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E’jaaz Mason: I started doing a lot of things that I won't say here, but a lot of things that, you know, lead young people towards a path of destruction. I was really, you know, just kind of falling off the map and the last time I got arrested was July 4th, 2011. I was in New Orleans for Essence Festival weekend, and the city is, for lack of a better term, very over policed during Essence Fest.
And so, mix that in with me making stupid decisions. I ended up getting arrested for like, again. Like a little small like marijuana possession or whatever.
Kathleen Schuster: E’jaaz Mason is around 20 years old when this happens. Long before he makes a name for himself as a filmmaker and teacher.
The jail he gets sent to is Orleans Parish Prison. The most notorious jail in New Orleans.
Mason: It was like hell on Earth in that place and I was only in there for like a day.
E’jaaz ends up in the holding tank, a room the size of a school gymnasium with a huge prison gate and three open toilets with no stalls.
It’s just 100, mostly black men, everybody's sweating and just like, dripping sweat, even the walls are sweating cause it's so hot, right?
He spends the next 18 hours terrified of what could go wrong. It’s well known that heroin and handguns are floating around the prison There are guys in orange jumpsuits and shackles ready to get transported Others in regular clothes like E’jaaz And everybody is in everybody’s business.
It's clearly guys in there with mental health issues cause people in there just screaming and it's like there is no privacy. There is no space and there is no peace. And it’s terrifying.
Ejaaz starts thinking back on how he got here. His mind drifts to his most recent highs and lows – like graduating high school but then struggling in college and getting into trouble with the police But something doesn’t add up.
Cause I was not raised to be this way. I was not raised to be a troublemaker or to like, do drugs, or to get into trouble. That's not who I am. I don't come from that type of a community, you know.
But had Katrina not happened, I don't think I would have ever even gotten to that point because I had so many people in my life who loved me, who cared about me…
Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina left 80% of New Orleans underwater after the city’s levee system collapsed. The news at the time was filled with images of inundated neighborhoods and rooftop rescues.
E’jaaz Mason was 13 years old when that happened. And he says kids didn’t talk about their Katrina stories for years.
So, in this episode, we’re going to be asking the question – what happens to an entire generation of kids when communities fail to prepare for the worst?
This is Living Planet, I’m Kathleen Schuster.
Before we get started, a quick warning – this episode contains descriptions of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath that may be distressing to some listeners.
During E’jaaz’s night in jail, he’s not thinking about Hurricane Katrina. That part comes later. He’s focused more on the problem at hand.
And I just remember kind of sitting there praying like man, if I make it out of this. I don't know what I'm gonna do but something has got to change. And so when I get out of here, I'm going to start looking for that something.
He was studying out of state, but now between his trouble with the police and bad grades, he needs to move back to New Orleans. He’s got time on his hands, so he goes to visit a friend at a local university. His friend’s busy, so E’jaaz is just walking around out when all of sudden…
This random, like, white guy comes running out of a building straight at me. I'm thinking I'm in trouble, but he's like, "Hey, man, do you go to school here?"
I was like, "No." And he’s like, "Well, do you have like an hour? I really need your help with something. I was like, 'okay, cool.'"
And so, he brings me into the TV production studio. He puts a boom mic in my hand and he's like "Alright, just stand here and I'm gonna tell you what to do." And as I'm looking around, I'm just captivated and I'm like, man, what is this? Like what? What did I, what did I just walk into, you know? And it was that day that I became a filmmaker. It was that day.
And soon after, there’s another fateful encounter. E’jaaz becomes friends with a student a year behind him named Edward Buckles.
They come up in filmmaking together, dabbling in different projects. From time to time, Buckles interviews people about their Katrina stories. Both of them remember the storm well – they were 13 when it happened.
But it isn’t until they started asking other people around the same age, that a lightbulb goes off: No one had ever really asked their generation about their Katrina stories, much less how they were doing.
And so a lot of them, E’jaaz included, had buried their stories deep down.
Dr. Eric Griggs: It's very rare that you find someone from here that really talks about it.
Dr. Eric Griggs is the vice president of Access Health Louisiana, one of the state’s largest networks of health centers.
New anchor: Guys it is June 2nd. We are officially in hurricane season 2025 started yesterday…
He’s also a regular guest on the local news. For example, talking about how to deal with hurricane season anxiety.
News anchor: And what do you tell your patients about handling anxiety as you prepare?
Griggs: Yeah, it’s absolutely normal to feel this level of anxiety. It’s said that…
He says a lot of people had to put their Katrina experiences aside to be able to move forward.
