Bloomberg: In New Orleans, Katrina Taught a Lesson in Local Resilience

To speed aid after future storms, community groups are building a network of solar-powered “Community Lighthouses” in the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods. 

Solar panels line the roof of First Grace United Methodist Church in New Orleans. It’s one of 18 “Community Lighthouses” across the city. Photographer: Matthew Hinton/AP Photo

As Hurricane Katrina barreled toward New Orleans in August 2005, families in the storm’s path faced a choice: stay or evacuate.

For Bianchi Hughes, then 9 years old, her family’s decision wasn’t easy: Her father was recovering from open-heart surgery at Lindy Boggs Medical Center in New Orleans’ Mid-City neighborhood and would have to stay behind. Plus, he usually did all the driving.

It wasn’t until an aunt called, urging the family to seek refuge in Mississippi, that Hughes’ mom finally hit the road with her two young daughters and their dog in tow. “We didn’t get to say bye to my dad at all,” Hughes recalled. Five days would pass before they learned what happened: He’d been safely evacuated from the hospital, which had been left flooded and without power or water for days after basement generators failed. In the storm’s aftermath, 45 patients died; the ruined medical complex was shuttered and remains vacant today.

Hughes is now the director of disaster relief at Together Louisiana, a statewide coalition of religious and civic organizations aimed at improving residents’ quality of life, including during climate crises. As she recalls her Katrina experience, she says her family was lucky: They had the resources to evacuate, including a car, a place to go and relatives extending help.

That wasn’t the case for many of the more than 100,000 people who stayed behind as Katrina’s storm surge broke through the levees that protected New Orleans, submerging about 80% of the city. Floodwaters trapped many residents inside their homes, and widespread power and utility outages stranded the survivors in stifling heat without electricity or access to clean water. Those who sought refuge in the Louisiana Superdome — the city’s designated shelter of last resort — didn’t fare any better, as conditions inside the damaged arena swiftly deteriorated into scenes of violence, filth and desperation.

Hurricane Katrina survivors wait outside the Superdome in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005. Photographer: James Nielsen/AFP via Getty Images

Nearly 1,400 people across the affected region died — many not during the storm itself but in the chaotic days that followed, as state and federal officials scrambled to coordinate emergency response.

Twenty years later, Katrina remains one of the most destructive storms in US history, costing $161 billion in damages and displacing millions of people. Recovery was incomplete: While the city’s tourism industry is larger than ever, its population is down by some 100,000 people, and its demographics have shifted, with fewer Black residents. The recovery process, in many ways, exacerbated racial injustices that existed before the storm: Aid programs from the Federal Emergency Management Agency — the top federal agency for disaster response and recovery — were rife with racial discrimination, as funds ended up flowing mostly to higher-income homeowners and not to residents of the low-income and predominantly African-American areas that bore the brunt of the storm’s damage.

The lessons of Katrina stand both as a powerful indictment of the government response and a call to strengthen the capacity of local communities to respond to emergencies. In coming disasters, local help may be the only help that residents of cities like New Orleans can expect to see.

Residents of New Orleans’ Broadmoor neighborhood remained inundated says after Hurricane Katrina in 2025. Photographer: Ronna Gradus/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

“We’ve learned from Katrina and every event since then that the first responders are your neighbors,” said Pierre Moses, president of 127 Energy. The renewable energy firm has been working with Together Louisiana to install solar panels and back-up batteries on more than a dozen churches, civic centers and other neighborhood-serving facilities throughout New Orleans, creating microgrids that stay powered during prolonged blackouts.

These buildings have also been designated as “Community Lighthouses”; during disasters, they’ll serve as resilience hubs offering people a range of support and potentially life-saving services. They’re stocked with food, charging stations and refrigerators for storing medicine. And they’re run by members of the community.

“The most important part is a team of people who are the ‘lighthouse keepers,’” said Broderick Bagert, a founding member of the Community Lighthouse project. They routinely canvass the neighborhood, identifying people who live alone, surveying households about their most urgent needs and building trust with the community. When an emergency arises, that information can be used to determine who needs to be checked in on, by phone or in person.

“We have come to understand more that isolation is a big factor in who lives and dies,” Bagert said.

Debris from a collapsed house after Hurricane Ida in New Orleans on Sept. 3, 2021. Photographer: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg

Spearheaded by Together New Orleans — a subset of the larger coalition — the project launched in 2022 in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida, which hit as a Category 4 storm about 90 miles southeast of New Orleans in 2021, knocking out power to much of the city for nearly three weeks. Carbon monoxide poisoning from running generators and hyperthermia from heat exposure were the top killers, causing half of the 28 deaths recorded in Louisiana. Since then, 18 lighthouses have been established throughout the city, many in the some of the most socially vulnerable neighborhoods.

The group is currently aiming to create the largest network of solar-powered resilience hubs in the US, with plans to expand to 86 facilities across New Orleans and, eventually, to 500 throughout the state.

The goal: to put one in every neighborhood, each within a 15-minute walk — or drive, in more rural areas — from people’s homes.

Mutual Aid Model

The need for community resilience has taken on new urgency as President Donald Trump continues to shrink FEMA’s role in disaster response. About a third of the agency’s workforce has left since the start of the the Trump administration. FEMA has also moved to eliminate key hazard mitigation initiatives, including the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, which helps cities prepare for future disasters. In August, a federal judge temporarily blocked the administration from reallocating $4.5 billion in BRIC funding after 20 Democrat-led states sued — but not before several projects were put in limbo.

