Matt Lemmler didn’t want to leave. He had just started a full-time position as a piano professor at the University of New Orleans. More significant, his roots in the Big Easy, particularly in the Lower 9th Ward, could be traced back to the 18th century.
The jazz musician came from a family of artists and grew up along Caffin Avenue (now called Fats Domino Boulevard), just a few blocks away from legendary rock-and-roll artist Fats Domino. His ancestors on his grandfather’s side arrived in New Orleans in the late 1700s.
“I was hesitant to leave because I thought for sure … the school hadn’t canceled yet or anything like that,” Lemmler told The Living Church, where his project of singing through the Psalms at Episcopal parishes was recently featured. “From what I remember I think they finally made it a mandatory evacuation that Saturday. I think it was kind of last minute.”
Lemmler, his wife, and his son left New Orleans for Houston on August 27, 2005. What was normally a six-hour drive took 13 because of the unusual amount of traffic and number of people leaving.
Two days later, on August 29, Hurricane Katrina made landfall along the Louisiana-Mississippi border.
“A most powerful hurricane with unprecedented strength … most of the area will be uninhabited for weeks … perhaps longer,” said the National Weather Service in New Orleans, warning residents of the storm’s intensity. CBS News meteorologist Nikki Nolan wrote that “nothing could prepare those in Katrina’s path for what they are still reeling from to this day, 20 years later.”
As Nolan explains, Katrina received its name when it strengthened into a tropical storm on August 24, 2005. By the following day, it became a hurricane, with winds of 75 miles per hour, less than two hours before it made landfall in Southeastern Florida. As Katrina reached the Gulf, it underwent “rapid intensification” twice.
By the time it made landfall at the border, it had maximum sustained winds of 121 mph.
The massive storm surge observed along coastal Mississippi reached up to 28 feet. The debris swept into the Gulf included pieces of bridges that collapsed as the hurricane barreled through.
And then there was the breach of the levees—primarily blamed for the flooding, deaths, and damage that occurred throughout New Orleans, which was 80 percent flooded within 24 hours of Katrina’s landfall, with some areas reaching up to 20 feet.
The breach submerged the entire Lower 9th Ward. “It was actually the failure of the levees that flooded the city,” Lemmler said. “Had the levees been maintained, the city would be fine.”
“My family…like my papa, my grandfather, and then his sister and cousins and stuff that were there in the Lower 9th Ward, they all had to leave,” Lemmler said. “And they never went back.”
The hurricane claimed almost 2,000 lives and $200 billion in damages, in today’s dollars.
Fire, Smoke, Water
An Anglican priest and canonical resident of the Diocese of Zanzibar in the Anglican Church of Tanzania, the Rev. Jerry Kramer was serving as rector of the Free Church of the Annunciation under the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana when the hurricane hit. The floodwaters were up to 10 feet deep in their neighborhood of Broadmoor after the levee broke.
Kramer and his parishioners rode out the storm in Baton Rouge. Many of them were evacuated with the parish’s assistance, since they didn’t have cars. A week after Katrina, he returned to Broadmoor, sneaking in with a media pass.
“This was back during the Balkan war,” Kramer told TLC, referring to the deadly Yugoslav wars that began in the late 1990s. “It was just fire, smoke, water. It was unrecognizable,” he said of what he saw.
His house was underwater by about 10 feet. The parish was in the same condition. “Everything was underwater. So that was kind of a surreal experience.” Local media captured Kramer paddling through the same street where he had driven his truck.
“Everything was just covered in brown and there were no markers. There were no street lights. There were no signs…the things were all gone,” he said, even of landmarks like an Exxon gas station. For a year, he had to navigate New Orleans using GPS.
Kramer and his staff at the Free Church of the Annunciation, with help from other parishes, would spend five years in rebuilding and recovery efforts in Broadmoor. “With 100% of all homes and buildings in our community destroyed or severely damaged, our little church offered up the double-wide as home base for our civic association,” Kramer wrote for the Anglican Church in North America about his experience.
