'I took home with me.' Thousands settled elsewhere after Katrina hit New Orleans. Dian Zhang, USA TODAY August 27, 2025 at 11:03 PM 'I took home with me.' Thousands settled elsewhere after Katrina hit New Orleans.
- - 'I took home with me.' Thousands settled elsewhere after Katrina hit New Orleans.
Dian Zhang, USA TODAY August 27, 2025 at 11:03 PM
'I took home with me.' Thousands settled elsewhere after Katrina hit New Orleans.
Michelle Gibson fled her home in New Orleans with her newborn son, her 6-year-old daughter and her boyfriend as Hurricane Katrina took aim at the city 20 years ago.
She never returned there to live. But she brought New Orleans dance traditions to her new home in Dallas, teaching energetic "second line" techniques rooted in jazz funerals and other street performances to students at Southern Methodist University.
"When I left home, I didn't leave home. I took home with me," Gibson said.
The flight from Katrina's deadly winds and flooding scattered thousands of evacuees across the nation. A month after the storm, USA TODAY reported in 2005, FEMA aid applications poured in from every corner of the map. Refugees had found shelter from Houston to Chicago, Los Angeles to New York City.
Within a year, more than half of those displaced by Katrina had returned to New Orleans, according to a study published in the journal Demography in 2014. And by 2010, another survey of New Orleanian evacuees by the Rand Corp. showed that about 2 out of 3 had returned. But 20 years later, there are those like Gibson who remained in the communities that sheltered them.
Each brought a piece of New Orleans with them.
Darren Indovina moved to Monett, Missouri and opened a Cajun seafood restaurant, introducing his hometown flavors to the Ozarks.
Rhonda Mouton relocated to Charlotte, North Carolina, and then New York City. She turned her Southern hospitality and what she learned surviving Katrina's trauma into a career helping others in crisis.
"Katrina set people in motion, people who otherwise wouldn't have moved because they were set and they were ready to be lifelong New Orleanians because they always had been," said Elizabeth Fussell, a sociologist and demographer from Brown University who lived through Katrina herself and has spent years studying its aftermath. "People who were set in motion had to keep moving."
Gibson, now 49, remembers the call she got after she'd settled in Dallas for about a year and a half, staying home and taking care of her two children. Vicki Meek from the South Dallas Cultural Center remembered Gibson's dance performances in New Orleans years earlier.
"She was like, you have a home here. You have people that will support you, that will love you," Gibson said. "She is who put me on my feet, introduced me to a new world."
'It was trauma, it was triumph'
Texas became the primary destination for Hurricane Katrina evacuees, with approximately 200,000 displaced Gulf Coast residents arriving in Houston alone, and mostly being economically disadvantaged African Americans.
Gibson was among the many who evacuated to Texas after Hurricane Katrina. "We remember this moment in time like yesterday, because it is something that redirected, rechanged and refocused our lives forever," Gibson said. "Still to this day after 20 years, I still wear the residue of the heart palpitated, and anxiety and displacement of that moment in my life."
Gibson was teaching at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts right before Katrina struck. Her son, Nigel, was born on Aug. 20, 2005 – just eight days before the family would flee their lakefront home forever.
They evacuated to McComb, Mississippi, first, thinking they'd return home soon. But after spending days in a hotel without electricity and with grocery stores running out of food, Gibson – who was breastfeeding – decided to drive to Texas, praying their fuel would last.
"We evacuated to Dallas," Gibson said. "Texas was a blessing to us. They opened up their doors."
Fussell, the professor at Brown University, said migration between New Orleans and Texas was already "pretty well established" pre-Katrina because of job opportunities and existing family and community ties.
In Dallas, Gibson first learned Katrina's true scope from hotel lobby televisions showing the flooded city. Her lakefront house was flooded, too.
"It was like watching a movie of a third-world country looking at your own home," she remembered.
Gibson decided to raise her children in Dallas, knowing many schools in New Orleans were shutting down and her hometown needed time to rebuild.
"It wasn't that I didn't want to come home because I loved my home, but it served my children best for me to live and stay in Dallas," Gibson said.
However, starting over in a new city wasn't easy. Gibson described riding out the aftermath of the disaster "in a state of the most unhealthy mental place you can be in, other than suicide."
