Lessons 'unlearned' Twenty years after Katrina, experts warn disaster readiness lags in the US.
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Two decades later, the storm's legacy continues to haunt many experts in the emergency disaster field, a spectre that has grown larger as many warn the administration of US President Donald Trump may be repeating the same mistakes as it weighs gutting federal capacity.
Alessandra Jerolleman, a director at Loyola University of New Orleans, said Katriana shattered the assumption that Americans would inevitably be protected in times of crisis, laying bare the fragility of the systems meant to safeguard them.
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"Katrina is kind of the event of record in modern US emergency management that has kind of guided the work of the field the past 20 years," Montano said, pointing to an increased emphasis on expertise, research and the professionalisation of the emergency management field, as well as increased emphasis on equity and a pivot towards more preventative measures.
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"In the early 2000s, as a nation, we were moving in the direction that we were now a post-racial society. And Katrina slapped us in the face, showing us this tremendous racial inequity in terms of who lives, who dies," he told Al Jazeera. "Socioeconomic inequity reduction is disaster risk reduction, and that's something that FEMA still didn't learn in the aftermath of Katrina."
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