As he described it, “the parish worked hand in glove with the local civic association to bring residents home, helping to rebuild their lives.” But the “church’s finest hour,” as he shared, came at a price. In a lesson he now widely shares, the third year of any disaster is when PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder, sets in. Around that time, the attention to the emergency and the urgency people feel to help are gone. “All the money will be gone, and you’re gonna be sitting there with the worst situation you had yet,” he told TLC.
He said that around 2008, there may have been around 500,000 people in the city experiencing trauma. An unforgettable moment occurred in one week, when five people who lived on the same street near his parish took their lives, including a staff member at his church.
It’s one reason he has been coaching churches involved in rebuilding and recovery efforts to think long-term.
“Think two to three years out. Start rebuilding resilience and being prepared for what’s coming up, especially when there’s just not gonna be much help on offer and we’re gonna have to do it ourselves.”
Empathy and Resilience
During the past six months, the Diocese of Louisiana has been busy preparing for the week leading up to Hurricane Katrina’s 20th anniversary commemoration. A podcast hosted by Lauren Dunn, diocesan youth coordinator, together with Bishop Shannon Rogers Duckworth, launched on August 18.
Dunn and Rogers Duckworth interviewed Jimmy Duckworth and Frank Paskewich, both retired officials of the United States Coast Guard, who shared their experience as first responders during and after Hurricane Katrina.
A short-form video series called Serving through the Struggle debuted on the diocese’s social media platforms, where parishioners spoke about their experience in rebuilding both their lives and worshiping communities after the storm. On August 28, Bishop Rogers Duckworth, the Rev. Stephen Craft of St. Philip’s Church, and the Rev. Austin Wendt of St. Paul’s Church—both in New Orleans—joined over a dozen religious leaders in an interfaith prayer service at St. Louis Cathedral.
The service was also attended by New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell.
Rogers Duckworth, who spoke to TLC hours before she headed to the interfaith service, said she thought it was important to approach the remembrance of Katrina in three ways.
One was to provide a space for people to remember and reflect, to talk about their faith. Second, to present models of what leadership looks like in difficult times. “Because I feel like as a diocese, we’re responding to grief and trauma continually,” she said, noting the August 27 shooting in Minneapolis.
“And so how me, how I as a bishop can help inspire my clergy to be able to put the team around themselves to respond in difficult times,” she said. And third, Rogers Duckworth and the diocese wanted to convey that the challenges brought by Katrina didn’t end 20 years ago.
“Here we are 20 years later, still serving vulnerable communities through direct grants from Episcopal Relief & Development,” she said.
When Lemmler and his family left New Orleans in 2005, they thought they’d be gone for a couple of days and then come back. It would take five years before he returned. Along the way he became part of the Episcopal Church.
On Sundays, he serves at the 10 a.m. service of St. Mark’s Church in Harvey, Louisiana as a music director, and later in the day at the 5 p.m. jazz Mass at Christ Church in Covington, Louisiana. He hopes for the day when his city can stop talking about Katrina and move on, while acknowledging that “it’s difficult.”
Rogers Duckworth had just begun her job as chaplain at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School in Jackson, Mississippi, when the hurricane hit. She witnessed new students arrive at school and the community coming together, making sure they had uniforms and backpacks so they wouldn’t stand out.
In November 2022, she became the first woman to serve as Bishop of Louisiana. “The language of this diocese all these years is people talk about life sorts of before and after Katrina,” she said, describing what happened then as a monumental shift that she and her staff must remember.
Kramer resigned from the parish and left New Orleans. He brought his experience from Katrina to other parts of the world, including northern Iraq, where he helped assist millions of refugees threatened by the terrorist group ISIS.
After the tragic flash floods in Kerr County, Texas, he immediately reached out to his friend, the Rev. Bert Baez, rector of St. Peter’s Church in Kerrville, Texas, to offer support.
“We were on our way back to the Middle East when [we] detoured to Kerrville,” he said. “I processed out of the church, straight to my car, and drove into the flood zone.”
The flash floods occurred on July 4. He and his wife were at Kerr County two days later.
Caleb Maglaya Galaraga is The Living Church’s Episcopal Church reporter. His work has also appeared in Christianity Today, Broadview Magazine, and Presbyterian Outlook, among other publications.