Griggs: There are things I've seen, certain smells, things that happened that I just put in a place. So, we never talk about Katrina. It's the 20-year anniversary and we don't talk about it's not an anniversary.
When Katrina hit, New Orleans was underwater for weeks. The city’s infrastructure collapsed. The power was down. Telecommunications were disrupted. Medical care was unavailable. They were cut off from the world.
Everything that you knew was gone and you couldn't function and there was no one to call. No one that could help you because we were in an unprecedented situation.
When it comes to dealing with disasters, adults have different coping mechanisms than children and teens, who are still developing.
So, moving forward for kids like E’jaaz was challenging in a different way.
Imagine someone just taking your brain and taking everything you know, shaking up your head, shaking up your memory, shaking everything, and then ripping it away. And putting it back after it was destroyed. And that's where you start.
Start with that physiologically, start with the biochemistry of it and then it's trying to deal with the maturing emotional response that you're trying to figure out in a teenage brain. And then say OK, move forward.
And that’s what E’jaaz’s generation tried to do. Move forward.
But what they lost was so much more than just a house or a school. They witnessed the very social fabric of New Orleans get ripped apart.
So, a few more years go by with E’jaaz and other friends helping Buckles film interview after interview for the documentary which eventually gets called "Katrina Babies."
Buckles moves to New York City to pursue filmmaking and eventually HBO and Time Studios back the film.
Over the years, E’jaaz hears the stories. Many times being told for the first time ever. But he says it took until the film was finished for him to really start reflecting on what his peers were saying. And to start his own journey of traveling back in time to think about all that had happened from the time he and his mom evacuated.
E'jaaz Mason: The day before on August 28th, 2005, my grandmother gave a call to my mom and my grandmother is a very, very spiritual person.
And she called my mom, and she was just like, "Joanne, I got a bad feeling about this one. I've been praying on it and I've been talking to God and he's telling me we need to get out of here."
And this is a lady who survived, like Hurricane Betsy you know, she has seen it all.
Hurricane Betsy struck New Orleans almost exactly 40 years before Katrina. Betsy was a category 4 storm that caused levee breaches and mass flooding. It was also the first hurricane to cost over $1 billion in damages.
Congress ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to build a massive flood protection system to prevent that type of catastrophe from hitting New Orleans again.
E’jaaz and his mom pack their belongings – some clothes, important documents, some DVDs and CDs and his Playstation.
They head five hours northeast to Montgomery, Alabama where they check into a hotel and eventually fall asleep.
And when I woke up, I just saw my mom like glued to the TV.
News anchor: We welcome you back to this special continuing coverage of Hurricane Katrina …
Mason: And she's, like, very emotional. And the images that she's seeing were really, like, striking her. But I wasn't thinking of it, you know, I mean, I'm a kid.
Back in New Orleans, another 13-year-old boy, Arnold Burks, who later appears in “Katrina Babies,” is one of about 100,000 people still in the city. Many couldn’t afford to leave or didn’t have a car. Some chose to stay.
Arnold Burks: So my mother wanted me to leave with her and my sister, but I literally wanted to stay at home with my father and my brother, because they were like gonna tough it out, you know?
“Like, I want to be with the men, Mommy,” you know, like that.
And I was 13, so she couldn't just grab me anymore, you know? And I only wanted to stay because I wanted to play the video game. Like I was that simple minded as a child.
In the early morning hours of August 29, Katrina makes landfall.
It’s supposed to be a category five, but gets downgraded to a three.
Burks: At about 4:00 in the morning. Like those winds started getting really, really serious. I don't think I ever witnessed to anything like that at that point, you know? And we had a lot of homeless in the neighborhood back then.
I just heard screams, you know, and I assumed it was that.
Those winds reach 125 miles per hour, or just over 200 kilometers per hour.
Luckily, Katrina passes through, the sun comes out and New Orleans thinks it’s been spared the worst.
I remember we were walking in the water just, you know, because it was fun just to walk around the neighborhood, see what things look like and, walked back home. We were sitting on the porch about 4:00. At first, the water was below the porch, but then it started creeping up to the porch.
And we thought that was really, you know, weird. We lookin’ at each other like, what is going on? The rain has stopped, the sun is out, why is the water still rising?
Arnold was used to his neighborhood flooding easily.
That’s because New Orleans is situated on low-lying marshland in the Mississippi Delta region. A good chunk of the city lies, on average, about 6 feet, or about 1.8 meters, below sea level, and is protected by floodwalls, levees and pumping stations.
Technically, the levees had been built to withstand a category three storm. But since Katrina had been a category five as it was approaching New Orleans, it pushed through a much stronger storm surge that was 12 feet high.
