How the Katrina heroes you’ve never heard of survived the killer flood and helped pump a great American city dry By Michelle Krupa, Edmund D. Fountain, Alicia Johnson and Byron Manley, CNN Published August 28, 2025 Editor’s Note: This story was reported and written by CNN’s Michelle Krupa, who first learned of New Orleans’ unique drainage system as a reporter from 2002 to 2012 at The Times-Picayune/nola.com. This account was edited by Jason Hanna. New Orleans – They reported for duty in the days before landfall, just the same as always. Duffels packed with clothes for three days. Food that could last as long without spoiling. Vienna sausages. Cheese crackers. Potted meat. Their wives and children had fled – to Baton Rouge, to Jackson, Mississippi, to Birmingham, Alabama. Up and out of the bowl-shaped city these men had stayed behind to protect. A weak Hurricane Katrina already had hopscotched Florida’s southeast coast and waded into a very warm Gulf. Now, it was swirling. Seething. Swelling until it stretched from Florida’s Panhandle bend to the Louisiana-Texas line. URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service New Orleans LA 1011 AM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005 …DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED…. HURRICANE KATRINA… A MOST POWERFUL HURRICANE WITH UNPRECEDENTED STRENGTH… This storm was “everywhere,” Bobby Brouillette observed that last Sunday of August 2005 as Katrina’s satellite image lit up his screen, one of the many modern tools patched into a century-old, 72-acre campus that served as a critical hub of arguably the most important public infrastructure network in the city: its stormwater drainage system. Hurricane Katrina aims for a landfall on August 29, 2005, near Buras, Louisiana. NOAA Far to the south, past delicate wetlands, Katrina’s top sustained winds reached 175 mph, far surpassing the threshold of the hurricane scale’s top tier: Category 5. No such storm had developed in this basin in a generation. URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service New Orleans LA RIVALING THE INTENSITY OF HURRICANE CAMILLE OF 1969. MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER. To those New Orleanians not deemed essential to facing down nature’s fury, city and state leaders issued an order via radio and TV: Evacuation is mandatory. “This is, of course … because of the topography,” the governor said, “the geography that we deal with here: being below sea level.” That geography, indeed, was why Brouillette and dozens of his coworkers at the city’s Sewerage & Water Board weren’t leaving. Their job, as in so many past storms, was to electrify and run the pumps that keep this flood-prone city dry. “All of us were prepared – or thought we were prepared – to deal with this,” Eric Labat, a power dispatcher supervisor, would recall. “And none of us could imagine what went on.” To understand what these men were about to face, it’s important to know why New Orleans routinely pumps water out of itself. After the city was established on narrow strips along the Mississippi River, the only place to expand was swamp. That couldn’t be done well until the 1910s, with the advent of an enormous pump that could drain the wetlands and discharge the water into nearby Lake Pontchartrain via long, floodwall-sandwiched drainage canals. The water removal allowed for a building boom – and a new era of soil subsidence, or settling, that by 1960 had dropped much of the city’s interior several feet below sea level. It also created a new sort of flood risk during both heavy rain, which could pool quickly in the bowl, and tropical storms, when swirling winds could funnel the brackish lake back inland via the outfall canals. Still, New Orleans had a defensive web purportedly poised to meet these relatively common sieges: a 350-mile patchwork of federally overseen levees holding back rising water in the lake, as well as nearby wetlands and shipping channels. Plus, the same pumps that had bested the swamp – many as big as a backyard shed – could drain rainwater from the streets and push it out through the canals. The system since its inception had grown and grown to include more than 100 drainage pumps at 24 stations manned at all hours and spread across the whole city, including a newer, suburban-style eastern expanse. The pumps were not infallible – and in fact earned residents’ ire whenever any failed at the height of heavy rain. But for decades, they had helped keep New Orleans from a worst-case scenario. Now, a storm poised to deliver exactly that was headed their way. URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service New Orleans LA THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED. Brouillette eyed his screen as Katrina “took up the whole Gulf.” At the same water board facility – about 9 miles up the Mississippi River’s winding high ground from the French Quarter – Labat, too, stared at the satellite picture. A respected veteran among utility workers, Labat helped energize many of the drainage system’s strongest pumps via a frequency of electricity largely phased out by the mid-20th century – but still generated by a power plant at the water board campus in the Carrollton neighborhood. The oft-debated, admittedly inefficient operation offered two surprising advantages: City workers could generate the archaic frequency independently of commercial power using steam and natural gas turbines, then deliver it via the water board’s own buried lines when strong winds inevitably felled the for-profit, above-ground grid. Still, Katrina’s size and strength posed challenges even the most fortified quarry wouldn’t invite. “Just move,” Labat willed the hurricane that Sunday, figuring the best way to be spared its wrath was for it to plow through quickly. “If you’re gonna get us,” Labat bargained, “get us and go.” About 3 miles from the Carrollton campus by car, along an elevated ridge amid New Orleans’ interior neighborhoods, Conard James stood at the waist-high, sky-blue control docks inside the water board’s Drainage Pump Station No. 6, a 500-foot long brick warehouse with concrete floors, a metal roof and a vacuous mechanical smell that belied the fishy canal beneath it. Built starting in 1899, the cavernous building straddled the 17th Street Canal, separating New Orleans and suburban Jefferson Parish. The city’s most powerful drainage station, it housed seven of the old, mammoth pumps run by antiquated electricity, plus several more modern ones run by commercial power. At full tilt, the station – with a roar like a jet taking off – could drain some 10,000 cubic feet of water per second from the city’s streets, equal to about seven Olympic-sized swimming pools every minute or the entire Louisiana Superdome downtown in three or so hours. As assistant pumping station supervisor, James would help command that might, alongside an electrician, a machinist and equipment maintenance experts. This Wood screw drainage pump – named for its inventor – is one of 13 major pumps at Pump Station No. 6. Powered by in-house electricity, its motor wheel spins a black shaft that turns an encased 12-foot impeller, left, to move stormwater from the 17th Street Canal south of the station into Lake Pontchartrain to its north, the water board’s Conard James explains. Edmund D. Fountain for CNN The pump’s motor is wired to generate its own magnetic field, James says, adding, “This is technology they had in the 1920s” – still at work today. Edmund D. Fountain for CNN Even so, he had sent his wife and kids, ages 12 and 13, out of New Orleans as Katrina steamed in. URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service New Orleans LA POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS. It was “gonna be bad,” James sensed, even as the water board’s in-house electricity – and the drainage pumps it fueled – were set to keep the place dry. At the Carrollton campus, Brouillette, an electrical supervisor, loaded up a truck to head out to three pump stations along the earthen lake levee in eastern New Orleans that he would help keep running through the hurricane. URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service New Orleans LA ONCE TROPICAL STORM AND HURRICANE FORCE WINDS ONSET…DO NOT VENTURE OUTSIDE! Besides a comforter and pillow from home and a cooler of ice to preserve his ham slices, bread and jarred peanut butter, Brouillette carried a two-way radio all water board workers used to keep in touch. Meanwhile, networks chief Rudy August was hunkering down with his own reserves and crew at the water board’s Central Yard. The site, staging teams to repair sewer and water lines, was just downriver of the French Quarter and about 1 1/2 miles from each of two more major pump stations: No. 5 on the Industrial Canal and another on the London Avenue Canal. As Katrina’s outer bands blew through Sunday evening, Central Yard’s landlines rang with routine customer complaints. Business as usual, August thought. Back at the Carrollton campus near the river, his colleague Keith Beasley watched from the facility maintenance unit as Katrina rolled in across the dark sky. It was not quite following Labat’s wish to “get us and go.” replay with audio Katrina blasts through the Carrollton campus before dawn on August 29, 2005. Damon Adams The hurricane had weakened to Category 4, then again to Category 3 – with top winds of 129 mph – by the time its eye trudged ashore just before sunrise on Monday, August 29, near the fishing village of Buras, some 