Vann Newkirk II: I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking about a man I don’t know much about. I don’t know what he looked like. I don’t know how old he was. I don’t know where he was born or where he died. What I do know is his name: Richard. He was enslaved, and he was on Last Island in 1856.

Last Island. Isle Dernière. Back then they spoke French in southern Louisiana, and that island was as far south as it got. Last Island was a resort. A place where everybody who was anybody went for the cool salt breeze. The wealthy of America’s slaveocracy would go there in the summer to have balls, parade down the promenade, relax. But behind their leisure was the hand of slave power that ran everything.

I know a little bit more about the man who owned Richard. Thomas Mille was a Frenchman. He ran a sugar plantation out in the bayou. Mille took his family to their mansion on Last Island that summer. On August 9, a Saturday night, they danced in a grand ball in the local hotel. But on Sunday, they looked out into the waves and felt the bracing winds approach. A storm was coming.

That night the winds grew stronger. The scions of Last Island panicked and packed themselves into a hotel. But Richard was worried. He tried to convince the master and his family to leave their mansion and take shelter in a stable. But they refused. The storm’s eye approached. Waves got higher and higher. The surge of water the storm pushed ahead of it raced to the island. It hit like a tidal wave. Through it all, Richard braved the storm in the stable. His only companion that night was an old horse.

The next morning, the only building still standing on Last Island was that stable. Richard and the old horse had made it. Many other folks weren’t so lucky. About half of the people known to be there died. Richard found his master’s 18-year-old daughter bleeding from a head wound and delivered her to safety. She was the only member of her family on Last Island to survive. As far as we know, Richard was the only person they enslaved who survived.

Everything we know about Richard comes from a newspaper interview with the daughter he saved. The story of Last Island became a sensation across America. It was sensational in part because of who died.

In the 1850s, southern Louisiana had the highest concentration of millionaires in the country. The Last Island hurricane had killed a lot of them. The idea of doomed grand balls and final pageants of the plantation aristocracy, it was all so tragic and romantic.

But I don’t really care about that part. I just can’t stop thinking about Richard.

The Last Island hurricane was a Category 4 storm when it hit. It’s been called the “first great storm” in the recorded history of Louisiana. It seems like every generation has one: 1893, 1915, 1947. Each with their stories and their myths. Each with their Richards.

The last big storm in New Orleans was Hurricane Betsy, 1965. And then, for 40 years, it was quiet.

From The Atlantic, I’m Vann Newkirk, and this is Floodlines.

Newkirk II: Part I: “Antediluvian.”

The summer of 2005 was like any other summer. People all over the city of New Orleans were doing what they do: working, going to church, sitting on porches. Kids were out of school and having fun. And maybe nobody was having more fun than Le-Ann Williams.

Le-Ann Williams: Oh, my god. I was a daredevil. A tomboy.

Newkirk II: Le-Ann was 14 that summer. She spent her days playing with her cousins on Dumaine Street in Treme, the black neighborhood known for jazz and second lines.

Williams: They’ll let us run in the street and play freely. But every time a car would come, I remember we’ll say “Car time! Car time!” That mean get out the way. A car coming. You can’t play football, freeze tag, nothing. You gotta get out the way.

Newkirk II: Second lines and parades were such a big part of life around Dumaine that it was how Le-Ann and her cousins played pretend.

Williams: We’ll have the trumpet player, the trombone player, the snare-drum player, the bass-drum player. And the tuba players would have sticks blowing [Hums.]. And my cousin’s friend, he’ll have a big wheel on his neck. And he’ll have it throwed over his shoulder, because you know a tuba is heavy. So that was pretty heavy for him to carry at that age. And we’ll sing and march on down the street.

Newkirk II: Le-Ann was also playing basketball that summer. She was the only girl on the team, and she was known for her lockdown defense.

Williams: They used to be mad. “Get her off the team. Make her go sit down. She all over me.” I’m like: That’s what you're supposed to do. Take the ball away from you. They used to be mad.

Newkirk II: Le-Ann was a basketball fanatic. But those days she had a little extra motivation.

Williams: I had this crush on this boy named Fonso Jones. And Fonso was the point guard. Lord, I had the biggest crush on him.

Newkirk II: That summer, Fonso asked her out. They were an item.

Williams: He’ll walk me home every day. We’ll cut through Dumaine Street and we get to the Claiborne bridge, and the Claiborne bridge leads to my—the project—my house. I stayed on the corner in the front. And he would walk me home every day.

