This guide is part of State of Emergency, a Grist series exploring how climate disasters are impacting voting and politics. By the time Mtangulizi Sanyika got to Houston in September 2005, he and his wife were tired of moving. Sanyika, a lifelong resident of New Orleans and a professor at a historically Black college in the city, had spent weeks jumping from town to town after being displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Simultaneously, he waited for information about his mother and sister, who had been stranded in New Orleans’s Charity Hospital with no power and little food. Eight people died at the hospital while waiting to be evacuated, but Sanyika’s mother and sister made it out, and the family reunited in Houston, where some of their cousins lived.