Twenty years ago today, Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, made landfall as a Category 4 storm with 145 mile-per-hour winds. New Orleans – three to twelve feet below sea level, wedged between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi – has always depended on levees and pumps to survive.
Katrina exposed not only infrastructure failures but human ones, leading to nearly 2,000 deaths and millions displaced, many never to return.
National Geographic’s Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time released last month opens with an elderly survivor: “To prevent something from happening again, you have to understand why it happened in the first place.”
It wasn’t just levees that failed. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did too. And to our country’s detriment, FEMA is again showing cracks.
Since January, FEMA has lost a third of its full-time employees. This week, 180 current and former staff sent a letter to Congress criticizing both the cuts and the lack of a qualified administrator with disaster-response experience. One of the painful lessons-learned from Katrina was George W. Bush’s FEMA Director, Michael Brown, whose political background left him unprepared for crisis management and slowed response.
This week’s torrential rain locally helped extinguish wildfires but triggered flash floods – a reminder of how vulnerable we are. When Katrina destroyed power lines and communications, radio became a lifeline. It delivered alerts, news, and reassurance when everything else failed.
Stations broadcast from makeshift studios with backup generators. Calm, familiar voices cut through chaos with instructions and hope. Voices like Susan Banes, “Susie B,” who spent a decade at KSUT: Four Corners Public Radio, and passed away recently. She wasn’t on air in Ignacio during Katrina, but her warmth made listeners feel they had a friend. And they did.
As our community faces wildfires, floods, avalanches, and mudslides, Katrina’s lessons on infrastructure and funding shouldn’t be forgotten. Yet Washington is holding back FEMA grants that support public radio equipment and emergency alert systems. Once again, we risk the silence that cost lives two decades ago.
In February, FEMA awarded KSUT a $537,288 Next Generation Warning System grant to upgrade seven failing towers. Station Manager Tami Graham described them as “held together by duct tape and glue.” The funding – frozen soon after – would have added generators, solar panels, and remote equipment to keep broadcasts running during outages. FEMA tasked the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with contracting the funds. But with CPB now defunded and closing Sept. 30, it’s unclear if the money will ever reach the ground.
KSUT reaches almost 300,000 people, including four tribes and five counties across 130,000 square miles of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. And as Graham recently told The Associated Press: “There is nothing partisan about emergency alerting in rural areas. That is just an absolute basic need” (AP News, Aug. 25).
When digital networks fail, like they did for eight days in Vallecito (Herald, Aug. 27), local radio can prove essential. Community resilience depends on clear, reliable, local information. FEMA’s cuts – including withholding grants for public radio equipment – threaten that.
It’s smaller, rural, and tribal stations that need help most. Without upgrades, radio systems may fail when we need them most. The risk is repeating Katrina’s silence – people unable to access information about evacuation routes, shelters, or aid. That silence, two decades ago, cost lives.
FEMA and Congress must prioritize communication infrastructure. We look again to local residents, leaders, Rep. Jeff Hurd and Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper to raise their voices. When local and state capacity is overwhelmed, as with Katrina, our resilience depends on it.
Katrina taught us the cost of neglect. Twenty years later, we cannot let history repeat. In disaster, information is as vital as food and water. Cutting off radio lifelines cuts off communication and community connection when it’s needed most.
