I'm Shireen Marisol Miraji.

I'm Jean Demby and this is Code Switch.

From NPR.

Y'all for the past week, Hurricane Isai is has been tearing up the East Coast.

People of last power homes have been destroyed and as of when we're recording this episode,

it's just the beginning of Hurricane season. But we're nowhere near the kind of damage and

destruction that happened 15 years ago this month.

Jean, you know what I'm talking about.

Mm-hmm. Hurricane Katrina, as many of our listeners will remember, that storm absolutely

devastated New Orleans. When the levees broke, entire neighborhoods were flooded,

people were left without electricity for months. More than 1800 people died.

Thousands of New Orleansians were refugees in their own city and many wound up leaving New Orleans

permanently for Houston, Arkansas and other places.

And the neighborhood's hit hardest as many people listening to this already know were poor,

black neighborhoods. And those neighborhoods, many of them, have still not recovered 15 years later.

Over the years, especially during these anniversaries, many people have criticized the government's

response to the crisis. But this week on the show, we're bringing you an episode of the New

Floodlines podcast from The Atlantic. And this episode gets into the many ways the media

failed in the aftermath of that storm and how coverage of Katrina exacerbated the already severe

racial inequities in New Orleans. So here's episode three of Floodlines. With host Van R. Newkirk

the second, it begins in the days after the storm first hit.

Most of the Lord ninth Ward was already underwater. Lots of people were missing.

...