Katrina, 20 Years Later: Resilience Lessons from Those Who Were There
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 left behind searing images of damage and suffering — along with years of challenges and lessons in tenacity.
Engineers who were immediately immersed in rebuilding from the storm’s destruction across the Gulf Coast and the flooding that swallowed New Orleans also gained invaluable experience in fortifying vital infrastructure to improve public safety.
In commemoration of Katrina’s 20th anniversary, we reached out to Freese and Nichols water resources design engineers who spent years working on the recovery (with previous employers). They shared their most vivid memories and the enduring lessons that continue to inform their work on coastal restoration and community resilience.
Several of them evacuated from southeast Louisiana before the storm but were among the first to return and undertake difficult, consuming and essential work. Long, intense days were the norm for months, if not years.
Nina Reins and Naveen Chillara both had completed engineering master’s degrees just months before Katrina, Nina at Tulane University and Naveen at the University of New Orleans. The storm helped define their career trajectories.
April Hurry, PE, had built a career in New Orleans focused on bridge and stormwater drainage systems. Barry Fehl had recently moved to the area with years of experience working on federal dam projects in locations across the United States. Blake Cotton, PE, LEED AP, and Jim Keith, PE, CFM, came to the work later, spending years on it.
Nina Reins, PhD, PE, PMP, New Orleans
With little information about best routes back into a devastated region, Nina drove into a still-darkened city, to a house with roof and rain damage. Power wouldn’t be restored to her home for weeks. But she and her husband offered a bedroom to a visiting New York reporter with nowhere else to stay.
The amazing thing, even right away, was the camaraderie and the friendliness and the coming together in the city. People were helping clean up, looking out for each other. It almost gave you the energy and fuel to keep going.
The work: Initially, she went through the city’s Lower 9th Ward counting driveways to determine where washed-away houses used to be and documenting which homes qualified for demolishing. She also helped with debris removal and recovery at a marina on Lake Pontchartrain, where yachts were piled on land and on top of each other.
Later, she worked marathon days well in 2006 at an office in Baton Rouge, the Louisiana capital 80 miles west, with a team helping the state develop its first coastal resilience master plan combining flood and environmental protections for levees, barrier islands and marshes.
Enduring lessons: As a young engineer focused on sediment transport, she had the opportunity to learn quickly and build expertise in a newly evolving specialty, coastal restoration.
“I was trusted with a lot more than if there hadn’t been an emergency,” she said. “It heightened my vision for resilience. I continue enjoying helping communities working on more resilient protections. It’s why I’m still very passionate about coastal restoration.”
She’s now applying her experience on major federal coastal protection projects with Freese and Nichols. She also is leading design on the Dillard Wetland Restoration, a federally funded project applying green infrastructure to reduce flood risk, improve health and encourage revitalization of the Gentilly neighborhood, a low-lying, flood-prone area in New Orleans.
She also is exporting this passion and knowledge to the Texas Coast. And her broad coastal experience positions her to currently lead Freese and Nichols’ work on the first Coastal Texas Program Ecosystem Restoration Project (G28-1), a shoreline protection project along the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway implemented by Ducks Unlimited for the General Land Office and the Coastal Protection and Restoration District.
What should we remember?
- The energy and eagerness to help lasted a long time and attracted a lot of talent to the area, creating opportunity even during the economic downturn elsewhere in the country.
- It’s important to find fulfillment in what you do and make sure you’re doing the right thing for the longer term.
Naveen Chillara, PE, now in San Antonio
Within a week after Katrina, Naveen was helping assess the damaged flood protection systems and identify immediate protections needed. That became even more vital when Hurricane Rita formed Sept. 18 and became the strongest hurricane recorded in the Gulf to that point.
We spent hours walking through New Orleans, surveying the damage to the remaining flood walls and levees. The visuals were like stepping into a war zone.
The work: In the first month, he was part of the teams supporting the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, coordinating with marine contractors to mobilize equipment for installing pipes, sheet piles and sandbags, primarily in Jefferson Parish adjacent to New Orleans.
After the initial phase, he assisted in full-scale design and field engineering and was deeply involved for nearly a decade in the planning and construction of flood walls, gates, levees, and pump stations — critical infrastructure to protect the region from future storms.
Enduring lessons: “Never underestimate what nature can do and assume that we are safe. I feel my real engineering learning is due to Katrina. The whole code for design of floodwalls and levees changed after Katrina. We look at risk in a very different way after Katrina.”
What should we remember?
- Disasters are part of life — pointing fingers after the fact doesn’t help anyone.
- It’s not enough to build strong infrastructure; keeping it well-maintained is key to keep people safe.
- Please evacuate when warned.
Barry Fehl, DSc, PE, now in Field
Barry’s work on Katrina-related projects started four weeks after the storm and would last more than 15 years.
The work: In the first year, he managed development of seven different design packages, including short-term fixes and long-term floodwall repairs and two miles of new floodwall.
I will never forget the piles of trash piled along the streets from people gutting their homes. It is one of those scenes you can’t really do justice to unless you actually see it. At a home near one of the floodwall failures, people were taking wheelbarrows of sand out of their house because the water from the failure had pushed material into their home.
Over the next several years, he worked on more than a dozen projects either as a project manager or providing general oversight and management. Those included levees, floodwalls, gated closure structures and pump stations.
An example of the intensity: After receiving a Friday afternoon call about an issue on one project, he and a co-worker went to the site, evaluated the issue and went back to the office to develop a solution that they took back to the construction trailer at 10 p.m., where the contractor was working around the clock.
Enduring lessons: “The experience gained from my work following Katrina provides a great background for other flood control projects because everything moved so quickly and you got to see stuff being built just months after design was completed, which is atypical of USACE projects.”