What Arnold and his dad and brother don’t know yet is that the levees are about to fail.
So me being 13, I don't know how, but I took a nap, fell asleep, woke up. This is why I woke up: ‘cause water was touching my face.
They hear on the radio that, to their east in the 9th ward, people are being forced onto their roofs by fast rising water.
Where they live in the 4th ward, in the middle of New Orleans, there’s still time.
So, they wait for the sun to come up and then they head for their cars which they parked on the roof of their local grocery store.
So my brother and my father, they could swim. But I'm only like 5 foot tall at that point. So they found like a tire floating in the backyard, and they just look me in the eye said do not let go of this tire.
Do not let go. Don't play around, this is serious. Do you see? Like he pointed, like, do you see what's going on right now?
There’s a sheen of oil on the water. Across the road, he can only see the top of his neighbor’s house.
And I don't know if they're in there or not. I have no clue where they are. To this day, I still don't know.
They swim through 8 feet of water. And are careful to avoid areas that look deeper.
He says the flood waters looked strange – they were higher on some streets and lower on others.
It feels like an eternity to swim the few blocks to the grocery store.
So, we get up there and they waving and like, come on, come on. Like, you know. And then they rush up to us and they help us get us out the water like, and they see me like, oh, they got a baby with them, you know, like, that's how they do me. Like, I'm still a baby.
Once they reach safety, they wait for three days and two nights for their rescue, baking in the hot summer with countless other people on that concrete rooftop.
Arnold occupies himself with some "Goosebumps" books he managed to pack as they escaped.
Eventually their food runs out and they’re forced to live off of whatever can be salvaged from local shops. The day before their rescue, Arnold starts to get restless.
Arnold: My dad was on the rail and just talking to some of the older guys in the neighborhood, and I walked up like Daddy when the water gonna go down so we could go back in the house, like I'm ready to play the game.
And he's like, "Boy, we can't go back in the house right now, like, even when the water goes down, that house gotta be gutted. Take the sheetrock out. It might have to get demolished."
And that's when it first hit me. I’m like, "Demolished?!" Like I couldn't fathom anything like that. Like, I didn't realize that that's that was what the rebuilding process was going to have to be for the whole city. I didn't realize it. I was so young.
And soon after, presumably like a lot of other kids, Albert finds himself exposed to a city dangerously on edge.
As they’re waiting in line to board their connecting flight out, a man nearby cracks and tries to skip the line. The man ends up getting tased . And that was crazy just seeing that. I had never saw anyone get tazed before.
Hundreds of miles away, E’jaaz is trying to process everything. His house was one of the 150,000 homes that were inundated. Even more disturbing are the images coming through the TV screen portraying Black New Orleanians as criminals.
E’jaaz Mason: And all we just kept hearing was about all this disarray and how everything is chaos and people are looting and people are dying in the Superdome and you're seeing dead bodies float, you know, on top of a car in the street. And the whole time I'm thinking to myself, like, this is crazy. Like, like we really going through something right now.
And then there was how the media was talking about evacuees.
It made me feel like I'm just, you know, like like I'm a refugee, you know? Like, I'm not an American citizen. I'm like, I'm like, I'm not a person. Like, I'm just, you know, a burden on this, on this, on this nation.
And the information that I was getting from my stepfather and from other sources who were still on the ground was pretty terrifying because it was all bad news.
After Montgomery, E’jaaz and his mom move to a town outside of Atlanta to live there temporarily.
It’s a huge mental shift from his loving community in New Orleans.
E’jaaz’s school days are marked by navigating a mainly white environment where nobody seems to care what he’s dealing with.
Worse still, one of the biggest symbols of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan ist just a short drive away. It’s a place called Stone Mountain and its known for a 90-foot carving of three of the main leaders of the Civil War South. E’jaaz says the heritage of racism there was palpable.
Everything starts to bother him – how people talk, how the food tastes, how the air smells – and he starts having small panic attacks. He says years later, he can’t really describe the air in Georgia, but he knows the smells he longed for from home.
It smells like, like slightly burned rubber. It smells like someone cooking something delicious. Like somebody just laid down some charcoal and you can smell the charcoal on the grill. Or somebody's, like, doing a seafood broil and you can smell the different seasonings in the pot.
It smells like hot combed, black hair, right? It smells like cocoa butter. It smells like, you know, the Mississippi River water or or like the Lake Pontchartrain Water, which is, you know, slightly salty, but mostly fresh water.
