stayed behind to ride out the storm.
“Both sets of my grandparents lost their home, my parents lost their home, all of my aunts, all of my uncles, all of my sisters, all of my brothers,” she said. “The churches we attended were destroyed. The schools I attended were all destroyed. Banks were destroyed. So, I can’t go back to our neighborhood and tell my son ‘that’s the lady I used to buy candy from when I grew up. You know, that’s where I used to go and get my hair done.’”
Insurance payments came and Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance eventually rolled in after the storm. But the monetary payouts were nothing compared to the value of what they lost, Faulkner said.
“What price do you put on losing everything that you ever had any affiliation with? Your family, your church, your jobs, your schools, you know? Community,” she said.
Although water rushed into the home and ruined almost everything, her family was able to salvage a couple of items. Locked away inside a plastic storage container, Faulkner found film strips of family photos and her mother’s diploma from McDonogh 35 College Preparatory High School—a cherished institution where many of her relatives went to school.
For the past 10 years, she has served as director of the Jackson Public Schools Partners in Education program, raising capital to provide resources for both teachers and parents.
She keeps her mother’s framed diploma in her office.
‘We Did Not Miss A Beat’
Of the people who spoke with the Mississippi Free Press about deciding to relocate to Jackson after Hurricane Katrina, Leslie Duvernay is the only one who rebuilt her family’s home in New Orleans. The rebuild took a few years, but today she relishes in having two places to call home—two places to celebrate her birthday.
Within the year after evacuating, Duvernay obtained a master’s degree from Jackson State University and now teaches for the Jackson Public School District.
It was the generosity of the people she met in Jackson that allowed her family to make a smooth transition between evacuating and settling into their new lives in Mississippi, Duvernay said.
She considers herself fortunate that her evacuation story ended the way it did. “I did not have to wade in water. I didn’t live in the Superdome. There are some people with some stories,” she said. “But it’s like the grace of God was upon me and my family members because we did not miss a beat.”
‘Safe Here At Least’
Two decades after the storm named Katrina ravaged her beloved city and exposed infrastructure weaknesses, Deirdre Jackson says that she sees her life in two parts: Before Katrina and after Katrina.
After the storm, life went on and piece by piece she put things back together.
She moved into her home on Hunt Street in West Jackson in 2006. It was one of 26 homes Habitat for Humanity of the Mississippi Capital Area built in Jackson for evacuees who relocated. Oprah Winfrey and NBA star Kevin Garnett sponsored 18 of the homes.
Now teaching at Jim Hill High School, Jackson said that over the years, she has met “a lot of good people,” built a community and found a new church home in the capital city.
Her daughter, Destiny, has since moved to Shreveport, La., and her mother went back to live in New Orleans. Jackson plans to return home in a couple weeks when the Saints meet the Arizona Cardinals for a game at the Superdome.
But just as that long ride from New Orleans to Jackson, shrouded in uncertainty, was an arduous journey, recovering from the mental trauma of losing everything has taken time.
As she sat on a couch in the living room of her home, Jackson said fear of another catastrophe makes her unlikely to move back and leave her place of refuge—her sanctuary—on Hunt Street in Jackson.
“Another storm can happen, and I need my mom to have a place to go to,” she said. “During Katrina, we didn’t have nowhere to go. So at least I know that if I’m here, she can come here, and she can be safe here at least.”
Read more Free Press coverage of Hurricane Katrina, with our archive dating back to 2005, at www.mississippifreepress.org/hurricane-katrina.