About This Case Study

Almost everyone knows the outline of Hurricane Katrina: a storm struck New Orleans in late August 2005, the levees failed, the city flooded, and more than a thousand people died. Told that way, Katrina is a discrete event with a date — a natural disaster that happened and then ended. This case study works from three sources that tell it differently. The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture's digital feature on Katrina presents the storm through the lives of Black New Orleanians — who lived on the lowest ground, lost the most, and struggled hardest to return. The Data Center, an independent New Orleans research organization, has tracked the city's population and recovery continuously for twenty years. And the historian Andy Horowitz argues that Katrina was not an event at all but a history — a century of decisions about land, water, housing, and money that determined, long before the storm formed, who would drown and who could come back. Set the common version beside these, and a question opens that the word "disaster" usually closes: when, exactly, did the disaster begin, and has it ended?

This case study reads Katrina through the idea that a disaster is a history, not an event — and through the broader claim that vulnerability is socially produced: that who suffers most in a "natural" disaster is decided in advance by human choices about where people live and what protects them. The phrase "natural disaster" itself functions as an instrument. By locating the cause in nature — a storm, an act of God — it quietly forecloses the questions that matter most: who built the levees that failed, who was housed in the path of the water, whose neighborhood was rebuilt and whose was left to empty. The analytical move is to refuse that foreclosure: to reconstruct the decisions that made the vulnerability, on both sides of the storm, and to see the pattern in a single concrete comparison. You will build Katrina's timeline from the decades before landfall to the twenty years after, answer the case's organizing question — when was the disaster? — and then compare two New Orleans neighborhoods that flooded together and recovered apart.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• The Smithsonian NMAAHC feature "Hurricane Katrina's Impact" (The Searchable Museum) — the main source.
• The Data Center (New Orleans), for population and recovery indicators — its data resources include neighborhood-level figures.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on currency and access: the Data Center's indicators are drawn from data of particular years and are updated periodically, so record the vintage of any figure you use. New Orleans neighborhoods appear in the data under "neighborhood statistical area" names; if a specific number is hard to find, note that too — where the record thins is part of what you are reading.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• What do you remember, or what have you heard, about Hurricane Katrina? Write the story in three sentences — and notice where your version starts and stops.
• Can a disaster have a start date and an end date? If the same storm hit two neighborhoods and one recovered in two years and the other in twenty, was it one disaster or several?

The Exercise

Phase 1: Orientation — The Event and the History (8–10 minutes)

Begin with the two ways of telling the story. Explore the Smithsonian feature and note how it frames Katrina — not only as the days of the storm and flood but as something with a longer racial history and a long aftermath. Then write, in a few sentences, the difference between the "natural disaster" version of Katrina (a storm that struck in 2005) and the claim this case study will test: that Katrina was a history, not an event. Do not resolve the difference yet; just state it clearly.

For groups: explore the feature individually, then agree on a one-paragraph statement of the two framings before moving on.

Phase 2: Before the Storm — Building the Prehistory (12–15 minutes)

Reconstruct the decades of decisions that built New Orleans's vulnerability before the wind ever blew. Drawing on the Smithsonian feature and what the unit has established, sketch a timeline under three headings:

1. The land. How did development and housing policy place Black New Orleanians disproportionately in the lowest-lying, most flood-prone parts of the city? What made some ground safe and some ground cheap?
2. The water. How did human decisions shape the flood itself — the oil-industry canals that eroded the protective wetlands, and levee and floodwall systems built and maintained unevenly across neighborhoods? The 2005 flooding came less from the storm overtopping defenses than from those defenses failing.
3. The disinvestment. What longer patterns — in public housing, public services, insurance, and income — shaped who could prepare for a storm, evacuate before it, and rebuild after? Note where a decision that looks technical (a canal, a levee grade, an insurance map) had a racial distribution of consequences.

For groups: assign one heading to each member or pair, then assemble the shared prehistory.

Phase 3: After the Storm — The Aftermath and "When Was the Disaster?" (12–15 minutes)

Now extend the timeline forward through the twenty years since landfall, and then answer the case's organizing question:

• Using the Data Center, trace the aftermath: how the city's population changed and by race, whose neighborhoods returned and whose did not, and the fate of major public institutions — public housing (much of it demolished after the storm), the public school system (converted almost entirely to charters), and public health facilities. Who came back, and who did not?
• Answer the organizing question directly: when did the disaster begin, and has it ended? Mark the moments on your timeline where you would place its start and — if you can — its close.
• The strain test. Where does "a disaster is a history, not an event" illuminate Katrina, and where does it strain? Consider what the framing might cost: whether stretching the disaster across a century risks losing the specific horror of the days people drowned on rooftops, or whether it risks making the flood sound inevitable rather than the result of choices that could have been made otherwise. How do you hold the long history and the acute event at once?

For groups: build the aftermath together, then let each member place the disaster's start and end on their own before comparing.

Phase 4: Two Neighborhoods (10–12 minutes)

Test the whole argument in one concrete comparison. Two New Orleans neighborhoods flooded badly in 2005: the Lower Ninth Ward, historically Black and working-class, and Lakeview, historically white and more affluent. Using the Data Center's neighborhood data, compare them:

1. Flood and loss. How severely did each neighborhood flood, and what were the immediate losses? Note what the two had in common in the days of the storm.
2. Aid and return. Now follow the twenty years after. Compare the two neighborhoods on population return and rebuilding over time. Where and when did their paths diverge, and by how much?
3. The pattern. What does the comparison show? If two neighborhoods experienced the same storm but two different recoveries, in what sense was Katrina one disaster — and in what sense was it several?

For groups: one pair pulls the Lower Ninth Ward figures and another Lakeview; compare side by side.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

Asked when the disaster began, I would say __________. Reading Katrina as a history rather than an event changes __________. The part of this analysis I find hardest to hold steady is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly which decisions made the vulnerability and exactly when you would say the disaster started.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work through the phases in order, keeping your timeline and figures in brief notes. The prehistory from Phase 2, your answer to "when was the disaster?" in Phase 3, and the two-neighborhood comparison in Phase 4 are the central artifacts; keep them for use with the unit's questions on disaster and recovery.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phase 1 can be individual then pooled; in Phase 2 the three headings divide well among members; Phase 3 works as shared reconstruction followed by individual answers to the organizing question; Phase 4 splits naturally into two teams, one per neighborhood. If time is short, the closing reflection can be assigned as individual writing after the session.

After the Case Study

• The Data Center publishes long-run indicators for New Orleans and its neighborhoods along with its methodology; comparing more neighborhoods, or tracking a single indicator across the full twenty years, extends the analysis.
• For the full century-long account this case study compresses, see Andy Horowitz, Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 (Harvard University Press, 2020), in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The method here — refusing "natural disaster" and reconstructing the decisions that built the vulnerability — applies to any disaster; carried forward to the coming climate displacements, it becomes a way to write a disaster's history before it happens.