More Than New Orleans: The Hidden Toll of Hurricane Katrina

The scars of Hurricane Katrina stretch far beyond New Orleans, lingering in damaged homes, partially repaired neighborhoods and communities across Louisiana.

Damage throughout New Orleans is still prevalent, even almost 21 years later, but what tends to get overlooked is the damage outside of the city.

“You can still walk by houses today and see the blue tarps on the roofs and the Katrina numbers and the crosses on the sides of the houses,” said Kelly Schexnaildre, when speaking about Houma, La. “There’s just a lot of abandoned property, like, a lot of abandoned property.”

Schexnaildre was living in Houma when Hurricane Katrina struck. Houma is about an hour away from New Orleans by car, or roughly 60 miles.

“We hemmed and hawed about whether or not we were going to evacuate,” Schexnaildre said.

Ultimately, they and their family decided not to evacuate, which was the right decision, according to Schexnaildre, despite all that happened within Houma. Trees were torn from the ground and scattered throughout the streets and over houses, leaving roofs smashed. When Hurricane Katrina hit, the town lost power for three weeks.

“It was just chaotic and crazy,” Schexnaildre said.

So, for three weeks, there was no way to communicate via telephone. Schexnaildre explained how people couldn’t get in contact with others throughout the state to see if they were okay following the storm. There was no air conditioning in the blistering Louisiana heat. There was no electricity to watch the news on a television.

The only way Schexnaildre and their family got news was through a battery-operated radio.

“The levees didn’t break until after the storm was over, so we thought ‘we made it, and it’s bad, but it’s not that bad,’ and then the levees broke,” Schexnaildre said. “We didn’t get word of what was happening in New Orleans for probably a day.”

Schexnaildre was in their first semester of college in August of 2025 at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux. They explained that it took about a month for classes to resume after Hurricane Katrina.

“The college that I went to was turned into a refugee camp, for lack of a better way to describe it, and the gymnasium and a lot of the buildings were taken over by people who needed emergency shelter, moving people out of hospitals and hotels,” Schexnaildre said.

Hurricane Katrina is most generally associated with New Orleans, but it expanded so much further.

“There was just so much widespread devastation beyond New Orleans, and I think that a lot of people think Katrina was a New Orleans disaster, and the reality is much bigger than that,” Schexnaildre said. “New Orleans was just the most sensational part of the story.”

Schexnaildre’s father was considered an essential worker during Hurricane Katrina recovery, as he worked in construction. They explained how he experienced the firsthand aftermath of the storm.

“It was just mayhem in the city from what I heard from him,” Schexnaildre said. “There was a lot of crime, a lot of shoot-on-sight orders, a lot of stealing. People were just desperate. The situation devolved.”

Schexnaildre was born in New Orleans and lived there until they were about 3 ½ years old. Over the years, they have lived in various places, such as Houma, Colorado and Florida. In 2022, they returned to New Orleans and have lived there since.

Currently, they live in Bywater, a neighborhood in New Orleans that sits on the edge of the Lower Ninth Ward, according to Schexnaildre.

“The neighborhood is quite disheveled,” Schexnaildre said. “There’s still a ton of houses that have not been redone since Katrina.”

Schexnaildre explained that this is a common theme throughout all of New Orleans.

“Even when I was living over in Broadmoor, which is kind of a nicer neighborhood on the other side of town, my neighbors next door to me had no money to repair their house since Katrina, so it was in complete and utter disarray,” Schexnaildre said. “Like, missing windows, blankets hanging instead of glass, the yard was trashed, all the siding had peeled off and the roof had tarps on it. A lot of houses down here are still like that, even after all these years later.”

There is abandoned property across several neighborhoods in New Orleans, many of which are in lower-income neighborhoods.

“People just lost everything,” Schexnaildre said. “People lost their entire livelihood, like what would you do right now if your entire house burnt to the ground? And your car was gone? What do you do? If you already don’t have anything and then Katrina took whatever you had left, how are you supposed to fucking start over?”

Since Hurricane Katrina, several people have left New Orleans, according to Schexnaildre.

“The city has had its collective share of traumas,” Schexnaildre said. “From being the city of the slave trade and from being kind of the single biggest source of human misery for America, and moving into all of the subsequent devastation, we had like Jim Crow. Then, to move into Katrina, I think the collective devastation was just too much for a lot of people.”

But some people, like Schexnaildre, are still returning to New Orleans because it’s “unlike anywhere else in the United States.”

“New Orleans has a lot of character. It has a lot of energy. It has a lot of magic,” Schexnaildre said. “I think that magic is a result of the intersection of all of the identities that have been here. I think that the intersection of white people, indigenous people and black people makes for something really special.”

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward nearly 21 years after Hurricane Katrina. It was created by an immersion journalism student in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available on The Storm That Never Left: Inside New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward Nearly 21 Years After Katrina.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club, and a private donor.