NEW ORLEANS — It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina slammed the Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm. The disaster is remembered not just for its winds, but for the crushing surge of water that devastated rural Louisiana parishes and tore through the heart of New Orleans. 

A woman searches through storm debris in Buras, LA, following Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on Aug. 29, 2005. The storm left widespread destruction across the Mississippi-Louisiana border. (Sarah Alegre)

Katrina weakened before making landfall on Aug. 29, 2005, but still struck the Louisiana-Mississippi border as a Category 3 storm. The storm surge flooded homes, took more than a thousand lives and turned reality into a nightmare along the Gulf Coast.

“It was just heart-stopping, the area I grew up in, I’ve lived here all my life,” Papania said. “You didn’t even know where you were.”

The husband and father of four also lost his home.

Rupert Lacy, who helped coordinate law enforcement and emergency management during the storm, remembers it vividly.

“For Katrina, I had that vision that this is what I’m going to see…I just didn’t realize it was going to be on steroids,” Lacy said.

It wasn’t the first monster storm he had seen. As a child in 1969, he lived through Hurricane Camille, whose surge flattened entire communities.

“You’ve got to understand the force of water,” Lacy said. “Buildings that survived Camille did not survive Katrina.”

Today, emergency officials say lessons from Katrina continue to guide their response.

“We do plan for the potential failures of our systems,” said Matt, an emergency leader in Gulfport. “We do have paper backups, we have alternate forms of communication.”

Still, for Papania, the memories remain close.

“I always say I wouldn’t trade the experience I had in Katrina, but I absolutely don’t want to do it again,” he said.