And then here I am in the middle of the woods, out of nowhere. I couldn't tell you exactly what it smelled like. Perhaps it was fresh air and I had just never smelled fresh air before, but to me it just, it just, it just constricted my nostrils. I could not all my air passageways did not want to accept this new air that I was being exposed to.
Finally, in December, three months after Katrina, they go back to New Orleans for a short visit.
As soon as we got out of the car, I just remember it being dead silent, I mean you couldn’t even hear a cricket. It was just completely silent.
And there was just like stuff, small pieces of paper and like little photos and like a picture frame or like a shoe kind of just all over the place, all outside the house.
We had a big X on our door with a bunch of numbers and stuff like every house in New Orleans.
And so we go through the back, we open the back door.
We had to like kind of push some stuff open to get the door all the way open.
Everything surprisingly was still kind of damp. It had been four months and everything was still damp. You could touch the couch it would be kind of squishy and there was still a little bit of water on the floor.
The smell of mildew, like I still have pictures that we were able to salvage that still have some of that storm water and mildew on it, and it’s a smell I’ll never forget.
This smell comes up in a lot in interviews with Katrina survivors. So far the only adjective that seems to describe it is "putrid."
Every single photo that I have of my father who passed when I was 8, was destroyed.
To this day, I don’t have a photo of my dad. So, I mean, he just was just total chaos and I couldn't believe that you know, a few months prior, I was like, sleeping on this couch or I was sleeping in the bed, or I was doing my homework. You know, in this office area, or I was eating food at this dining table, right?
It didn't even look like my home at that point.
I didn't, I didn't like get upset or or, you know, emotionally react at that point.
And I think it's because I just lost all emotion at that point. It just was a total flat line. Like I said, I couldn't find the emotions because it just it just did not feel real.
We’ll be right back.
PROMO
Fast forward to 2022. "Katrina Babies" explodes onto the documentary scene and wins two awards at the Tribeca Film Festival.
The moment has come to share these stories with New Orleans at its iconic Orpheum Theater. E’jaaz says the line went around the block.
And it was talking and chattering and laughter and excitement up until those first few piano chords played at the beginning of the film. And then you see the people on top of their roof and Katrina.
Dead silence. There were audible tears and people crying during the film. Like almost immediately at the beginning of the film.
And so I was sat right in front of my mother, who was a row behind me with my stepfather. And as the film played every time something emotional would happen, she'd like tap my shoulder.
The stories resonate deeply. Stories of entire neighborhoods being displaced, disrupting a sense of local pride that went back generations.
They’re stories of many people being haunted by the 1,200 lives lost to Katrina. Not to mention the loss of half of the city’s Black community, who left New Orleans and never returned. E’jaaz dad’s side of the family was part of that group.
It was a crisis that didn’t go away. E’jaaz felt lucky to move back into his own home and find new role models in his football coaches who he describes as strong Black men who gave him a firm hand or a warm hug when he needed it.
But when he left for college, his grandad died, and so did two friends – one to gun violence, and one to suicide.
His coping mechanisms crumbled. He says that’s when he really started getting into trouble and heading down the wrong path, he says.
And what the documentary shows is that many kids were going through something. Their parents didn’t necessarily know that, though.
But then there was one part in the film where they asked where Buckles asked his mom. "Like, how do you and my dad think the children were dealing with it?"
And both of his parents were like, "We thought that y'all was good. Like y'all didn't seem like y'all was dealing with too much, y'all just was happy kids or whatever."
And there was an audible like "Mmmhhhh" like just reverberated through the whole theater.
And so my mom, who sitting behind me, she leans forward and she wraps her arms around me. And it's just like, "I am so sorry. I had no idea that y'all was dealing with this type of stuff."
And I just like patted her on her hand was like, "It's all good, ma. Look, look where we at? You know, we had to go through that to get to where we're at right now, you know?"
And so it was all love. It's been all love. And I think that that's the experience of a lot of us in New Orleans, like we don't blame our parents for how they handled it, because how would anybody have handled that situation?
As far as natural catastrophes go, what happened in New Orleans can’t be called "natural."
The American Society of Civil Engineers found in their 2007 report that New Orleans’ levee system failed in every way – it wasn’t high enough, strong enough or able to compensate for the fact that the city is sinking.
In the years since, New Orleans' has withstood other hurricanes. But it’s still vulnerable.
For one, Louisiana’s coastline is eroding fast. According to the environmental non-profit, the Nature Conservancy, Louisiana is losing, on average, an area of wetlands the size of a football field every hour. Some estimates say it’s even more than that.
We’re going to talk more about coastal erosion in Louisiana in an upcoming episode.
