Chasity Hunter was six when Hurricane Katrina hit. She remembers specifically how high the water rose in their home—so much so that her mother, aunt, uncle, grandmother, and three younger siblings had to start climbing the stairs in their public housing building, known as the Calliope public housing development.
“We watched the water rise together, and eventually the storm was so bad that we had to start climbing on top of the roof of the project building, and we had to be rescued by helicopter,” Hunter, now 26, recalled.
She remembers staying in the Superdome, and being separated from her grandmother and aunt who were elderly, and then living in a homeless shelter in the state’s capital of Baton Rouge before being relocated to a FEMA trailer. It would be three years before Hunter and her family would be able to return to New Orleans. Living through Katrina and growing up in the petrochemical-laden Gulf South — and a serendipitous encounter with a filmmaker as the primary subject and collaborator in the documentary short “Station 15,” about water infrastructure in New Orleans — led Hunter to join the Sunrise Movement.
Hurricane Katrina initially made landfall in Florida and continued to gain strength until it hit Louisiana. In the aftermath, 1,392 people were killed, 60,000 stranded, and some 1.5 million displaced, permanently impacting the city’s makeup.
What’s become clear over the years from reporting and investigations is that decision makers failed New Orleans’s mostly low-income, Black communities, who bore the brunt of poor urban planning and emergency management. Those policy choices included the dredging of the Industrial Canal almost a full century earlier, the intentional dynamiting of levees to provide relief to wealthier neighborhoods during a flood in 1927. The natural slope between the Upper Ninth and Lower Ninth Wards — each composed of multiple neighborhoods, with their names describing their position in relation to the Mississippi River — cemented the inequality in the region’s geography itself.
All these events provided all the evidence to residents that their area had never been considered a priority.
Alex Epstein, then a teen volunteer for a cleanup effort after the storm, heard it in the voices of residents he spoke to 19 years ago to survey what post-Katrina life was like and how they got there. The neglect, for many, seemed intentional and deadly. “Many of the people in the community believe[d] at the bottom of their hearts that their government was out to kill them,” he recalled of his conversations at the time.
Chasity Hunter and other youth climate activists like her, in Louisiana and beyond, experienced Hurricane Katrina mostly through its long-lasting legacy. Some were too young to even remember it happening, but what they do remember is the aftermath. For all of them, combatting climate change, environmental racism, and structural inequality has become a calling.
Decades later, these climate advocates argue, its lessons are still going unheard by those on power: this week, FEMA staffers penned a letter opposing the Trump administration’s proposed and ongoing gutting of the agency, warning:
“Since January 2025, FEMA has been under the leadership of individuals lacking legal qualifications, Senate approval, and the demonstrated background required of a FEMA Administrator. Decisions made by [FEMA officials and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem] erode the capacity of FEMA and our State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial partners, hinder the swift execution of our mission, and dismiss experienced staff whose institutional knowledge and relationships are vital to ensure effective emergency management.”
“For many people, the motivating factor, the spark that initiated their activism was experience with the climate crisis or a climate shock, such as Hurricane Katrina, or a wildfire or drought or a horrible heat wave where people died,” said Dana R. Fisher, a professor and sociologist at American University who has studied climate activism for decades. For others, it was a sense of civic duty. “We find that there's a real intersectionality of the types of issues that motivate people to participate,” said Fisher.
Upon Hunter’s return to New Orleans, everything had changed. One of the main infrastructural failures during Katrina was levees that were previously considered safe. When they failed, 80% of the city was inundated with water. The storm surge, which reached twenty feet in some places, as tall as a house, from the Hurricane also led to overtopping, which is when water spilled over side of the levees and seawalls built to protect the low-lying city. Hunter’s original apartment in the Calliope public housing development in Central City was closed and eventually torn down. Its replacement wouldn’t come for another 7 years.
Meanwhile, the city’s public schooling system was gradually replaced by charter schools. Even her voice was different.
“I always wonder what my life would have been like if Hurricane Katrina didn't happen. Would I even have the accent that I have right now?” Hunter told Teen Vogue. “ When I lived in Baton Rouge I went to a lot of speech therapy, and even that — language intonation can convey culture.”
For Chanté Davis, 21, another Sunrise Movement member who lived in New Orleans before Katrina, she experienced the effects, like many others, from Texas. Her family relocated to Houston after Katrina — only for Hurricane Harvey to hit when she was a teenager.
Davis remembers a Teletubby doll of hers being caught in the window of her old house, when her family went back to visit. The most astounding thing: it still talked and worked perfectly. “I think a lot about how my life would have been different if I had gotten to really grow up in a house instead of relocating,” she said.
Davis would eventually be spurred into action by the 2019 high school Climate Strikes. “It felt tangible. That's how I eventually got involved with the Sunrise Movement,” she said. While organizing with Sunrise, Davis helped plan and participate in a 400-mile march from her birthplace of New Orleans to her new home of Houston to advocate for climate action, and specifically advocate for a Civilian Climate Corps. Former President Biden did eventually enact a version of that program called the American Climate Corps, which his administration wound down President Trump took office, in anticipation of its eventual demise.