Newkirk II: Le-Ann lived in the Lafitte Projects, just around the way from the Treme community center. Her mom worked on Tulane’s campus, and her stepdad was a star musician in a city full of star musicians. They had plans for Le-Ann. The last school year, she had worked hard to get good grades, and she had just gotten into a fancy high school. She was gonna be starting in August.

Williams: My dad took me school shopping, and I had my Jordans that I wanted. I had my hair in some long braids. We call them “booty braids” in New Orleans because they so long. I thought I was the stuff.

Newkirk II: The first day of school was Thursday, August 25, 2005.

Williams: Couldn’t wait for my first day. I was up at 5 o’clock. Clothes laid out; trying the clothes on the day before in the mirror, looking, trying to see how I looked for my first day of school. I was just so happy.

Newkirk II: Around the time Le-Ann got up, the 11th named tropical storm of the season was heading toward the coast of Florida. It was small then. But strengthening.

Williams: I remember my science teacher Mr. Smith telling us to track the storm. So, I only was able to track it that Thursday and Friday, because I didn’t go to school after that. We had to get prepared for Katrina.

Newkirk II: News anchors and meteorologists first started calling the storm “Katrina” on August 24. A Wednesday. That’s when it gained the 39–mile-an-hour winds needed to become a tropical storm. It came up from the south and east of Florida.

Archival (news clip): You are looking at tropical storm Katrina, and residents in South Florida are keeping a very close eye on the system. It could become a hurricane before it moves in late tomorrow or …

Newkirk II: It became a weak hurricane for a few hours. Then it made landfall just north of Miami.

Archival (news clip): The hurricane came ashore with winds of 80 miles an hour.

Newkirk II: It crossed over the southern tip of Florida Thursday night and Friday morning.

Archival (news clip): Now a Category 2 hurricane making its way across the Gulf of …

Newkirk II: It weakened over land, but entered the warm Gulf of Mexico intact.

Archival (news clip): And Katrina is getting stronger.

Archival (news clip): The storm’s gaining even more strength.

Archival (news clip): With winds of up to 115 miles per hour.

Newkirk II: It was due to strengthen on Saturday.

Archival (news clip): New Orleans, you are in the very big realm of possibility. Let’s take a look at the storm right now.

Archival (news clip): This is the big one! As the mayor put it …

Mark Schleifstein: The big one always has been a Category 5 hurricane that would put so much water over the coast that it would overtop the levees.

Newkirk II: That’s Mark Schleifstein, an environmental reporter in New Orleans.

Schleifstein: I’m known in the office as Darth Schleifstein.

Vann Newkirk: Why is that?

Schleifstein: Oh, because I’m always reporting on, you know, what kind of disaster can occur.

Newkirk II: Mark was worried. And Mark is a guy who covered the worst disasters for years. He’s not the type to get worried easy. He was worried because of a prediction he’d made three years before. In 2002, he and his reporting partner John McQuaid had written a series about “the big one” hitting New Orleans. Following the same path as Katrina.

The stuff they predicted was alarming. A hurricane would hit the city. It would send record-breaking storm surges through the lake and the river. Without wetlands to stop the surge, it would grow higher and higher. All of the drainage and shipping channels around New Orleans would funnel that surge directly into the center of the city. The levees would simply be too low to stop the water. Mark and John predicted a city uninhabitable for at least four months with up to 100,000 people dead. But even their editors were kind of skeptical about the reporting.

Schleifstein: One of my editors actually said, “Well, this is just more of Schleifstein’s disaster porn.” And I said, “Well, you know, like real pornography, disaster porn is in the eye of the beholder, and there’s a hundred thousand people who live in New Orleans who don’t know that there are no plans to get them out in advance of a major hurricane.”

Newkirk II: Did you ever feel like you were—I guess the phrase “shouting into a hurricane” is not a good one here. [Laughs.]

Schleifstein: A Cassandra? Yeah. Yeah. I did.

Newkirk II: When Mark first saw the projections for Katrina, all those visions of the city being destroyed came back to him. He was in touch with Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center. Mark was trying to tell his editors how serious the storm was going to be. But it seemed like they just saw more of his disaster porn.

Shleifstein: So it’s 4 o’clock on Saturday in the newsroom, and I’m at my desk. And the editor and publisher are standing behind me while I am attempting to explain why it is important that we run a copy of a storm-surge modeling map on the front page. And some of those same things were coming up. “Well, you know, is this really going to happen? I mean, you know, you’re talking about the death of the city.” La la la. And the phone rings. And I pick it up, and it’s Max Mayfield. And before I had a chance to say anything he says, “Mark, how high is your building? What kind of winds can it withstand?” And I said, “Max, what are you telling me?” He said, “What do you think I’m telling you? This is the big one, and it’s coming right at you.”

