August 29, 2023, marks eighteen years since Hurricane Katrina made landfall in New Orleans, my then home. There was a time when every subsequent August brought visual reminders of that life-changing event.

I had recently started my eighth-grade school year only eleven days prior at St. Francis Cabrini. My mom discussed asking my school principal to adjust my graduation date because my older brother–who then was a senior in high school–was scheduled to graduate on the same day in May 2006. My parents wanted to attend both of our graduations together.

Neither event would happen.*

I remember, eerily now, prior to the 2005-2006 school year, watching slideshows of students in N.O. public schools on a local channel, while listening to the melodies of a group of young voices singing, “2005, 2005 . . . that’s the time when we (start) our brand-new lives.” I cannot remember the exact lyrics, so forgive me, whoever wrote and sang those words so long ago.

But the lyrics were haunting.

2005 was the year that my family and I had to start new lives . . . suddenly, without warning: Hurricane Katrina brought a fierceness that local government in New Orleans could not expect until the day before—August 28, 2005—when Katrina was made a Category 5 storm. Yes, we New Orleans residents did not receive a mandatory evacuation until the day before the storm made landfall. I do not write this in anger or frustration, because I believe that no one in the city knew or could have foreseen Hurricane Katrina to be the groundbreaking, devastating global disaster that it became.

In fact, my school administration did not even mention Hurricane Katrina on that Friday—August 26, 2005—the last day of instruction prior to the storm’s landfall. Katrina was that nonthreatening and was not originally supposed to hit us so directly until the local weather channels repeatedly began showing the storm’s changing trajectory for New Orleans, the following day: Saturday, August 27, 2005. In fact, my parents did not plan to evacuate until that Saturday evening, when a good friend of my mom’s who worked at a hotel in downtown New Orleans offered us a complimentary stay to ride out the storm. She encouraged us to evacuate.

The decision to evacuate our home near Lake Pontchartrain was likely a lifesaving one.

Only a year prior to Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Ivan was anticipated to be the storm that would devastate New Orleans, among other coastal lands, in summer 2004; however, that storm, and multiple other major hurricanes would devastate the Florida coast that year. That summer was brutal, but New Orleans was spared.

My parents and older brother were one of the only families in our neighborhood that did not evacuate for Hurricane Ivan in 2004. The couple of days that we remained home, it barely rained, and on the anticipated day of landfall, it was a beautiful, sunny day, and our neighbors who had evacuated gradually returned home later that day.

A year later, our home would be devastated beyond repair, flooded to the ceiling, windows busted, and the interior of our once nicely kept home ravished like someone had detonated a bomb.

Now, prior to Hurricane Katrina, and even Hurricane Ivan, my parents sometimes evacuated us to higher ground during major category storms. I remember Hurricane George hitting New Orleans in 1998 when I was in first grade. My family evacuated to a hotel in downtown New Orleans, and while we were away from our home, Hurricane George ripped the plywood from our exterior living room window.

Even during non-hurricane inclement weather, we experienced heavy rains in New Orleans that often sent students home early from school. On one particular school day in first grade,  it rained so hard and flooded the area around my elementary school so badly that my dad had to sign me out of school, and as Dad carried me to his car, the floodwaters reached above his ankles—and my dad is 5’11.

When you live in a city prone to any type of natural disaster—whether that be hurricanes in the Gulf Coast, tornadoes in the Midwest, earthquakes and landslides in the West Coast, or even the more recent deadly wildfires in Maui—you never anticipate a day where your home and entire life will be wiped away with it. That is one reason why some people evacuate their homes, and some do not.

You never know which disaster will be the “big one.”

Looking ahead to 2025—if the Lord spares my life—twenty years will have passed since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Louisiana, and other nearby Gulf Coast cities. There are so many stories wrapped up within each family that has been affected by the storm, stories beyond what many national news stations circulated in 2005—including the biased ones. There are so many stories within my own family that occurred during our evacuation and in the aftermath of Katrina.

More posts will likely be written in the future, but for now, I reflect and remember my city, before the storm, before the multiple deaths occurred in my family in the immediate year afterward, including my mommy, nearly sixteen years after she mourned the loss of her old life, her friends, and her home in New Orleans, before the storm came.

*Note: My brother was actually able to walk with his senior class in 2006 after completing his 2005-2006 school year in Allen, Texas. To learn more about the impact of Hurricane Katrina, purchase a copy of my poetry collection, Bring Me Back Home, New Orleans under my “Shop” page.