20 years later: How Katrina changed the game in US disaster response

When Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast of Louisiana in the early Monday-morning hours of Aug. 29, 2005, it shattered everything in its path: Homes. Trees. Weather records. 

The Category 4 hurricane “clearly overwhelmed” government agencies, according to an initial Government Accountability Office report, and set new precedents for mass-casualty disaster response, forever leaving its impact on how Americans respond to storms. Twenty years later, responders are still considering how lessons learned from Katrina can improve search and rescue (SAR) and other disaster-response efforts today.

Rick Christ, senior consultant of Crisis Prevention and Response Inc., was on the scene of Katrina in 2005, after Louisiana made a request for interstate aid. 

“That was the moment my crew changed,” Christ told SAN. “How could a prone city be so unprepared?” 

He has spent much time over the past two decades researching what went wrong leading up to Katrina. His hypothesis: Many Katrina casualties could have been prevented with better awareness about seawall weaknesses beforehand, as well as a sharper eye on data about city planning. 

“We didn’t know the street names, because the street signs were down, but we could see the streets — we could grid it out. One of us gridded it like the equator and prime meridian — other teams followed that process well,” Christ told SAN. 

Even with his team’s creative grid efforts, some of the victims from the city’s Lower Ninth Ward were never found.

“We need to put a lot into resources ahead of time: mitigation, protection and prevention.” Christ said.

This preparation, he said, can help responders overcome knowledge and resource gaps. And that can save lives. 

Morgue reports show the length of Katrina forensic investigation 

The process of finding Katrina victims was painstaking, and spanned Louisiana and Mississippi, according to a trail of coroners’ reports and mass casualty response planning documents.

Morgues were overwhelmed for more than a year after the storm. In November 2005, New Orleans City Business reported that 321 Katrina victims had yet to be claimed by families. That added further wrinkles in identifying those lost, as bodies decomposed to a degree that DNA tests with older technology were unable to identify the remains. These bodies also had no recognizable facial features, no fingerprints and “defied the norms,” for forensics at that time. 

New Orleans wasn’t alone. In Harrison County, Mississippi, residents waited nearly four years to learn the local death toll. In 2009, then-coroner Gary T. Hargrove published a report that detailed the number of determined victims from Biloxi, Mississippi. 

“As of today’s date [July 27, 2009], it is my regret to inform you that the total number of deaths in your city from Hurricane Katrina is 51,” Hargrove wrote.

The youngest was 22-year-old James Patton. The oldest was 96-year-old Pearl Frazier. 

“As of this date, there is one victim who is presumed dead even though her body was never recovered. Her name is Tonette Jackson, and she was 46-years-old,” Hargrove wrote. 

Jackson would remain missing for 15 years, and was presumed dead for a total of 19 years. Her disappearance was first documented when the Alabama-based TV news station WKRG interviewed her widower, Hardy Jackson, on the street after the storm. At the time of WKRG’s report, Jackson reported that he knew his wife had been swept away by the storm, though he could not find her remains. 

Hardy and Tonette Jackson were at home when Katrina struck. Neither expected the water “to rise so quickly,” Hardy Jackson told reporters. The pair attempted to climb to the attic to escape the water surge, but their home collapsed. 

Hardy Jackson said he tried to hold onto his wife and a tree to secure them in place. When Tonette Jackson couldn’t hold on any longer, she asked her husband to care for their children and grandchildren. And then she was gone with the water. 

How DNA research was processed during the early 2000s

Many of the DNA testing methods used during Katrina were informed by processes put in place for the recovery of Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks on the World Trade Center. 

In the early aughts, the available technology required more genetic material to be able to test DNA than would be needed today, according to Michael Coble, executive director at the Center for Human Identification (CHI). Technology has advanced significantly since then, though Coble told SAN that finding someone’ s remains quickly can affect the quality of a DNA sample, which remains an important factor for testing.  

“DNA is great if you collect it very, very soon. But elements, bacteria and tissue decomposition start degrading DNA almost immediately,” Coble told SAN. “Bacteria in the human intestines can travel within the body and consume tissue, which further complicates collection. Even a few days or weeks can make DNA much harder to recover.”