Then Meek called her from the South Dallas Cultural Center, and she experienced "a rebirth of life."
The performing artist began sharing New Orleans culture in her dance, and developed what she calls her "New Orleans Second Line Aesthetic" – dance rooted in the community-gathering traditions on the street such as jazz funerals or other celebrations in New Orleans.
The daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister, Gibson grew up watching jazz funerals from her bedroom window. She called it a "beautiful practice of how we dance bodies to the grave."
Gibson has taught second-line classes around the world, staged a one-woman show and performed at prestigious venues including Jacob's Pillow and the Joyce Theater.
Her dance practice carries "home" within it, she explained. "Home was my pedagogical practice, my choreographic approach, my spiritual rituals."
Gibson recently finished choreographing work for the American Dance Festival at Duke University. She is thinking about pursuing a doctorate in the near future and dreams of leading a second line in front of the White House.
"As much as it was trauma, it was triumph. I've accomplished some things in my life that I may not have accomplished if I had gone back home to New Orleans."
Who came back to New Orleans?
Hurricane Katrina didn't just destroy homes and displace families – it fundamentally altered life trajectories in ways that survivors never anticipated.
"Katrina is still the largest natural disaster in terms of the impact it had for anything that we've experienced, certainly in the last 100 years. The population displacement was far and away," said David Abramson, professor at New York University's School of Global Public Health and the director of the research program on Population Impact, Recovery and Resilience.
"We are very likely to be confronting similarly large problems over the years to come," he said. "It's sort of incumbent upon us to learn what we can from what happened during Katrina."
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The question of who came back to New Orleans after Katrina was hard to answer because "many people came back, took a look at what was there, and then said, 'I can't live here anymore,'" Fussell explained. "Maybe they never came back to the city to reside permanently, but most people did go back, just to make that assessment of what happened."
Fussell's own "migration" journey after Katrina was an example. After evacuating right before Katrina, Fussell and her family moved through Baton Rouge; New Iberia; Washington, DC; and Philadelphia before returning to New Orleans in December 2005.
Living in New Orleans during the early recovery period, when basic infrastructure remained unreliable after the storm, was challenging. Fussell recalled common gas outages, and when she reached out to the overwhelmed gas company, they'd say, "Turn it off and keep it off. We'll be there in a week."
They lived there until the summer of 2007, then left again because of job opportunities, and only returned for a sabbatical year in 2011.
One year after Katrina, New Orleans had lost more than half its population. Today, the city has about three-fourths of its pre-storm residents.
Early studies found that Black residents returned later than others, largely because many lived in flood-prone areas where homes were badly damaged. While about two-thirds of the city was Black pre-Katrina, in the neighborhoods most damaged by the storm, three-quarters of residents were Black.
Since then, the city's Black population has declined more than twice as much as the white population.
Preliminary findings from Fussell's ongoing research show that early racial disparities in who returned to New Orleans after Katrina have faded in the years since the storm. "There's certainly a racial differential, but that was more obvious at the beginning, early on, than it is later on," Fussell said.
Exclusive book: How Katrina changed all of us
'We put the fun in funeral'
While thousands like Gibson evacuated to nearby states like Texas or Georgia after the storm, some relocated to places hundreds of miles away.
When Hurricane Katrina flooded Darren Indovina's home in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, the 42-year-old New Orleans native faced a choice: rebuild in the flood zone or start over somewhere new.
He moved to Monett, Missouri, because his wife, Diane, had a job offer there. They carried just two suitcases, a Chihuahua, and Diane's Amazon parrot.
"We lost all our precious belongings and clothes and everything," he recalled. "When we moved to Missouri, we only took what we evacuated with."
Two years after relocating in Monett, a small railroad town of fewer than 9,000 residents, the desire for the flavors of home led the former electronic technician to open a Cajun restaurant named Bayou in 2007.
"I missed the taste – I missed sandwiches, I missed the spices, I missed the gravies, I missed the sauces," Indovina said. "Missouri is really popular for barbecue, which I absolutely adore, don't get me wrong. But the limitation in the food up here was something."
