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Five years ago, The Atlantic published Floodlines, an eight-part podcast that told the story of Hurricane Katrina and of the people in New Orleans who survived it. The show detailed the ways that failures of federal and local policies concerning flood control and levees created the flood that submerged New Orleans in 2005, and also the ways that preexisting social inequalities marked some people for disaster and spared others. Through the recollections of people who survived Katrina, as well as officials who tried to coordinate a response, Floodlines explored how misinformation, racism, and ineptitude shaped that response, and how Black and poor New Orleanians were pushed away from their homes. In particular, the series follows the story of Le-Ann Williams, who was 14 when the levees broke.

As the 20th anniversary of Katrina arrives, the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are still dealing with the legacy of the flood and with the racial inequality and displacement that were at the heart of the series. The Black population of New Orleans is declining, and some neighborhoods still haven’t come back. Many people who were forced to leave home in 2005 are unable to afford to rent or own where they built their pre-Katrina lives. Experts wonder if the flood-control system there is truly ready for the next “big one,” and because of climate change, more and more cities and towns may face similar threats. Help from FEMA is tenuous under a Trump administration that has slashed its resources and threatened to phase out the department altogether.

So on the occasion of this anniversary, Floodlines takes a fresh visit to New Orleans, to reconnect with Le-Ann Williams, and with her daughter, Destiny. In this special episode, we spend a day with Williams’s family and learn about the heartbreaks, tragedies, and triumphs they’ve experienced since we last spoke. We learn how trauma from Katrina lives on in the hearts and minds of its survivors, and how, for the generation born after the flood, a disaster they never witnessed still governs their lives.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Updated at 1:00 p.m. ET on August 6, 2025

Vann R. Newkirk II: (Knocks on metal door.) Male voice: Who’s that? Vann Newkirk: It’s Vann! Male voice: Come on. Newkirk: All right. (Chuckles.) How you doing? Le-Ann Williams: Hey, Vann! Newkirk: Hey, how you doing? Williams: How y’all doing? All right.

Newkirk: Well, hey. It’s Vann Newkirk. I know it’s been a minute since you’ve heard from me here. Five years, to be exact.

Williams: My family: my mom, Patricia; my daughter, Destiny; and my cousin Tasha. Newkirk: Nice to meet y’all. And I heard a lot about y’all. Nice to meet y’all.

Newkirk: A lot has happened in the time since we put out Floodlines. The pandemic started to really shut everything down the day we put out the show, and it’s been one thing after another since then. There’s been economic chaos. There were elections. There was an insurrection. There’ve been fires and hurricanes and floods. There’s been a lot of death and a whole lot of grief. A lot of people live different lives than they did in 2020. Hell, I know I do.

Five years ago, when I was making Floodlines, I’d been thinking about Richard, the enslaved man who survived the hurricane in 1856 at Last Island, Louisiana.

Newkirk (Floodlines clip): 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.

Newkirk: I was interested in memory and what disasters reveal about a place. My reporting took me to New Orleans where I was introduced to somebody who, quite frankly, changed my life.

Williams (Floodlines clip): We’ll have the trumpet player, the trombone player, the snare-drum player, the bass-drum player, and the tuba players will have sticks blowing.

Newkirk: Le-Ann Williams. You remember Le-Ann. She was 14 years old.

Williams (Floodlines clip): I had this crush on this boy named Fonso Jones—

Newkirk: She grew up around Treme and Dumaine Street—

Williams (Floodlines clip): —and Fonso was the point guard.

Newkirk: —living in the Lafitte housing projects, when Hurricane Katrina came and the levees broke.

Williams (Floodlines clip): And we heard it on the radio, and a man was like, he was in a panic: I repeat, get to safety; get to the Superdome.

Newkirk: She and her family went on an odyssey after the flood. And she came back to a totally different city.

Archival (Floodlines clip): 3,000 people a day heading to Texas. Archival (Floodlines clip): Arkansas will take 20,000 people. Archival (Floodlines clip): I’m not going back to New Orleans. I don’t wanna go back to New Orleans. Williams (Floodlines clip): If you push us out, what’s gonna be left? Just come look at things, like a museum. Just come and looking at historic places and buildings? That’s it? If you push us out, where the culture gonna come from?

Newkirk: If you haven’t listened to Floodlines, I recommend starting from the beginning.