August 28, 2025, will mark 20 years since my family rushed to pack up the cars and join 1.5 million people evacuating the Gulf Coast in the middle of the night. I was a week shy of turning 13 and storm evacuations were nothing new to me, but fleeing Hurricane Katrina felt noticeably different.
“It’s funny,” I remember my dad saying as he gazed into the overstuffed trunk of our 2002 Chrysler Sebring. It was packed to the brim with our valuables: family photo albums, sentimental knick-knacks, toys, the family computer. “What we choose to evacuate with is the kind of stuff a looter would just totally ignore.”
Katrina weakened and jogged eastward, decimating the Mississippi Gulf Coast. For a few brief moments, it seemed as though New Orleans had “dodged a bullet,” as the secretary of homeland security infamously declared. Instead we got breathtaking government failure, more than a million homes damaged, 25,000 evacuees seeking refuge at the Superdome, and 1,833 people dead…