The biggest challenge wasn't convincing Missourians to try alligator meat – it was getting the authentic ingredients from his hometown. For six months, Indovina drove 12 hours to New Orleans and then back every weekend to stock up on supplies he couldn't find in Monett, such as fresh Gulf oysters and French bread for po'boys.
"When you're young and ambitious, nothing seems to be hard," he recalled of those weekend trips.
Eventually, he was able to rent space in a cold storage warehouse, buying Gulf oysters and French bread by the pallet, and turned his 39-seat lunch spot with one-page menu into a 144-seat full-service restaurant with a five-page menu.
Growing up in a big Italian family in New Orleans, Indovina learned early that meals were about more than food – they were about connection and culture. His mother rarely took the family out to eat, instead calling everyone to the dinner table each night where no one was allowed to leave until everyone had finished eating.
"The thing is in life, black, white, rich, or whatever nationality, whatever language, whatever culture, for some reason, life happens at a table," he said.
Indovina trained his servers at Bayou about New Orleans hospitality and to "dress the part, talk the part, act the part, and create a full, fun, lived New Orleans experience" for customers.
"Because we put the fun in funeral is a hell of a way to say it, but we always look for a reason to raise a glass," he said. "That's our lifestyle in New Orleans. We always look for a celebration. Every day is a celebration."
The restaurant had a successful run for over 12 years until it "literally got out of control" in 2019, Indovia said. The popular and demanding business had grown beyond his ability to manage effectively, and Indovina decided to close it.
He channeled his efforts into public service, winning election as city commissioner. "I wanted to give back naturally because, I mean, this city supported me," he said. "Good friends do stuff for good friends back and forth in life."
Today, previous diners still approach Indovina in grocery stores, asking for recipes from Bayou. He'll write recipes down on a grocery receipt because now, "nothing is sacred anymore."
'Being displaced is being displaced'
One day before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, 33-year-old day care owner Rhonda Mouton joined 14 family members in three cars and evacuated to Charlotte, North Carolina, where a relative told them there might be available hotel rooms.
She only packed for three days.
She never moved back.
Twenty years later, the former day care owner has transformed her experience with displacement into a mission to help others in crisis. As Director of LaGuardia CARES Program at LaGuardia Community College in New York City, Mouton oversees student support services at the college, providing emergency assistance to students facing homelessness, food insecurity, and other challenges that can derail their education.
"Though they may not have experienced a hurricane, being displaced is being displaced, being homeless is being homeless, food insecure is food insecure, even if it's just for a 24-hour period, a couple of days or something like that," Mouton said.
When the storm passed, 7 feet of floodwater destroyed their multigenerational home in New Orleans' Gentilly neighborhood, where Mouton's mother and grandmother had been among the first African Americans to move into the area decades earlier.
Mouton recalled that the sofa went through the wall and the refrigerator was in the living room. And there was mold everywhere.
"I didn't even know that water could do that much damage," she said.
Her day care business was also gone.
The big family spent several months in hotels before moving into rental homes, just in time for Thanksgiving dinner in their own space since the hurricane. A local church in Charlotte had "adopted" the family, covering rent, utilities, and furnishings for six months.
"That was a tremendous time because that helped us to get back on our feet," Mouton said, who still received bills from their destroyed New Orleans home.
"The strongest lifeline in crisis is a united community," she said.
Before Thanksgiving in 2021, Rhonda Mouton, top left, and her family gathered for their first family portrait since Hurricane Katrina—a moment Mouton described as filled with "resilience, gratitude, and hope."
While some family members eventually returned to New Orleans to rebuild on their original property, Mouton remained in Charlotte for seven years. It was there that she discovered her calling, working with a federal grant program to help other Katrina survivors rebuild their lives.
In 2012, she moved to New York for her current position, arriving just as Hurricane Sandy struck. Her Katrina experience proved invaluable in helping LaGuardia Community College respond to the new disaster.
"The skill set that it took to navigate through Hurricane Katrina is the same skill set I used in employment in Charlotte and then now here in New York," she said.
Mouton completed her master's degree online in Charlotte and earned a doctoral degree in New York. Her definition of home has evolved over two decades – when she visits New Orleans now, she sometimes needs GPS to navigate once-familiar streets.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 20 years after Katrina, they keep New Orleans ways in new homes
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