Newkirk II: New Orleans was built by levees and pumps, by holding and moving water to create dry land. If you drive long enough in just about any direction, you’ll wind up in water. There’s Lake Pontchartrain to the north. The Mississippi River curves from west to east around the bottom of the city like a smile. The water is such a part of the geography of the city that people use it like directions. Lakebound. Riverbound. Upriver. Downriver. And just downriver from Treme is the Seventh Ward. That’s where Fred Johnson was that weekend. He was getting ready for a parade.

Fred Johnson: And I was oblivious because I was running around picking up different items. And I was not in tune to the weather. And every time I’m in and out the car, I’m listening to music. I’m not listening to the news.

Newkirk II: Fred’s one of those Smokey Robinson types. Smooth. Ageless. Wears lots of gold bracelets and earrings. Has no fear of the patterned shirt. Fred Johnson is a lot of things, but most of all Fred Johnson is a Seventh Ward booster.

Johnson: You had the collectiveness of a village.

Newkirk II: Once you get him started on the old days …

Johnson: We had all African American teachers.

Bar rooms and grocery stores on the corner.

Schools was right across the street.

Newkirk II: He’ll just keep going.

Johnson: They had authority and consent to bust my ass and send me home.

We standing on a corner and we smoking a cigarette.

And, you know, we just blowing smoke talking crap. And I look up, and I see Miss Melville.

Oh shit. I took off running. [Laughs.]

Newkirk II: Fred co-founded a group in the city called the Black Men of Labor. A social aid and pleasure club. They raise money for good causes. Mentor black youth. And they throw parades like you wouldn’t believe. Their second lines are famous.

Johnson: So late that evening when we said, “Okay that’s all we can do for the day,” when we come out, the guy said, “Hey, man. We got to evacuate.” I’m saying, “What you talking about?” They said, “Yeah, man. They got a storm coming, and they calling for an evacuation.” And I’m like, “Oh, shit. I’m not evacuating. I’m tired. I’m not getting on the road.”

Newkirk II: Fred wasn’t listening to the news, but the people who were listening had heard nothing but confusion. Mayor Ray Nagin dragged his feet on evacuation orders, and then finally made the call just a day before the storm came. Authorities failed to get buses to people, leaving lots of poor people stranded. Nagin declared the Superdome the shelter of last resort. Hospitals and nursing homes couldn’t get patients out. Even with that, about 80 percent of the population managed to evacuate. Which has never happened before. But still, about 100,000 people were left in the city.

Alice Craft-Kerney: So what I did was I stayed—I had worked, I guess, like 12 hours. I was so tired. I was seeing double.

Newkirk II: Alice Craft-Kerney was working as a nurse at Charity Hospital on Saturday. She worked the night shift and didn’t get off until Sunday morning. Lots of hospital employees had already evacuated, so they were understaffed.

Craft-Kerney: I was just literally exhausted because so many people had called off. They said, “I’m not coming to work. I’m not coming to work.” So, you know, we had more patients. And I mean, I was—I never stopped running.

Newkirk II: Charity served lots of poor folks without insurance. Alice had worked there for almost 20 years.

Craft-Kerney: I just fell in love with it because the people look like me who I served. And they had so many needs.

Newkirk II: Now there are a lot of things that Alice will not say directly. But she has a tell when she wants to say something that might be a little controversial. She’ll tell you what she will say.

Craft-Kerney: Now, what I will say is when I was there my mission was to make sure they treated my people well. Okay. I’ve made sure that when the doctors seemed like they were a little callous, I said, “Look. This person needs this, this, and this.” And I was their advocate, but I had great nurses before me who taught me.

Newkirk II: After her Saturday night shift, the idea of evacuating at the last minute just didn’t look great.

Craft-Kerney: And so, as I was driving here the lines to get out of the city were crazy. So, I went to my brother’s home in the Lower Ninth Ward. His house was elevated. He has a three-story historic home in the Lower Ninth Ward. So that’s where I went.

Newkirk II: The Lower Ninth Ward is on the east side of the Industrial Canal, separated from the main area of New Orleans. Way back in the day, the neighborhood was swampland. There’s old stories of escaped enslaved folks hiding out there. But by the time Alice’s folks were looking for a place, it was a thriving neighborhood.