60 miles southeast of New Orleans. URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service New Orleans LA 619 AM CDT MON AUG 29 2005 …EXTREMELY DANGEROUS HURRICANE KATRINA MOVING ACROSS LOWER PLAQUEMINES PARISH… …DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED… Katrina’s eye moved north and just slightly to the east of New Orleans, a path that would matter in ways not immediately apparent to the water board men. What was most clear as the storm hit was the wind. From a garage-style entry at his shop, Beasley, a utility master maintenance supervisor, watched an apartment building’s 12-inch slate roof tiles wobble. “Within 15 seconds, they were all gone,” he would recall. “We watched that roof peel.” URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE National Weather Service New Orleans LA AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD … PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK. The hurricane beat down for hours as it moved toward another explosive landfall, this one near Mississippi. When it finally waned, Beasley emerged from his shelter. Commercial power had blinked out, but the Carrollton plant kept running. And his feet met asphalt. “Absolutely, we beat the storm,” Beasley thought. “Absolutely.” Soon, though, Beasley, found frightening evidence of the hurricane’s strength when he checked on a dump truck near his shop: “One of those slates went through the driver’s side window,” he would remember, “and stuck in the door.” Though he did not yet realize it, the impaled roof tile signaled a far more alarming upshot of Katrina’s ferocity. It was already stealing and upending lives across the nearly 300-year-old city. Just a few miles away, it also was pushing some water board men to the brink. At Pump Station No. 6, James listened early Monday to his two-way radio wail with horror. Water somehow had begun pouring into Pump Station No. 5, along the Industrial Canal in the city’s Lower Ninth Ward. It had rushed up to cover the same kind of waist-high, blue pump controls at James’ own fingertips. “At Station 5,” the assistant supervisor would remember, “they were suffering.” His colleagues were making their way to the rafters and an elevated switch room, begging for help over the radio: “Don’t want to die.” Then, the line went dead. Why exactly this was happening wasn’t clear to James. At so many sites across the vast drainage system, the ground was dry, guys reported via radio. Or only flooded a little. From the second floor of Central Yard, August saw knee-deep water in the street, presumed to be due to a busted water main in City Park, the 2-square-mile respite of lagoons and ancient live oaks about 4 miles to their west. “But it wasn’t anything that led you to believe that we were going to be in a new world,” August would recall. And, he figured, it wasn’t anything the water board pumps couldn’t handle. Outside Pump Station No. 6, James also found dry ground. But then, on Monday afternoon – eight or so hours after landfall – he spotted something odd in the canal near his station: A small boat. It got closer. And closer. The inflatable gray dinghy carried a water board power plant engineer and another colleague. “What are you doing?” James shouted at them. “Why are you doing that?” “Man!” they told him, “The levee broke on the 17th Street Canal!” Over at Central Yard, August around midday “heard screams from people that were in the building on the … first floor.” “And as I’m running down the stairs, water is coming upstairs. “Fast.” This was no water main break. It was like at Pump Station No. 5. New Orleans’ interior flood defenses were crumbling. Because Katrina’s eye had passed just east of New Orleans, the storm inflicted “unusually severe wind loads and storm surges” on the city’s flood protection systems, scientists and engineers later would say. With how big and fierce it had grown in the Gulf and its counterclockwise spin, the hurricane was perfectly positioned to pile up and push water into the city from the Gulf and Lake Pontchartrain. Beyond even that, the surge homed in on long-hidden weaknesses in the city’s vast flood protection system, knocking out ill-designed floodwalls along the 17th Street, London Avenue and Industrial canals while overtopping and eroding other levees. The lake and surrounding wetlands were filling the bowl.Across New Orleans, people were drowning, many in their own homes.Thousands more were launching desperate escapes. Word of the inundation reached the water board’s Carrollton campus near the river long before the flood itself. “Man, the levees broke!” some machinists shouted at Beasley. “We gotta get out of here!” A sandbagging effort whipped up to try to protect the equipment that had kept electricity flowing