This week, nearly 200 current and former FEMA officials signed an open letter to Congress warning that the president’s actions were putting the US at risk of another Katrina-level catastrophe. Meanwhile, budget and staffing cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration stand to make weather forecasting more difficult, at a time when storms have become increasingly unpredictable.

The pullback places new pressure on local responders when it comes to preparing for the next emergency, especially as extreme weather becomes more frequent and deadly.

In September 2024, the Community Lighthouse project was put to its first test after Hurricane Francine left half a million Louisianans without power. A dozen lighthouses were in operation at the time, including Broadmoor Community Church, located in a racially and economically mixed part of the city’s Uptown district. It’s a low-lying part of town that saw severe flooding after Katrina; post-storm planners initially recommended turning the hard-hit area into parkland. But Broadmoor residents fought hard to rebuild and repopulate the neighborhood instead.

Like at other hubs, residents came in to charge their phones and store medication in the church’s fridge when Francine hit. Jonah Quinn is clinical director of the Broadmoor Improvement Association, which helps run the lighthouse. He recounted one way in which it functioned differently from a government-run shelter: As different needs of different people became apparent — for example, someone to watch and entertain young kids who were becoming restless — community members took it upon themselves to fill them.

“The 16-year-olds start babysitting not just 6-year-olds from their own family but the other ones, too, and so this kind of organic mutual aid experience came up at Broadmoor,” Quinn said. “The line between who’s receiving service and who’s giving them disappears within 30 minutes of people getting there.”

A sign for the Community Lighthouse initiative at First Grace United Methodist Church in New Orleans. Photographer: Matthew Hinton/AP Photo

Another lighthouse is based in Mid-City at First Grace United Methodist Church — whose congregation merges two historical churches that were destroyed during Katrina. There, the church filled up with community members seeking a place to cool off and recharge roughly two hours into the outage. Shawn Anglim, a pastor at the church and a founding member of the Community Lighthouse, described the mood inside as “joyful” as they found refuge in the air conditioning. First Grace also became an ad-hoc distribution point used by city officials and nonprofits for resources like food, oxygen tanks and non-diesel backup generators.

“How did they know to call us? It’s because they know we’re a Community Lighthouse,” Anglim said. Previous outreach efforts made it easier to determine which residents needed those resources — and it ensured those residents also knew where to go for help. “It became very clear to us we need to focus on the human infrastructure that connects our lighthouses back to the neighborhoods,” he added. “So making sure that residents around community know what resources are available to them, that they’re not alone in this.”

15-Minute City

The idea of neighborhood-scale resilience isn’t new: Until the second half of the 20th century, New Orleans residents relied on an ad-hoc network of designated public buildings like churches, schools and libraries to shelter from hurricanes and stage the post-storm recovery. And the concept can be seen in sites far from Southern Louisiana. Aid groups from Baltimore, Maryland, to Maui County, Hawaii, are also building their own resilience hubs with a mix of private and public funding. (Although, some projects that relied more heavily on federal dollars are stalled amid the rescinding of federal grants.)

Too often, though, such efforts can miss the point, according to Ki Baja, who helped pioneer the resilience hub concept more than a decade ago while serving as the hazard mitigation planner for the city of Baltimore. Now the cofounder of the Resilience Hub Collaborative — a platform for community leaders to exchange ideas and resources — Baja says a true hub doesn’t just respond to disasters.

“It just is something that enhances a community in the event of a disaster or disruption,” she said. “We are in hazard disaster probably less than 2% of the time, but resilience is necessary the other 98% of the time.”

In a sense, resilience hubs just add survival resources to the list of daily essentials that should be sited within a short distance from people’s homes — a core principle of the zeitgeisty “15-minute city” urban planning model.

To that end, a resilience hub should serve residents year-round with resources that boost their ability to be self-sufficient. That means programs that not only give out food, but show people how to cook and grow their own produce. Some hubs could have commercial kitchens for members to make food that they can sell to other residents. It could also mean programs that foster connections and exchange of knowledge between older residents and students.

Long after a storm has passed, these facilities can also serve as third spaces, where residents can gather to socialize and develop community bonds. Ideally, she added, hubs are housed in spaces that are already trusted and respected by area residents, who can easily access them. Churches and other houses of worship are often ideal host sites for resilience hubs: They’re centrally located in their communities, often in large, robust older buildings with an abundance of space that can be adapted for multiple purposes. Their existing relationships with their congregations can easily be built upon and expanded. Community centers also make for good hubs, as many already have the physical capacity to provide a range of social services, from childcare to health care to economic development.

“Libraries and schools, even though you’d think they’d be great, are actually terrible for resilience hubs,” Baja said, since those buildings tend to have less flexibility in the way their spaces can be adapted. Not to mention, school boards can be hard to work with.

Like many community leaders involved with resilience hubs, Baja is skeptical of too much official interference. Government support should be limited to funding or additional resources: “If government tries to lead, they create the same conditions of things that haven’t been working for years. And it puts us right back in the same issue of why people won’t go to emergency shelters.”

In other words, these spaces should be run, managed and designed by the community itself.

“No two resilience hubs are alike,” Baja said. “They’re not supposed to be — they’re supposed to reflect the uniqueness of the community that they serve.”