As the 20-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina lands this week, the memories hit hard, as if I were still boots on the ground in Louisiana to photograph the aftermath. The levees, meant to hold back the surging waters, failed catastrophically. Around 80% of the city was under 20 feet of water.

Later that same year, “Katrina That Bitch” T-shirts summed up general sentiment around the region. Flooding from Katrina took out entire neighborhoods, and devastated Plaquemines Parish, a finger of land jutting into the ocean, around 60 miles south of New Orleans.

My boss at the time, Nancy Andrews, tapped me to fly into Houston to replace another photographer, the late David Gilkey, who had to return to Detroit for a wedding after covering the storm’s destruction in Alabama, where it tossed boat

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