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Forbes
2 hours ago
- Forbes
Rewriting The Narrative Of Hurricane Katrina
A police car drives through the empty streets of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. (Neil ... More Alexander) On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. The storm itself was devastating—but what followed was far worse. The real disaster, many experts argue, wasn't the wind or water, but the collapse of infrastructure, communication and trust in government. Now, two decades later, National Geographic's Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time revisits the catastrophe with the benefit of hindsight and the tools of modern technology. Directed by Traci A. Curry and produced by Proximity Media and Lightbox, the 5-part series is a digitally reconstructed case study in systemic failure—an attempt to rebuild not just the timeline, but the public memory of what actually happened. Technology as a Truth-Telling Tool I had an opportunity to connect with Ivor van Heerden, the former deputy director of Louisiana State University's Hurricane Center. Ivor is the 'Cassandra' of the Katrina tragedy—he predicted Hurricane Katrina and the catastrophic impact in 2004, only to be ignored. 'This is definitely not a story about a storm,' said van Heerden. 'The trigger, if you will, was a storm—but it was man's folly that led to the catastrophe.' LSU Hurricane Center Co-founder Ivor Van Heerden discusses events surrounding Hurricane Katrina and ... More other hurricanes during an interview for National Geographic's Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time. Van Heerden is known for his criticism of the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), attributing the 2005 levee failures in New Orleans to their faulty design and execution. With emotional accounts of survivors and immersive archival footage, the series reveals Hurricane Katrina as a disaster that was anything but natural. (National Geographic) At the time of Katrina, social media was in its infancy. Most people didn't have smartphones. Surveillance footage was grainy or missing altogether. And the digital infrastructure needed to coordinate a large-scale emergency response simply didn't exist. Fast-forward to 2025, and the tools for documentation and storytelling have changed dramatically. The production team behind Race Against Time used AI-enhanced video restoration, satellite overlays, GIS modeling and high-resolution archival footage to create a real-time, moment-by-moment reconstruction of the disaster's timeline. 'They were banging on my door fairly often,' van Heerden recalled, 'for computer model simulations, data, photographs, my own video imagery.' Those simulations—many developed two decades ago—have taken on new life in the series, contextualizing the levee breaches and helping viewers visualize the scale of the flood. This technical precision is what transforms the docuseries from reflection to re-examination. Overlaying personal stories with geospatial data and timestamped visuals, the series makes a compelling case: the devastation wasn't random—it was predictable, and preventable. The Failure Wasn't Just Physical. It Was Digital. The documentary also highlights how poor coordination and digital blind spots worsened the crisis. Government systems failed to track where people were sheltered. Communications systems collapsed. Rescue missions turned around because of misinformation—such as unconfirmed reports of violence or looting. 'People were told to go to the Superdome and wait for help,' van Heerden said. 'Then the damn roof blew off. And the cavalry didn't come. And the cavalry didn't come. And the cavalry didn't come.' In one scene, the series deconstructs how the sound of gunfire—interpreted as aggression—was actually a signal for help. 'The SOS signal for a hunter is three shots fired. Boom, boom, boom,' van Heerden explained. 'You want to make a noise so you can be heard. But instead, those shots were misunderstood, and buses turned around.' It's a stark reminder that signal, context and interpretation are everything—especially in crisis response. It's not enough to have data; you need to understand it, respond to it and trust the systems delivering it. A Warning for the Future As we face a new era of climate-driven 'storms on steroids,' van Heerden cautions that Katrina should not be viewed as an isolated failure, but as a warning. 'We need to better understand how hurricanes are going to change given these warm oceans and the warm air,' he said. 'And then the last thing is, it's pretty hard to predict sometimes these storms... we need a lot more research into that.' That research depends on technology. From atmospheric sensors to predictive modeling, modern science is built on data. And yet, as van Heerden pointed out, the very agencies responsible for this work—like NOAA—are facing cuts. 'You ignore the science at your folly,' he warned. 'Science is a quest for the truth. If you ignore the science, then you won't know the truth—and the folly is yours.' Beyond Commemoration Race Against Time is a digital act of reckoning. By combining technology, testimony and survivor narratives, the series offers a framework for how we can revisit past crises—and build more resilient systems for the future. What Katrina exposed was not just vulnerability to weather, but vulnerability to misinformation, miscommunication and outdated infrastructure. If there's a tech lesson in this story, it's that no amount of forecasting matters if you can't translate data into action—and no tool can replace accountability. Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time premiers on National Geographic on July 27. All episodes will be available to stream July 28 on Disney+ and Hulu.