What should we remember?
- Regardless of the flood protection system you live behind, if there is a large hurricane, evacuation is the best plan of action.
- In order to have proper flood protection, sacrifices by individuals are sometimes necessary. Sometimes, it is difficult to maintain things people enjoy (such as a waterfront view) and provide flood protection at the same time. I don’t feel like people always understand that.
April Hurry, PE, now in Houston
Having worked in the New Orleans area for 15 years, April was well versed in the region’s infrastructure and storm vulnerabilities. For the first months after Katrina, her company had to work out of rented space in Baton Rouge because they couldn’t get into their building in Metairie, next door to New Orleans.
It took a couple trips into New Orleans to desensitize from the damage. The first couple of trips were more about becoming used to the amount of damage, and after that I was able to be more focused on the damage evaluations.
The work: One short-term assignment involved documenting damage and preparing repair estimates for facilities at the New Orleans Lakefront Airport and along Lake Pontchartrain, separating the damage caused by storm surge from the damage caused by high winds.
April also had to redesign several projects prepared during the summer pre-Katrina because of revised design criteria after the storm. Her recovery work focused on stormwater pump station fronting protection and T-wall/floodgate projects (construction was completed by 2013).
Enduring lessons: Now, she’s working on T-wall and levee projects as part of the joint venture team for the Sabine Pass to Galveston Bay (S2G) Coastal Storm Risk Management project, an extensive storm surge protection effort along the Gulf Coast. For the ambitious federal coastal projects, Freese and Nichols’ team is applying the updated design guidelines for flood risk management and coastal storm risk management that the USACE adopted as a result of Katrina.
What should we remember?
- Have an evacuation plan in place and don’t wait until the last minute to evacuate. Don’t think that it will be fun to try to stay through a hurricane.
- There is a fairly large group of people in any city that simply don’t have the means to evacuate, and I hope that more cities/counties have more robust, appropriate plans in place to support everyone.
Blake Cotton, PE, LEED AP, New Orleans
Blake evacuated from Baton Rouge before Katrina but wasn’t called on for recovery work until 2007, when he was assigned to quickly set up a state-of-the-art geotechnical soil-testing lab and base of operations in New Orleans to support fast-moving design and construction of new and/or improved flood protections.
The work: To help restore, build up and fortify levees and flood walls across the New Orleans area to establish a 100-year level of flood protection, the geotechnical effort included numerous geotechnical drilling rigs on and near the levees collecting hundreds of soil samples daily for lab testing to support complex geotechnical engineering analyses. For more than four months, Blake would work in the city all week, then spend less than 24 hours at home with his family. Later, he commuted 160 miles daily between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, working 12-16-hour days.
The work was fast-paced and highly scrutinized at all levels, very stressful. The amount of collaboration was amazing.
Other challenges arose, such as in 2008, when Blake stayed in Baton Rouge as his family evacuated to Arkansas ahead of Hurricane Gustav. That storm battered Baton Rouge on Sept. 1, 2008, knocking out power at Blake’s office, so he set up a makeshift office for his employees to work out of his living room.
Enduring lessons: He quickly learned logistics were critical: how to secure and move vast quantities of soil sample tubes, sealing wax and other supplies to keep field crews operational. He also had leadership opportunities, such as frequently briefing top-level local and national government officials: “All they wanted to know was, ‘are we going to be safe?’”
What should we remember?
- A tremendous amount of good was accomplished in the midst of so much bad, which showed us that, as a community, we can come together to overcome any obstacle.
- What we accomplished in four years was monumental and unprecedented. We advanced the state of the geotechnical practice.
Jim Keith, PE, CFM, now in Denton
Jim, who today is Freese and Nichols’ Coastal Resiliency Initiative Leader, started on post-Katrina work in 2011. He led a team developing new hydrologic and hydraulic models to update FEMA flood insurance maps within the Greater New Orleans levee system.
My most vivid memory is seeing the extent of destruction that remained six years after the storm, with large neighborhoods particularly in the Lower 9th Ward area still decimated and not yet recovered or rebuilt. The pain and emotional toll of Katrina was still very much on the faces of folks living there.
The work: The modeling work involved dozens of specialists and coordination among multiple federal and local government entities. “These were some of the most complex models and difficult-to-map areas that I have ever encountered,” Jim said.
“This work took about three years, which included about two years of heavy technical effort along with a great deal of outreach and stakeholder engagement. Ultimately, the mapping was adopted by the local communities and provided them a much more accurate understanding of the flood risks due to rainfall that must be pumped out of the system.”
What should we remember?
- My hope is that Katrina serves as a critical and tragic reminder of what happens when we don’t respect the risks we are facing and do not adequately prepare for them.
- We should also remember how communities can come together to support each other and recover from disasters like Katrina.
Hurricane Katrina: The Magnitude
Hurricane Katrina was a record storm accompanied by flood protection failures that turned a natural disaster into a humanitarian crisis. Beyond the lives upended, the storm’s lasting ramifications ranged widely: School systems and transportation networks disrupted. Tourism and commercial activities immobilized. Bridges destroyed. Offshore oil operations interrupted. Environmental damage from oil spills, eroded beaches and debris.
Category 3
Strength at landfall in southeast Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005 (after reaching Category 5 over the Gulf). Destruction along the Louisiana and Mississippi coasts, reaching into Florida.
80%
Amount of New Orleans overwhelmed with floodwater because of storm surge, overtopping and failure of levee flood walls.
$201.3 billion
Total estimated damage across multiple states, making Katrina the costliest hurricane to hit the U.S.
1,392
The death count for all locations (direct, indirect and indeterminate cause), updated by the National Hurricane Center in 2023.
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