from this high ground for generations. So, too, did panic. Some machinists “were really tripping out,” Beasley would recall, “getting in their trucks.” The utility master maintenance supervisor and others tried to get everyone to take a breath, man their posts – and not resort to the still-drivable river road up and out of the drowning city. “No, don’t leave yet,” they counseled. “Just hang tight.” At Central Yard, “panic started to set in because we trapped in this bowl,” August would remember. “There was so much water.” They moved operations by Monday night to the second floor. But August had reason to hope: “Right next door (was) Station D, which is a major pump for that area.” “These boys next door gonna get to pumping this water,” the chief of networks told his team. “We gonna be out of here.” But the storm had blown the roof off Station D. Its equipment was drenched. August’s escape plan was a well-founded fantasy. Out in eastern New Orleans, Katrina’s surge pushed water over the earthen lake levee as Brouillette hustled to keep three more-modern pump stations working. Soon, he, along with a pump operator and a diesel mechanic, started seeing “caravans of people with nowhere to go.” Despite the evacuation order, some couldn’t get rides out of town – for themselves, older or sickly relatives, or pets. Many didn’t have the money at month’s end for gas or a motel. Others stayed to protect property – with sandbags or shotguns – or simply refused to go, recalling past hurricanes played up as monsters before fizzling. Now, they were heading to high ground at the swollen lake’s shore – toward one of the fenced-in pump stations – to escape another tide surging up from the Gulf through wetlands at the city’s edge. “It was like they were zombies.” “They see our generator and the lights on. They trying to get into the pumping station. And the only protection I had was a machete,” Brouillette would remember. “You feel bad, but … we can’t let people in. “They hit the wrong switch on us, you can blow the pumping station up.” Stranded residents also walked to the water board’s Carrollton campus near the river, where even as the flood crept toward knee depth, in-house electricity production kept flowing and, thanks to a frequency-changing device, ran modern lights and air conditioners. “How y’all still got power?” they asked Beasley at the fence line. By late Monday, the world had started to grasp the magnitude of the catastrophe, and more helpers – from volunteer flotillas to the National Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers – were rushing in. Levers inside Pump Station No. 6 operate screens on the facility’s back side that stop debris from entering the pumps. Edmund D. Fountain for CNN This pump at Pump Station No. 6 drains 250 cubic feet per water second, James says. It replaced an older model and runs on modern electricity. Edmund D. Fountain for CNN But neither they nor the old-timey electricity fueling a beacon in the deluge were much help to the water board crews still manning those enormous drainage pumps scattered around the bowl. At some stations, the flood had inundated the oldest ones, salt gnawing at their critical components. And more than 50 levee breaches – including along the 17th Street, London Avenue and Industrial canals – meant any attempt to pump water out only poured it back into the waterways now funneling the lake into New Orleans. Still, at least one pump operator refused to quit. “Eric, you gotta make him stop!” James implored Labat on Tuesday by two-way radio. A pump worker at a station that fed into No. 6 thought he was stanching the flood’s flow so it wouldn’t reach palm-lined Canal Street and downtown’s luxury hotels, office towers and Superdome, the men would recall. But owing to the breaches, that’s not what he was doing at all. And even James, an assistant supervisor, couldn’t get him to pull back. So, he got a headstrong veteran on the line. Labat didn’t sugarcoat it: “You’re pumping it in a circuit, dude.” Indeed, just as Katrina had turned the colossal pumps into little more than flood-recirculation machines, so had the mighty storm – and the subpar levees it felled – tied the hands of the expert workers who had stayed put to keep the place dry. The pumps went quiet. Water kept filling the bowl, feeding the flood until it could be seen from space. By Tuesday, it reached the Carrollton campus by the river, where it easily bested the sandbags. “We had zero resources left. Couldn’t do a thing,” Labat would remember. “We lost all means of producing any kind of power.” “That was the first time I ever seen that plant quiet,” Beasley would say. Still, a monumental task lay ahead. Some water board workers who still had food and flip phones or TVs that