Black America Web
a day ago
- Black America Web
Ryan Coogler's New Series Exposes the Real Story of Katrina & America
Source: Walt Disney Company / Walt Disney Company Two decades after Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans and exposed deep cracks in America's disaster response and racial divide, Black Panther director Ryan Coogler is helping to tell the story like it's never been told before. The Oscar-nominated filmmaker has teamed up with Oscar-winning producers Simon and Jonathan Chinn ( Searching for Sugar Man ) and director Traci A. Curry ( Attica ) for Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time , a five-part National Geographic docuseries that brings viewers inside the storm—and the systemic failure that followed. 'This series goes beyond the headlines,' Coogler said. 'It reveals stories of survival, heroism, and resilience. It's a vital historical record and a call to witness, remember, and reckon with the truth of Hurricane Katrina's legacy.' Premiering July 27, the series opens in the sweltering summer of 2005 as Katrina barrels toward New Orleans. Episode one, The Coming Storm , sets the stage for what would become one of the most devastating natural disasters in U.S. history. But as the series makes clear, the tragedy wasn't just the hurricane—it was the government's failure to respond. Episode two, Worst Case Scenario , captures the terrifying moment the levees broke and the city began to flood 'like a bathtub.' With emergency services overwhelmed, everyday people risked their lives to save neighbors and strangers alike. Coogler, known for using his lens to amplify Black voices and lived experiences, said it was important that the story be told through the people who were there—not pundits or politicians. 'What happened in New Orleans wasn't just a natural disaster,' Coogler explained. 'It was the result of long-standing neglect, inequality, and abandonment. The people of New Orleans were left to fend for themselves.' As the episodes unfold— A Desperate Place , Shoot to Kill , and Wake Up Call —the series chronicles what happened in the days and weeks after the floodwaters rose. It is an unflinching narrative of survival and strength. Viewers are taken inside the Superdome, where thousands sought shelter in dire conditions. It shines a light on the chaos and confusion at the Convention Center, the militarized response, and the media-fueled narrative of looting that often overshadowed real stories of courage. Through it all, Race Against Time keeps its focus tight: the people who lived through Katrina. Their testimonies are raw, emotional, and unforgettable. Director Traci A. Curry brings a cinematic edge to the storytelling, with rare archival footage, urgent pacing, and cliffhanger endings that make each episode feel like a chapter in a larger American epic. Known for centering truth, dignity, and emotion in his work, Coogler said he approached the series the same way he approached Fruitvale Station or Judas and the Black Messiah —with deep respect for the lives behind the headlines. 'This is a story about community, about loss, but also about resilience,' Coogler said. 'The people of New Orleans didn't just survive—they resisted, they rebuilt, and they kept their culture alive.' The series also tackles the aftermath of the storm—how families were scattered across the country, how the city changed forever, and how, even now, the scars remain. While Race Against Time arrives 20 years after the storm, its urgency is very much present-day. It speaks to what happens when disaster meets inequality, when bureaucracy fails, and when Black lives are treated as expendable. 'This series is not just about what happened,' Coogler noted. 'It's about what we allowed to happen—and what we need to learn from it.' Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time premieres July 27 at 8/7c on National Geographic. All five episodes will stream July 28 on Disney+ and Hulu. Source: Jazmyn Summers / Jazmyn Summers Article by Jazmyn Summers. You can hear Jazmyn every morning on 'Jazmyn in the Morning 'on Sirius XM Channel 362 Grown Folk Jamz . Subscribe to J azmyn Summers' YouTube . Follow her on Facebook and Instagram. SEE ALSO
National Geographic
a day ago
- National Geographic
Are interstellar objects proof of alien life? This could finally settle the debate.