Craft-Kerney: The Lower Ninth Ward was like, I guess you could say, Mayberry for me.

Newkirk II: Her mother, Miss Hattie, still lived in the pink house where she’d raised Alice and her six siblings. Growing up, all of Alice’s friends used to stop by for Miss Hattie’s cooking.

Craft-Kerney: They would come and say, “Miss Hattie, what you frying?” And so she said, “Oh, I’m just frying some cornbread. You want some?” So they would have cornbread and syrup. And you just see them lined up.

Newkirk II: The pink house had flooded before during Hurricane Betsy, back when Alice was a kid. Alice’s own house was out in the east, which often flooded. So that Sunday before Katrina, her brother’s three-story house seemed like the safest place.

Craft-Kerney: The highest part of New Orleans is near the river. My brother lives near the river. He lives in an area called Holy Cross. So he has some of the highest land, as far as elevation, in the city.

Newkirk II: One fascinating thing about New Orleans is that the Mississippi built its own levees. All the dirt piles up beside the river over time. That means it’s actually safest right beside the river, because much of the rest of town actually sits below water. People call all that high ground the sliver by the river.

Sandy Rosenthal: Sliver by the river. That is the region of the city that’s six feet or more above sea level—at least six feet above sea level.

Newkirk II: Sandy Rosenthal moved to New Orleans 40 years ago.

Rosenthal: I am originally from the Boston area of Massachusetts. I still know how to park the car.

Newkirk II: Sandy married a local. They lived upriver from the French Quarter in a neighborhood that’s wealthier and whiter than the rest of the city: Uptown.

Rosenthal: I taught fitness because I enjoyed it, not because I needed the money. I played a lot of tennis. I was seeing girlfriends a lot for lunch. I would say that’s the typical Uptown housewife girl that I was.

Newkirk II: In New Orleans, you’re always dealing with “nuisance” floods. Water-up-to-your-car-tires kind of stuff. But Sandy wasn’t too worried about flooding Uptown.

Rosenthal: There had not been a major hurricane in 40 years. We knew we had levees. Most people paid absolutely no attention to them. If anything, the levees were hills that were sometimes fun to roll on. We just assumed they would work.

Newkirk II: When Sandy and her family heard Katrina was coming, they moved all their stuff upstairs to the second floor of the house and joined the long line of cars driving north. The plan was to get out of the city for a little bit and wait in a hotel somewhere for it to blow over. It’d be like a vacation.

Le-Ann Williams: We didn’t have any transportation. So my mom was pretty scared, but we didn’t have a car or anything to leave. And she didn’t want us to go to the Superdome. That was out.

Newkirk II: Le-Ann Williams and her family didn’t really have a way out of the city. So they decided to do what they thought was the next best thing: take shelter in her mom’s apartment in the Lafitte Projects.

Williams: We in the project. The bricks not gonna move. They not moving for a hurricane. So they all came by us.

Newkirk II: Sunday afternoon, Le-Ann and her cousin Aralle were making the most of their time before the storm started. They rode around the neighborhood on bikes and stopped by the wing spot on the corner.

Williams: They was giving out free chicken—just frying chicken and giving out free chicken. And we went got us some free chicken, my mama free chicken, and everything. I guess they were trying to get rid of the food, you know, before the power goes out. We rode up Dumaine. We rode up Villere. We rode up Treme. And the rain was coming down on us, and we getting soaking wet. We were laughing, having fun. Teenage girls having fun. Riding the bikes.

Archival (radio clip): It’s United Radio Broadcasters of New Orleans. A service of WWL-AM …

Newkirk II: While everyone in the city waited for Katrina to pass, a lot of them tuned in to the local radio station WWL.

Archival (radio clip): Keep your radio locked for continuously updated official information. On the AM dial, the Big 870 WWL.

Newkirk II: If they were tuned in that weekend, they would’ve heard the voice of Garland Robinette. Garland had been on the air for decades in New Orleans, mostly as an anchor on TV news. He’d retired, though, years before. But that Saturday before Katrina hit, he was filling in for his sick friend. From the beginning, he had a bad feeling about the storm.

Garland Robinette: I came out of a coffee shop and there was a big palm tree. And in the middle of it was green parrots. Somebody let a pet out, and it propagated like hundreds of them. And every time you’d come out of the coffee shop, it’d be like you couldn’t hear yourself think. I walked out, I looked up, no parrots. Walked to the end of the street, looked around. No dogs, no cats, no birds.