caught an occasional signal stuck it out in elevated facilities. Others, like those at Pump Station No. 5, made their way through the flood to other water board sites or flagged down rescue helicopters and boats over the next days to get to dry land. Many stayed connected via two-way radio. But depending on their location and access to electricity, the “lifeline” system also was fraying until, for many, it went silent before they understood the full scope of the disaster. “When the communication went down, it was, like, solid: We didn’t know anything,” James would say. “And that’s what I think panicked a lot, everybody.” The hours started to bleed together. Coworkers clashed over what day of the week it was. At night, gunshots echoed and darkness made everyone blind. On Central Yard’s second floor, two-way radios had been quiet for days. Food and bottled water were almost gone. August started to worry. “We can’t get out of here,” he thought. “We can’t get out, and we can’t talk to anybody.” Then on Thursday or Friday night, the networks chief spotted a rescuer ferrying marooned residents from their inundated homes. He grabbed a flashlight, and the driver “pulled the boat right up” in waist-high water to the front door. Some in August’s crew were “so rattled,” they hesitated. “Nah, I’m not getting in the boat because I don’t know where it’s going,” somebody said. But August – and the guy at the vessel’s helm – wouldn’t have it. “I’m the last boat out,” the driver said. “Y’all don’t get on this one, nobody coming.” Two or three trips later, the Central Yard team was waiting for rides to a chaotic convention center-turned-emergency shelter. They bided their time on an Interstate 10 ramp not far from the border of the city’s older bowl and its eastern reaches, where some neighborhoods languished in more than 7 feet of water. Brouillette was still at one of the eastern New Orleans pump stations. But “as we were pumping into the lake, we didn’t know that the water was coming back in through all the breaks” in the levees, he would recall. And now, the electrical supervisor was out of ice. “The heat was just unbearable,” Brouillette would remember. “About the fifth day, that’s when the smell started. It took your breath away. “And, like, on the sixth day was when the flies started.” All the while, the world watched “special continuing coverage” of New Orleans, marinating. At least 80% of the city – from two-bedroom shotgun homes to mansions, hospitals, churches and po’boy shops – festered in anywhere from an inch to 20 feet of water. Oil spiraled from submerged cars into rainbows on the surface. Fish swam around signposts. Some 250 billion gallons of water had poured in. Engineers near and far tried to figure out how to get Lake Pontchartrain back where it belonged. But everyone knew: Until gaping breaches in the 17th Street, London Avenue and Industrial canals were plugged, any effort to drive out the flood would be – as Labat had put it earlier – “pumping it in a circuit, dude.” The “international technical community estimated that once the levees were sealed, it would take about 3-4 months to dewater or drain the City,” the water board years later would say. The water board’s top engineer knew – even before the flood equalized by Friday with the lake – how to get started quickly: “Just put a damn cofferdam there,” General Superintendent Joe Sullivan yowled, “and we can pump this city out.” Giant interlocking metal sheets, he said, should be lowered into the breaches to restore the canals’ integrity enough so his crews could restart their pumps. And drain the bowl. Sullivan’s order eventually would be carried out. But the Army Corps of Engineers, with the National Guard and others, started in on an even quicker fix: loading 15,000-pound sandbags onto Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters at the water board’s Carrollton campus and other sites, then flying them over the flood and dropping them – one by one – into levee gaps as long as football fields. The strategy was utterly new and, per the governor, an “engineering nightmare.” The federal agencies also helped reroute commercial power lines and haul in high-volume portable pumps to revive and augment the impaired water board fleet. Meanwhile, the water board men kept up their essential work under conditions none had signed up for. Far from their families and many with homes underwater, they kept living at their workplaces or other makeshift lodgings and worked at all hours – often 12 or 14 hours at a time – to get the ruined city’s most foundational public service back online. They couldn’t foresee just how many weeks – months, even – the job would keep them there. Brouillette kept manning the three lake levee pump stations – living