This demand places added pressure on human remains detection teams. 

Lynne Englebert, an associate with the Institute of Canine Forensics, told SAN that finding usable DNA is a job for dogs and handlers that are physically ready, well-trained and authorized by government agencies.

“FEMA has a certification process for working in disasters. After 9/11, my dog was trained to find bits of human remains you could use to get DNA,” Englebert said. She noted that the materials found by a FEMA-certified dog can be incredibly small. “That’s the level of precision required.”

Dogs that lack the proper training can slow the process of recovery, becoming a net negative, she told SAN.

Responsibility falls on the next generation of SAR and Planners 

In the years since Katrina, many new search and rescue agencies have sprung up to meet increased demand in the wake of major disasters. 

In Cypress, Texas, Danielle Lowery and a group of friends launched the search and recovery agency Divine Tactics Mission in 2024. Already, the charity organization has responded to two disasters: Hurricane Helene and the Guadalupe River flooding in Central Texas. Lowery and her group were driven in large part due to concerns that existing organizations are being exhausted. 

“We actually haven’t even hit a year old yet,” Lowery told SAN. “We started as just a group of friends who wanted to help. We met up with Operation Anchor, the Salvation Army—wanted to start an organization with a good heart posture. There are agencies that could do so much more, but there’s such a lack of resources, information, and communication.”

How agencies have walked back progress 

Helio-Fred Garcia, a crisis management professor at New York University, told SAN that the newest generation of search and rescue responders and emergency preparedness planners now face concerns over walked-back progress. 

“FEMA today is more effective than it was during Katrina. Ten years ago the agency learned hard lessons. But as bad as Katrina was, we’ve regressed in some respects,” he told SAN. 

Part of the problem, Garcia said, is a doctrinal difference between the climate science researchers that inform disaster preparedness and the government agencies that facilitate response. 

“Conservatives tend to focus on single agents, while progressives see complex systems,” Garcia said. “In crises, it’s almost always complex-system causation, and when leaders manipulate that reality, we end up repeating the same failures over and over.”

Government agencies and research groups often look at disasters in very different ways. For example, FEMA usually studies how well its own systems worked. In their reports, they examine questions such as: Did supplies arrive on time? Did different agencies work together? Did they follow their plans for disaster response, recovery and prevention? Their focus is on how the government performed.

The Tao Institute, in a 2008 study, suggested a different approach. The institute looked at something called “sociological embeddedness” – studying the way in which a community’s residents are connected, and how those connections affect people’s actions during and after a disaster. For example, people with strong local ties – be it through family, friends or business – might help people share resources and recover faster. Understanding these networks can offer clues about why some communities bounce back more quickly than others.

In their approaches to evaluating Katrina after the fact, the U.S. government looked at a series of “single agent” causes and solutions, whereas Tao Institute researchers looked at “complex systems.” Between search-and-rescue organizers and disaster management planners, the hope is for agencies to combine ideologies, trust in science and work together.

For recent disasters, Katrina’s reform process informs

Katrina prompted a wave of inquiries into disaster-preparedness systems as a whole in the United States. For example, the National Institute of Standards and Technology produced an exhaustive report investigating what went wrong with structures because of Katrina. The research process for this infrastructure report found structural vulnerabilities in the levees surrounding New Orleans. Had better standards had been in place, officials reasoned that the floods that burst through the broken levees would have caused fewer deaths and less damage. 

The inquiry into Katrina shaped the next decades around structure codes. But it didn’t solve everything. 

Relying only on warnings didn’t give enough protection to places like New Orleans or Kerr County before disaster unfolded. For example, before Katrina, safety groups warned that the levees were weak, but no action was taken. Later, a report from the American Society of Civil Engineers said that stricter building rules could have reduced the damage from disasters like Katrina.

Disaster managers were surprised to find that many problems during each of these major storms could have been prevented by making better use of simple systems. This has started a widespread discussion in the U.S. about how we prepare for disasters.

Experts who worked during Hurricane Katrina told SAN the mistakes made back then — and the resulting changes — can still offer important lessons today.