The point is, though, the coastline is disappearing in large part due to climate change – specifically warming waters and rising seas. The same two factors that are already making intense rainfall and flooding from hurricanes more likely.
Take for example, Hurricane Helene in 2024 which unleashed mass flooding in the Appalachian Mountains. The record water temperatures that fueled Helene were made 200 to 500 times more likely by climate change. And its torrential rainfall, 10 percent more likely. That’s according to the science group World Weather Attribution.
So since the release of Katrina Babies, a lot has happened in E’jaaz’s life.
He wasn’t just a part of "Katrina Babies." He was deeply involved in his teaching and then co-founded a non-profit called Lede New Orleans to train "emerging Black and Brown storytellers" to build stronger communities.
After that, Stanford University came calling. First for a fellowship, which then led to a position as a lecturer in community-based environmental storytelling.
It felt like fate. It felt like a part of my mission, a part of my purpose. And what my purpose is is to be a bridge between the city of New Orleans and the information, the resources, the people, the access that can help solve for some of those socioenvironmental challenges that we are faced with because, because it often feels like we're alone and a lot of the things that we go through.
Ok, so, I thought the story ended here, and then realized, as sometimes can happen I still had two questions for E’jaaz.
Kathleen Schuster: Okay, so it's been a few days since we spoke and maybe it's even better that I ask you this now, but when you were telling me about "Katrina Babies" it sounds like it's it's been a cathartic process for a lot of people. Did you feel like it had kind of taken care of the trauma you had experienced?
E’jaaz Mason: So, to answer that question it’s really twofold. One, personally, I think it's sort of started the healing process for me. A few years later, once I got here to Stanford, I was able to get like pretty good health insurance, and I was finally able to see a therapist for the first time.
And we actually got to unpack a lot of what we. What I had heard from the interview processes during Katrina Babies, it got me to think more about you know my own personal experience.
Kathleen: Were you surprised though when you did have access to a therapist that there was still so much left for you to go through and to unpack and to examine?
E’jaaz: I don’t think I was surprised about how much I had to unpack. What was surprised me was […] I didn’t really understand until I started talking with a mental health professional how that traumatic event impacted pretty much every other portion of my life.
As far as catharsis goes, he says Katrina Babies has been an important part of getting New Orleans to talk about hurricane preparedness, PTSD and keeping communities connected.
Ok, so a big word that’s been kind of the elephant in the room in this episode is “resilience." It’s a term that gets thrown around a lot when it comes to Katrina. New Orleans bouncing back. The people of New Orleans being "resilient."
So I wanted to know from E’jaaz, does he think going through Katrina made him resilient?
E’jaaz: In a weird way, I owe something to Hurricane Katrina and the other, like I said, traumatic events that I went through in my life for making me tough, you know? I'm built for any challenge now.
But here's the other side to the coin. It's also pretty messed up that we had to go through it in the first place.
Would I have rather gone through everything that we went through as opposed to having an actual sustainable model to mitigate the damage of Katrina so that my family wouldn't have had to move away and I'm just left floating in the wind? You know me and mom wouldn't would have had to have my whole house be destroyed. Wouldn't have had to have my whole community blown up in that fashion. Wouldn't have had to see so many of my people in my community floating dead on top of a car or something.
What I have rather that happened over just actually having a plan that was effective?
Absolutely not. Like we should have been prepared this. There was a lot of human error that came into play during the storm and I would have rather not have to be resilient. I would have loved to have grown up as a fully whole person.
And I feel like what's dangerous about the expectation of resilience is it takes the onus off the people in charge of the people who have power and the ability to make sustainable, positive change. It takes the onus off them and says, you know what, it doesn't matter if we, if we figure out positive solutions to climate change, because the people who deal with it, they're going to be fine, they're going to bounce back, they're going to be resilient.
Right now, New Orleans is experiencing some of the most rapid departure of locals, people moving to other parishes or other parts of the country. I mean, like myself, if I'm being honest, I moved to California.
Apart of the reason why people are doing that is because we're tired of always having to be resilient. We want to just be healthy and OK, you know, so it's up to those who have power and position to ensure the long term health and sustainability of our region, because we're sick of. We're we're sick of bouncing back. We just want to live.
There’s much more to say about New Orleans and hurricane preparedness so keep an eye out for an upcoming episode about how one local group is fighting two local problems – glass recycling and coastal erosion.
And by the way if you want to know more about how hurricanes impact the economy, you should check out our series “The true cost of climate change”. The first episode can be found in our podcast feed. It’s called “How much does a hurricane cost?”
This episode was written and produced by me, Kathleen Schuster and edited by Neil King.
Thanks for listening.