By Bill Quigley.  Bill is Fr. Twomey Scholar in  Residence at Jesuit Social Research Institute at Loyola University and an emeritus professor of law at Loyola New Orleans College of Law.  quigley@loyno.edu

“In the present condition of global society, where injustices abound and growing numbers of people are deprived of basic human rights and considered expendable, the principle of the common good immediately becomes, logically and inevitably, a summons to solidarity and a preferential option for the poorest of our brothers and sisters. This option… demands before all else an appreciation of the immense dignity of the poor in the light of our deepest convictions as believers. We need only look around us to see that, today, this option is in fact an ethical imperative essential for effectively attaining the common good.”

Pope Francis, Laudato Si, 158

“We were abandoned. City officials did nothing to protect us. We were told to go to the Superdome, the Convention Center, the interstate bridge for safety. We did this more than once. In fact, we tried them all for every day over a week. We saw buses, helicopters and FEMA trucks, but no one stopped to help us. We never felt so cut off in all our lives. When you feel like this you do one of two things, you either give up or go into survival mode. We chose the latter.

This is how we made it. We slept next to dead bodies, we slept on streets at least four times next to human feces and urine. There was garbage everywhere in the city. Panic and fear had taken over.”

Patricia Thompson,  New Orleans Citizen and Evacuee, US House of Representatives Select Committee Hearing, December 6, 2005

Because of its impact on social justice, JUST SOUTH will focus many of our monthly issues in 2025 on the aftermath of hurricane Katrina.  We start with the question raised by Pope Francis.  What happened to the poorest of our sisters and brothers in 2005 in the evacuation of New Orleans just before and right after Katrina hit.

Twenty years ago, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast.   According to a Bipartisan Congressional Investigation, which this article relies on for most of its facts, over a million people were displaced.  1833 lives were lost.  $120 billion in federal funds were spent on recovery.  While Louisiana was hit the hardest, thousands of families in Mississippi and Alabama suffered major losses as well.

As Katrina approached, City and State authorities called for a voluntary evacuation.  Over a million people in Louisiana got in their cars and left.  However, in earlier planning for a hurricane the public authorities knew there were about 100,000 people in the city of New Orleans had no transportation to leave.

Katrina came ashore and damaged thousands of homes and businesses in 41 of Louisiana’s 64 parishes. In Mississippi, storm surges measured as high as 27 feet and ultimately washed 6 miles in on land and 12 miles inland on waterways.  

The next day, several sections of the levees surrounding New Orleans were breached and 80 percent of the city was under water, in some places 20 feet deep.

Who were these tens of thousands of people who were not able to evacuate?  Twenty seven percent of New Orleans, 125,000 people, lived below the poverty line.  Many did not have cars. There was no public transportation to get out of harm’s way.  Thousands of patients and even more staff were left behind in two dozen hospitals and many more in nursing homes and private homes. Over 30,000 people ended up taking shelter at the Superdome before sections of the roof caved in and lost power.  

19,000 others, including hundreds in wheelchairs, gathered at the New Orleans Convention Center which had no electricity, no lighting, no air conditioning and no functioning toilets.  6,000 to 7,000 people were on one highway cloverleaf intersection alone.  Over 8000 were locked in flooded prisons.  Thousands more were stranded outside on rooftops and raised bridges. 

The City of New Orleans was closed for months.   Soldiers patrolled the streets.  No one was allowed home. 

Ultimately tens of thousands of people were bussed out of New Orleans and taken to shelters across the country, from Houston to Atlanta and beyond. One study discovered that within a month evacuees were registered in every state and almost one-half the zip codes nation-wide.

Within a short time 270,000 people made homeless by Katrina were living in shelters.  A Harvard survey of those in shelters revealed: 93% were African American; 76% had children with them in the shelter; 64% were renters; 67% were employed before Katrina; 68% had no money in a bank nor a usable credit card.

Certainly, many middle- and high-income homeowners had damage to their homes and suffered.

But the people literally left behind as Katrina hit and who were hurt the most were the sickest, the poorest, children, the disabled, the elderly, prisoners, and renters, overwhelmingly African American.  Poor people of color were more likely to end up displaced much further away than suburban middle-class whites.  African American neighborhoods suffered the most extensive damage. 

I think it is fair to say that Pope Francis’ summons to solidarity and a preferential option for the poorest of our brothers and sisters was not heeded in the immediate response to Katrina.

In coming months JUST SOUTH will look at what happened to our sisters and brothers in the months and years since.  If you want to join our Loyola Just South mailing list, please do so here.

For further reading please see “A FAILURE OF INITIATIVE Final Report of the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina,” February 15, 2006.