Newkirk II: On the radio, he found that the callers were just as nervous as he was.

Robinette: And people start calling in, you know. “We’re on the way out. Don’t see any birds. Don’t see anything.”

Newkirk II: On Sunday night, Katrina got closer and closer to New Orleans. Garland and his team were broadcasting from a high-rise building not too far from the Superdome.

Robinette: I think we were on the eighth or ninth floor. We had a gigantic window behind me overlooking the Superdome.

Newkirk II: Just around the corner at the Hyatt hotel, Fred Johnson and a bunch of his friends had decided to wait out the storm, too. It’s something people always did in the city when hurricanes came. If you couldn’t get out, you went up.

Johnson: So we end up on the—some 10th, 12th floor, or whatever the case is. They having a hurricane party. I mean, they drinking their asses off. I’m like, “No. No. Give me an O’Doul’s.”

Newkirk II: The rain picked up late Sunday and never stopped. And in those high-rise buildings in downtown New Orleans, the winds started getting dangerous.

Robinette: The wind started hitting, and it started howling a little bit.

Newkirk II: That giant window behind Garland started rattling.

Robinette: It sounded like whoop, whoop, whoop. Pop. Just exploded. And engineers came in, got me out real quick. Took me down a hallway. The station on the inside was just destroyed. Glass everywhere, furniture all—and they took me down to a closet. I broadcast all night from the closet.

Johnson: About 10 o’clock that night, they made a call on the PA system, because now they realize that the windows would not withstand the velocity of the wind. And if the wind pushed the window in, you could get sucked out. So they said, “Take your bed spread and bring your toiletries and come down to the third-floor ballroom.” So when I get to the third-floor ballroom, there is people all over the place. So I made a pallet on the floor, and I had on a khaki shirt and the khaki pants and a pair of little summer shoes. And I think I had on a little khaki Kangol cap, and I just pulled the cap over my eyes, because the level of fear that was in the room, I was trying to not to visualize it.

Le-Ann Williams: I could just remember this loud whistling sound. Katrina had a pack on her. I'm telling you. She did.

Newkirk II: Katrina moved in slowly. The rain and winds got stronger and stronger all night. Across the city, all of the defiance in the face of the storm settled into a kind of tension. Le-Ann and her family kept an eye on the TV news, watching things go from bad to worse. Finally, there was one weatherman who broke:

Williams: He had fear in his face. You could tell he was scared. He was like, “May God be with you.” And when he said that, the power went woo. It went out. That was the last thing of having any kind of communication to outside. That was it.

Archival (news clip): From ABC News, this is World News Tonight. Reporting from ABC News headquarters, Charles Gibson. Good evening. Katrina was bad. Very bad. But Katrina did jog slightly east just before hitting land, and that spared New Orleans—a city actually below sea level—the kind of direct hit that residents have worried about and feared for years.

Newkirk II: Katrina, it turned out, wasn’t the “big one.” At least not in New Orleans. Around 10 p.m. on Sunday night, forecasters knew the storm had weakened. It made a turn to the east. But as it hit the Gulf Coast, the hurricane did massive damage and caused hundreds of deaths in parts of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama.

Archival (news clip): In the area around Gulfport and Biloxi, it is a very dire situation …

Archival (news clip): State authorities are gonna be in rescue mode long into this night. This is the worst storm to hit Mississippi in over 35 years …

Newkirk II: In New Orleans, though, compared to the doomsday scenario, it was a little less extreme. Houses were flooded. Roofs had been blown off. Windows were shattered. It was bad, but not apocalyptic-bad. The people who evacuated could come back soon. And the people who stayed had hopes things would get right back to normal.

Le-Ann and her cousin Aralle were in a quiet, pitch-black New Orleans for the first time in their lives. They went outside to take it all in.

Williams: I just couldn’t believe how many stars was in the sky. And we just sit and talked about us, and when we get back to school. We can’t wait till this over with, and they drain the water out the city. I can’t wait to go back to Treme Center, so Fonso could walk me home. The city was black. No streetlights, no nothing. You were able to see the sky. It was, it was beautiful.

Newkirk II: Le-Ann couldn’t have known it then, but the city was already on borrowed time. Levees across New Orleans had already been breached, and at that very moment, millions of gallons of water were pouring into the city. That water would not stop for days until the entire city had been filled.

The country would watch while the city’s people were betrayed. Everything was about to change.

Because in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina was not the disaster. The disaster was what happened after.