A little more than a year ago, Vann Newkirk told me that he wanted to create a podcast about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. He wanted to understand what that disaster revealed about America. (1/10)

We released our eight-part series “Floodlines” on March 12, just as the terrible scale of the pandemic was becoming clear. https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/floodlines/ (2/10)

As Vann recently wrote, he’d initially hoped that the lessons of Katrina might “someday, somehow—help someone. But … it had not occurred to me that I might be that someone, and that someday might be now.” (3/10) https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/the-disaster-beat/610600/

Disaster researchers have a saying: “There’s no such thing as a natural disaster.” Katrina did, of course, devastate much of the Gulf Coast. But the infamous scenes of suffering in New Orleans that people remember were not the result of the hurricane. (4/10)

After levees broke and water flooded much of the city, survivors waited for rescue. But for tens of thousands of people, days passed, and no help came. The former head of FEMA, Michael Brown (“Brownie”), told Vann that this is just how disaster response works. (5/10)

When it became clear that the cavalry wasn’t coming, people searched for food and supplies, and tried to make it out of the flooded city on their own. The national media began to fixate on scenes of “looting.” (6/10)

A feedback loop of paranoia and misinformation ultimately led to tragedy. Police, fearful of “looters” and “snipers,” shot at least 10 people in the week after Katrina hit. The former Times-Picayune columnist @jarvisdeberry saw how quickly victims became targets. (7/10)

After reports of chaos, George W. Bush considered invoking the Insurrection Act and sending in federal troops. As Vann says: “We were pretty dangerously close to a situation where armed-forces units would shoot civilians for the first time since the Kent State massacre.” (8/10)

. @ltgrusselhonore was the head of the Army’s Joint Task Force Katrina. He recognized how dangerous the situation was. And he de-escalated it. “Don’t ever tell law enforcement to shoot to kill your own people,” he told the governor. (9/10)

Parsing a disaster as it unfolds is not easy. But if no disaster is natural, then we can look to past crises to interpret the present. I hope you’ll listen to “Floodlines,” because as Vann says, “We are all vulnerable. And the past will always find its way back to us.” (10/10)