mostly at one of them – warding off plundering and keeping the pumps and power equipment ready to switch on to drain the flood, he would recall. Day after day, he wore the same work boots and boxer shorts, his keys on a rope around his neck so they wouldn’t fall into the murky water. He ate Meals, Ready-to-Eat dropped by military helicopters, the first one burning the thigh he rested it on to use its flameless heater. He used the lake side of the levee as a bathroom. Beasley lived at the flooded Carrollton campus. He caught sleep on a cot in an improvised bunk room near the machine and welding shop, alternated among his three or four sets of clothes and carried out a critical job. From a National Guard depot at Harrah’s downtown casino, he ferried 55-gallon drums of diesel and gas via boom truck to the Carrollton campus. The fuel powered water board generators and other trucks that delivered bearing oil, new wires and other supplies to drainage stations across the bowl to revive the pumps that could drain the city. His payload more than once caught the gaze of might-be thieves – an outcome authorities already facing civil unrest moved to avert. “There was a guy with an M16 on each side of my truck for the rest of the storm” response period, the utility master maintenance supervisor would recall. Like others staying at the campus, Beasley ate meals made by volunteers who set up an industrial kitchen at a water board site across the river, and he bathed in an ad hoc shower his colleagues fashioned from basins of water purified before the storm, a sump pump, a hose and a blue tarp curtain. Others at the Carrollton site in those days right after Katrina toiled at another never-attempted feat: cold-starting the vintage power plant. After drying out key equipment, they launched a painstaking series of steps that required a vital set of components to sync with another, then the next and the next, with none failing midway through, Damon Adams, the power plant engineer from the dinghy, would recall. They made “four tries in three days.” Until it worked. Still, as Beasley knew, “We couldn’t pump until they fixed the levee.” Sandbag after sandbag plunged into the breaches, along with loads of fill dirt. By Monday, September 5, the work was well on its way at the Industrial Canal. At the 17th Street and London Avenue canals, it was done. And just like that, Pump Station No. 6 was back in business. “Once they closed that up,” James would remember years later, “we were able to start pumping.” As more breaches got closed, more of the city’s oldest workhorse pump stations cranked back into service, alongside the high-capacity portables. And soon, as many as 100,000 gallons of water were getting flushed out of New Orleans every second. His home station churning, James within about a week drove his pickup through the waning flood to the major pump station along the London Avenue Canal, where he and others slept on cots and “pumped … until we were able to get the water off the streets.” By September 15, “dark flood water had all but disappeared” from New Orleans, NASA reported, citing a satellite image and noting: “Pumps had been working nonstop to return the water to Lake Pontchartrain.” “After the breaches were closed, it took the employees 11 days to de-water the city,” the agency would report, referring to the oldest interior neighborhoods. Draining the lowest-lying parts of eastern New Orleans took a few more weeks. September 15, 2005 September 7, 2005 The feat would become legendary. But it wasn’t like draining a bathtub, porcelain washed clean. “It was messy,” James would recall. “Messy. Dirty. Smelly.” And the job was far from done. A full month after Katrina, Brouillette drove off the lake levee to his flooded home in Jefferson Parish. By then, the electrical supervisor had urged his wife in Jackson: “Put the kids in school up there. They have nothing to come back to.” After living at the Carrollton campus for 33 days, Beasley found Katrina had largely spared his suburban home. But for August – who’d been living in a water board office across the river – it “turned everything upside down” in his eastern New Orleans house. Midway through the 12 weeks in which Labat slept between shifts on an air mattress in his Carrollton campus office – save four days he visited his evacuated family – he drove to his home in eastern New Orleans. At first, “I just sat there in my driveway,” he would recall. Days later, he discovered the flood had pushed his refrigerator into a door and somehow steamed away the starry night sky he’d painted on his young daughter’s bedroom ceiling. In late September, James followed a bulldozer clearing streets to his elevated home near the London Avenue Canal, where the force of the flood