Remembering Hurricane Katrina With Clint Smith, 20 Years After the Storm

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In October 2005, about six weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck, New Orleans-born writer Clint Smith returned to his devastated home to find haunting remnants: a ruined wedding dress, a chair hanging from a chandelier, a perfectly preserved birthday cake. Smith has continued to visit his hometown, marking progress and the destruction still visible. We talk to him about his new piece for the Atlantic called “Twenty Years After the Storm.” And we’ll hear from you: what was returning home from a natural disaster like for you? Guests: Clint Smith, poet and staff writer, The Atlantic - his recent essay for the magazine is "Twenty Years After the Storm." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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1:12.6	Music From KQBD in San Francisco, I'm Mina Kim. Coming up on Forum, we marked 20 years since Hurricane Katrina with New Orleans-born writer Clint Smith. In October 2005, when Smith returned to his flood-destroyed home, he found haunting remnants, a ruined wedding dress, a chair hanging from a chandelier, a perfectly preserved birthday cake.
1:24.6	Smith continues to visit his hometown, marking both progress and the
1:28.4	destruction still visible. We'll get his reflections 20 years after the storm, which is also
1:34.0	the title of his new piece in the Atlantic. Listeners, what was returning home after a natural
1:38.8	disaster like for you? Join us. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. It's been two decades since Hurricane Katrina
1:53.4	brought death and destruction to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region. Fourteen hundred people
1:58.5	died, many in New Orleans, where levees maintained by the federal
2:02.1	government collapsed under the force of the storm surge. My guest, Clint Smith, had just turned
	...

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