In the fourth installment of History Was Ghetto, John Cash sits down with one of the most devastating — and most misremembered — disasters in American history: Hurricane Katrina.
Not the storm itself. The response.
John breaks down how the federal government ran a simulation of this exact disaster thirteen months before Katrina hit and still wasn't ready when the real thing arrived. How the levees that failed were designed to handle the exact category of storm that hit them. How two hundred school buses sat in a New Orleans parking lot — enough to have moved tens of thousands of people with no other way out — and never moved once. And how when the water finally came, the people least equipped to survive it were placed in the neighborhoods most likely to flood.
This episode covers the Hurricane Pam exercise, the levee failures, the Superdome conditions, FEMA's infamous response, the media chaos of the 24-hour news cycle during the storm, and what the data on who actually died tells us about how this country distributes risk.
Block Court returns with three defendants — including a verdict that reframes the most famous photo to come out of Katrina.
Funny where it can be. Honest where it has to be. History Was Ghetto is the show that calls the past exactly what it was.
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