Voices from the Storm tells the story of thirteen New Orleans residents whose lives were forever changed by the American government’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina. These stories were compiled and edited from interviews gathered throughout the country in the weeks and months following the storm. This book is a rich tapestry of oral histories—created in close cooperation with the narrators—that details the narrators’ day-to-day experiences during what began as the worst natural disaster in American history and ended as a monument to governmental indifference and incompetence.

As part of the Voice of Witness series on human-rights and social-justice issues, these personal accounts chronicle the racial discrimination and outright neglect many endured in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They depict the ways in which the U.S. government, entrusted with the protection and safety of its citizenry, failed the poor and minority residents of New Orleans. In the midst of a terrifying natural disaster, the government responded with lethal apathy, leaving storm victims to fend for themselves, depriving them of the most basic necessities, and exposing them to dehumanizing conditions.

Dan Bright was abandoned in a locked prison cell as floodwaters swallowed the building; the guards had abandoned the prisoners. Outside the Morial Convention Center, soldiers clad in black uniforms fixed laser-guided automatic rifles on Patricia Thompson’s granddaughter Baili. The six-year-old held her hands in the air and asked, “Mama, am I doing it right?” as Thompson looked on in horror. Abdulrahman Zeitoun—who emigrated from Syria decades earlier—traveled around the city for days rescuing neighbors until he was arrested under suspicion of terrorism. He and another Arab-American were imprisoned and held for weeks without charges.

Before the storm, the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the country’s three most dire threats—along with terrorist attacks and an earthquake in California. Of course, hurricanes were nothing new for New Orleans. Katrina was the fiftieth recorded hurricane to have passed through Louisiana, and as Katrina gathered strength over the Atlantic Ocean, New Orleanians watched the storm with only mild interest, expecting that the city would direct them if they were in any real danger. On August 25, Katrina made landfall on Florida’s southern coast, heading northwest toward the city. The following day, the National Hurricane Center issued a warning, and the state of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans initiated the emergency-response and recovery programs that were designed to protect those in the hurricane-prone region. The primary strategy for ensuring the safety of New Orleans residents was to evacuate them by car from the low-lying city to Texas or inland Louisiana.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, 67 percent of the population was African-American and 22 percent was living below the poverty line. At a time when the national unemployment rate was 7 percent, New Orleans’s rate was 13 percent. Many of those that did have jobs worked as housekeepers, porters, drivers, and cooks, serving the city’s high volume of tourists. They were part of America’s working poor, getting by on one paycheck to the next. If they had cars—and 24 percent of New Orleans did not—many still could not afford to buy a full tank of gas in advance of the hurricane; their pay was not due to arrive until after the storm.

Some New Orleanians, like Kalamu Ya Salaam, made it out of town the day before the storm and watched on television as his city was engulfed. Meanwhile, in the city, the police knocked on Sonya Hernandez’s door to tell her to evacuate. With borrowed money, she bought diapers, water, candles, and some other survival necessities, and went to the Superdome—the city’s only available shelter—where she huddled together with four of her children and two grandchildren. Conditions there quickly became abhorrent.

Hours after Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, New Orleans’s flood-prevention system failed. Anthony Letcher stood with his aunt on her porch surveying the scene. As they watched the waters roll in, his aunt cried out, “Oh Lord Jesus! Look at those two babies down in that water, Lord!” Moments later, Anthony dove into the water. Letcher made his home where many other African-Americans lived—a low-lying area known as the Ninth Ward. It was where literary activist Salaam grew up. It was where Hernandez—a Cuban transplant who cleaned houses for a living—raised her five children. When the first levees succumbed to the hurricane, the lower Ninth Ward suffered the brunt of the resulting floodwaters.

In the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center, the Bush administration put disaster prevention and response at the top of its agenda. It merged twenty-two separate agencies, including FEMA and the Coast Guard, under the banner of the newly-formed Department of Homeland Security. Katrina was the first test of the DHS and the country’s post-9/11 disaster-response program.

The U.S. government had been warned for years that the New Orleans levee system would not withstand a major hurricane. Days before the storm, National Hurricane Center Director Max Mayfield reiterated this concern in a conference call with President Bush and Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff. They thanked him for his input, and proceeded according to the national response plan outlined by the Department of Homeland Security.

Optimism quickly faded as bureaucratic red tape paralyzed the agency. The world watched as conditions quickly deteriorated in New Orleans, where between August 29 and September 2, an estimated 100,000 men, women, and children were trapped. Residents were stranded for days on rooftops and in nursing homes and hospitals. They waded through filthy, chest-high waters in search of high ground, and suffered at the Superdome and the Convention Center. Government agencies at the city, state, and federal level could not manage to pull together a rescue operation for their desperate citizens. It took a full five days for adequate food and water to arrive and for a somewhat orderly evacuation process to begin.

In addition to exposing monumental shortcomings in the nation’s Department of Homeland Security, the storm’s aftermath also exposed America’s profound racial and class divide. It was the poor who were stranded in New Orleans. The fact that most of them were African-American serves as a reminder of the enduring economic disparities that exist between America’s black and white citizens.

Voices from the Storm joins a growing body of literature on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Many of these books provide insight on the meaning of the disaster in a larger political and social context. The stories chronicled here are meant to convey the day-to-day experience of those who lived through the storm. Through their stories, Voices from the Storm raises questions about the success of the civil-rights movement and the legacy of racism in American society. Moreover, it empowers the victims of this tragedy to finally speak for themselves. They do so with incredible honesty, insight, and warmth—even though it’s clear that in most cases, so much that they loved and trusted was lost during the storm. Still, their interwoven stories provide an invaluable addition to the literature about Hurricane Katrina, helping to illuminate an astonishing human-rights crisis that unfolded on our own soil.