Living in Louisiana, Lea Johnson was not unfamiliar with hurricanes.

“We were used to that weather,” said Johnson, a fifth-year comparative literature transfer student at UCLA. “It was just part of living out there – if you go to school down there, you are used to evacuating sometimes.”

So before Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005, she left classes at Southern University in Baton Rouge and traveled to her grandparents’ house in central Louisiana with her sister, who attended Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans.

They both expected to be back at school in one to two days.

Yet, as the days went on, they watched Katrina unfold on television, damaging the home they had known since childhood.

With this week marking the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Johnson remembers the hurricane that flooded New Orleans and other areas of the Gulf Coast, damaging more than a million homes, killing a reported 1,464 people in Louisiana and displacing hundreds of thousands more, according to the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals.

Over the past five years, New Orleans has slowly begun the process of rebuilding. According to the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center, New Orleans’ population is at 78 percent of its pre-Katrina level and the labor force has reached 87 percent of its pre-Katrina level.

Along with home reconstruction, New Orleans has strengthened the levees and improved the evacuation and emergency systems.

David Eisenman, an assistant professor of general internal medicine and health services research at UCLA, studied the evacuation of Hurricane Katrina victims and found that public health authorities must think about evacuating extended families in an emergency, instead of just each household. His findings have contributed to new evacuation systems that are now in place.

Even with modest gains in population and labor, 860 families continue to live in trailers provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, 50,000 homes remain vacant and 100,000 people have yet to return to the city, according to the data center.

“A lot of the neighborhoods … were never returned to. We would go back to Xavier’s campus and next door would be the houses that still have spray paint on them, saying how many were found dead in the home, how many (people) were found and not found,” Johnson said. “It’s like the ghosts are still there.”

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Johnson said she heard many stories of social injustices placed upon the hurricane’s victims.
“It was really the impetus that made me move all the way from Louisiana, this place I had known my whole life, and try to transfer into UCLA,” she said. “I wanted to do research and be in a place like Los Angeles where you can really try to affect change.”

But despite the persistent problems in New Orleans in the five years since Hurricane Katrina, Johnson said residents have yet to lose hope for one day rehabilitating their homes to a former time when the city was known for its vivacity and culture.

“I think I am optimistic, though, just because New Orleans has this atmosphere that I have never seen anywhere else,” Johnson said.
“I feel like it is a resilient city, and I think that comes from its mix and diversity.”