Hurricane Katrina, the race against time: a scream, a nightmare, and a testament

Less than five years after Hurricane Katrina, HBO premiered Treme , a series that explored the human consequences of the New Orleans catastrophe . Katrina devastated the city in August 2005, and by April 2010, David Simon already had a series about its sad legacy on the air. Treme wasn't a fiction about death and destruction, but about life and reconstruction. Simon is interested in the past and the dead, and, as always, he refuses to accept blame. But above all, he wants to tell what comes next, what there is when it's time to return. If you return, that is. His wasn't the only series about the post-Katrina era, but it was the most important. Now, 20 years after the New Orleans catastrophe, another series, this time non-fiction, reminds us of that terrible episode in the recent history of the United States.

Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time , recently released on Disney+ , begins with a light rain. The rest we already know. Or not. That hackneyed idea of the calm before the storm ceases to be hackneyed when someone who lived through Katrina tells you about the feeling of total stillness immediately before the world threatens to end. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time combines descriptive testimonies almost to the point of dissociation (how could one not dissociate in those circumstances) with very clear denunciations of misinformation and chaos. Those from then and those that still linger today. From the mean-spirited use of images of looting (some were just that, but in many cases they were desperate attempts to obtain any kind of food) to the apocalyptic narratives of the disaster that, far from awakening social conscience, became mere morbid entertainment for millions of Americans who remained dry and warm in their homes.

The five episodes of the series border on the tragicomic when they recall the shooting of government helicopters (some believed it would attract the attention of rescue teams), described in some news reports as "sniper fire." Others are simply horrifying. An emergency worker acknowledges that they were unprepared for the type of missions Katrina would force them to undertake. They had to do unthinkable, risky, unspeakable things. Half of New Orleans was under water after its water barriers failed. The natural ones, especially the city's famous cypress swamps, barely existed; the artificial ones collapsed because, with the natural barriers disabled, their resistance was weak. Given that a huge portion of the city was below sea level, entire neighborhoods collapsed.

The tens of thousands of people who couldn't be evacuated from New Orleans and the surrounding areas bore the brunt of Katrina's impact. But of the 1.5 million people who were able to flee and reach safety, 40% never returned home. The vast majority were African-American. Among the refugees in the Superdome, the sports arena that would become the center of the Katrina legend, whites stood out precisely because they were so few. This was already evident in Treme , but in the documentary it's even more striking. New Orleans, as an American city, recovered quickly. And at the same time, it will never recover. Hurricane Katrina: The Race Against Time is a cry, a nightmare, and a testament. Sometimes you have to say: that happened.