For Davis and Hunter, hurricanes aren’t abstractions. They’ve witnessed the damage and the impacts on their families and communities that the climate crisis can cause. When the opportunity arose to advocate for a fossil-free future, they didn’t hesitate.
“When we don't regulate these big companies and we let them pollute our air and pollute our water and pollute our land, and take away power from the locals [and Indigenous communities]— we [face] worse outcomes,” said Hunter. ”And it's not just the physical climate, it's also people's bodies [are] affected by [fossil fuels],” referring to the numerous studies showing how proximity to oil and gas plants can harm human health.
Jerome Foster II, 23, a former member of the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council during the Biden Administration, grew up hundreds of miles away from New Orleans in Washington D.C. The storm still played a major role in how he understood climate disasters.
“[Katrina] was everywhere,” said Foster. “It was, inevitably, in our history books. It was in our English textbooks, where we had to write essays about the aftermath and about the communities that were impacted.” But as a kid, Foster felt his education of the events of Hurricane Katrina didn’t go far enough. “We knew [climate change] was there, but no one was talking about: what are we going to do about it?”
Foster’s climate work, which brought him to New Orleans as a teenager, helped him feel more empowered to attempt to solve some of the problems caused by the fossil fuel industry and the people in power who enabled them. Despite never having visited New Orleans before, Foster observed that communities’ struggles to get through to those in power was universal. “It really felt like there was a common understanding amongst elected officials that you could obfuscate responsibility by just saying, ‘right now is not the time to talk about solutions, right now is not the time to think about why we got here.’”
Chasity Hunter learned about the structural inequities that exacerbated the disaster through her work on the PBS mini-doc “Station 15.”
“Hurricane Katrina is considered one of the most disastrous hurricanes in our recent times, [and] it seems that a lot of the damage could have been prevented,” said Hunter. “Our local politicians knew that this hurricane was coming. They knew that there were lots of low-income African American people who lived in the city, and they knew that people didn't have transportation.”
Hunter wondered about how things would have turned out if buses were available for those without cars. If evacuation warnings were more widespread and urgent, she wondered, maybe some of the worst impacts, like people who ended up stranded on rooftops for days, could have been avoided.
One notable factor of why New Orleans’ then-ongoing flood prevention projects weren’t completed: the Iraq War. In the days after the storm, former Clinton admin aide Sidney Blumenthal pointed the finger at then President George W. Bush, citing funding cuts for a crucial program focused on flood prevention in southern Louisiana. Bush’s war in Iraq came at the cost of funding cuts to those programs. Katrina’s devastation came not just on the failure of decaying levees, evacuation, emergency management and flood prevention programs, but also because climate change intensified the storm.
Alex Epstein’s memories of post-Katrina New Orleans are clear as day. As a high school freshman, he went on a school-sponsored trip from New York City to help with clean-up 9 months after Katrina made landfall. Now 34, some of his most memorable moments were of seeing the levees adjacent to the Lower Ninth Ward with his own eyes.
“When they brought us to the levees [that] breached during the storm, we were able to see [the remnants] and the new levees that they were rebuilding,” said Epstein. “These were literally small concrete walls designed to protect this neighborhood… I could, like, get on my toes and jump and see over the top of them.”
In contrast, levees for richer areas like Lakeview or the French Quarter weren’t just higher, they were integrated into the fabric of the neighborhood. “The levee in Lakeview was so big that they built a park on top of the levee, and you could walk all the way up to the waters with these beautiful stairs,” he said. Lakeview did end up flooding severely, but unlike the Lower Ninth Ward, its population eventually bounced back to pre-Katrina levels.
That school trip left a lasting impact. “I think part of what those experiences brought together for me was an understanding that climate and environmental justice is fundamentally interwoven with racial and economic justice,” said Epstein. A few years later, when his school ended the Katrina trip, he and a group of friends started NY2NO, an organization designed to connect young people in New Orleans and NewYork City to organize against social, racial, and economic inequalities in both places; the group was later renamed NY2X.
In the years since, Epstein moved to Philadelphia. He’s now focused on gardening and re-connecting with the land, through a company he co-founded, Root Catalyst, which is focused on creating spaces for people to connect with nature. He also is still bringing young people into climate work, co-organizing an “Emerging Climate Leaders” program through Root Catalyst.
“That path was set in motion by those experiences I shared with folks in New Orleans,” he said.
Hunter believes that climate action is the best way to fight the impending climate crisis. With climate impacts now reaching further than they previously have, from Canadian wildfire smoke in Midwestern and Northeastern cities, to hurricanes as far inland as western North Carolina, everyone’s fates under climate change are linked. Even the richest will have to contend with higher insurance premiums, more turbulent skies, and the perils of a warming planet.
“It’s not like anyone will truly be safe. And I feel like that should really unite us all in fighting for a better, safer world for us all to live in,” said Hunter.