that settled 5 feet up the walls also mounded up sediment mixed with fallen branches and parked cars. By then, the assistant pumping station supervisor had started making the 80-mile drive up Interstate 10 to visit his family in Baton Rouge. But he never stayed long, always returning to his pump station cot and rejoining the effort to stand up the crippled drainage network. Across the system – from turbines to pump motors to canals and culverts, plus the radio network and computers to run it all – Katrina had done unthinkable damage. But if the equipment didn’t get fixed, tens of thousands of New Orleanians would never be able to return to check on their homes – and start to rebuild. The water board men were the world’s experts in how to patch the system back together, in some cases fabricating “parts as small as a screw or as large as an impeller … to exacting specifications” in their Carrollton campus workshops. So, in order to keep working, they just kept living in temporary accommodations in a virtually vacant city where houses slouched off slabs, flowering bushes had gone gray and a grimy water line slashed everything in sight. James moved in October to the Sheraton hotel on Canal Street – where public employees, recovery contractors and newsrooms set up – then the next month to a cramped trailer on a municipal lot near City Park. Labat – after moving to a cruise ship-turned-shelter on the river – also got a trailer there that felt “like the Taj Mahal.” Weeks, then months, of work again blurred together. Water board workers ate fast food and supermarket fare from nearby, bounced-back suburbs. They tucked in kids by phone and went home alone to government trailers and office cots. It wasn’t until October 2006 that Labat bought a house in a part of New Orleans that didn’t flood and moved back in with his family. For James, it was 2007 when he, his wife and kids moved back into their rebuilt home, pioneers amid houses in varying states of decay. “There were no fights. There were no arguments,” Adams would say years later of the time he and his colleagues lived at work so they could rebuild the drainage system. “We were too busy concentrating on how to get this place back in shape.” In the five years after Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers spent some $40 million to repair and restore 23 of the water board’s hardest hit pump stations and parts of its Carrollton campus, plus more to “stormproof” the stations with backup generators, elevated equipment and safe rooms that can withstand 250-mph winds. Far more broadly, the federal agency also invested $14.5 billion to reduce flooding and boost protection from storms in and around New Orleans, including with improved levees, surge gates and pump stations at the ends of the outfall canals. The effort – “one of the largest public works projects in history” – took 17 years to finish. Already, though, parts of the system are sinking faster than sea levels are rising as the warming climate also makes hurricanes stronger, and more improvements almost certainly will be needed. Meanwhile, the city has come back, albeit unevenly. And the water board has “come a long way,” said Brouillette, now utility service administrator in facility maintenance, as the 2025 hurricane season kicked off. Rain still pools in parts of the bowl in heavy storms, but the drainage system is sturdier, including an upgrade that aims to generate modern-frequency electricity – not just the old-timey stuff – at the power plant to run the major pumps. “That wasn’t designed for that,” Brouillette said, “but we manipulated it to do what we wanted to do. So, we’re a lot better off today.” That kind of thinking, August weighed in, comes with the territory. “I remember when I first came to Sewerage & Water Board, the old-timers was like, ‘Look, there’s the right way, the wrong way, and then there’s the water board way. … If you want to stick around here, you better learn the water board way.’” In Katrina, “we were just ordinary people, right?” added James, now the drainage and sewerage supervisor. “We wasn’t looking for that … I never experienced anything like that before. So, we were learning as we went along.” “We fussin’ and fightin’, just like a family,” said August, now retired. “But when that storm hit, man, it’s like, ‘Man, you OK? What you need?’” Even coming up on 20 years later, Katrina crosses their minds “every time there’s a hurricane threat,” said Labat, who retired as the agency’s operations chief. “The hair on your neck stands up,” Brouillette said. “You see that big circle in the Gulf,” Beasley chimed in, “and you go, ‘Shit, here we go.’” Still, “it just kind of is what it is,” Labat said. “Once you’re in the fight,” August added, “you’re just swinging.”