The Vera Rubin telescope is poised to kick off an explosive era of discovery. "It's like old-fashioned astronomy: Find the thing, point telescopes at it, argue about it. It's going to be fun." Astronomers predict that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which begins surveying the night sky this year, could spot dozens more interstellar objects over the next decade. Photograph by Tomás Munita, National Geographic In our solar system, everything belongs to the sun. While they might take years and years to complete one loop, every planet and moon, asteroid and comet, every bit of crushed ice and rock, is gravitationally bound to our star, fixtures of a perpetual cosmic carousel. But every once in a while, something else comes along that, based on careful measurements of orbital mechanics, is unmistakably untethered: an interstellar visitor. The object arrives from the realm between stars, and after a quick sojourn in our solar system, it goes back out to the unknowable depths. Such enigmatic travelers are called interstellar objects, and they bring with them a glimpse of a part of the cosmos that we've never seen before. Each time one shows up it kicks off an observing spree, with astronomers mustering other telescopes, on the ground and in space, to scrutinize the visitor. The object appears as little more than a fuzzy speck of light, but astronomers try to uncover its true nature before it slips away, from fundamental properties (dimensions, chemical composition) to the wild possibilities (signs of alien technology). Only three interstellar objects have ever been discovered, with the latest appearing just this month, from the direction of somewhere in the center of the Milky Way. 3I/ATLAS, as the object is known, is currently traveling just inside the orbit of Mars, captivating telescopes around the world. These are rare events—for now. A new telescope, scheduled to begin full operations later this year, is expected to find many more such transient objects. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, perched on a mountaintop in the Chilean desert, is designed to scan the sky night after night and capture faint glimmers in the darkness—including sunlight reflecting off a fast-moving celestial body. Its observations produce time-lapse views, allowing astronomers to track those objects and study their orbits for any oddities. Rubin didn't discover 3I/ATLAS but happened to snap dozens of pictures of the object, before and after its interstellar nature became apparent. Those images are already helping astronomers form a clearer picture of the visitor. Rubin's Simonyi Survey Telescope can detect very faint objects like interstellar visitors and track their paths, as they swoop through our solar system before heading back out to the space between stars. Photograph by Tomás Munita, National Geographic With Rubin, the field is in for a potentially explosive era of discovery; according to astronomers' statistics-driven predictions and exhilarated personal bets, the observatory could spot somewhere between five and 100 interstellar objects in the next decade. "It's like old-fashioned astronomy: Find the thing, point telescopes at it, argue about it," Chris Lintott, an astrophysicist at Oxford, says. "It's going to be fun." What we know about interstellar objects An interstellar object, once anchored to a star of its own, can travel for millions and even billions of years before encountering the warmth of another. When the first known interstellar guest appeared in 2017, astronomers were stunned—not only because of the historic moment, but because 'Oumuamua, as it was later named, didn't match up with their working theories of the universe. Scientists had long thought that interstellar objects must exist, thrown out from the cold edges of their home system as new planets swirled into shape, a distinctly turbulent time. 'Oumuamua, though, wasn't like anything astronomers had observed before: weirdly shaped, rocky like an asteroid but plowing forward like a comet, and yet lacking the signature tail of dust. (Ideas about alien origins abounded.) The second recorded interstellar object to visit, Borisov in 2019, was more in line with expectations—an icy comet, though perhaps originating from a smaller, dimmer kind of star. While astronomers have already characterized 3I/ATLAS as a comet, it has its own quirks; the object is far larger than 'Oumuamua and Borisov, and appears to be a few billion years older than our solar system. ʻOumuamua (illustrated above) means 'a messenger from afar arriving first" in Hawaiian, and the first confirmed interstellar object to visit our solar system continues to puzzle astronomers today. Illustration by NASA/ESA/STScI The Hubble Space Telescope snapped this image of our solar system's second-known interstellar visitor, a comet named for its discoverer, amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov. Photograph by NASA, ESA and D. Jewitt (UCLA) An entire catalog of interstellar objects, however, can help reveal how cosmic forces shape planetary systems over time. Right now, "there's a whole zoo of explanations for interstellar objects," says Susanne Pfalzner, an astrophysicist at Forschungszentrum Jülich, a research institution in Germany. The space rocks could have been ejected because of the gravitational jostling of giant planets fresh from the cosmic oven. Most stars form in clusters, and the crowded environment could force objects from several budding planetary systems to fly off. Grown systems could lose celestial bits and pieces too; the icy bodies at the very ends of a planetary system are secured by the faintest hint of gravity, and could easily be whisked away by a passing star. And when a star exhausts its lifetime of fuel and begins to expand, the stellar winds unleashed in the dying act could expel many interstellar objects. These wanderers are relics of countless histories, and Rubin's future inventory could help astronomers determine which are most common, Pfalzner says. A flurry of Borisovs would indicate that the objects likely spring from the cold, dark outskirts of their systems. More 'Oumuamuas would suggest that most interstellar objects originate in their inner star systems, where the heat of their star has stripped away most of the chemical compounds that would typically create a shimmery tail during an encounter with our sun. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's potential to help build a more extensive catalogue of interstellar visitors could help researchers answer big questions about the objects themselves and how planetary systems change over time. Photograph by Tomás Munita, National Geographic Rubin's observations could also help settle the discussion over whether 'Oumuamua was something other than a space rock, says Avi Loeb, a Harvard physicist. Loeb thinks that 'Oumuamua is a broken piece of alien structure; our own solar system, he says, is full of space trash—rocket parts, a red Tesla—which are sometimes mistaken for asteroids by amateur astronomers. He and his collaborators suggest that 3I/ATLAS is a piece of alien tech, too. Should Rubin turn up more objects that look and behave like 'Oumuamua or 3I/ATLAS, they're less likely to be the products of extraterrestrials, Loeb says. "At the very least, we will learn more about rocks that are thrown out of other stars,' he says. ' But we might also find an answer to the most romantic question in science: Are we alone?" It's a spine-tingling thought, and certainly daydream fodder, even for the astronomers doing the work. The late astronomer Vera Rubin, for whom the new telescope is named, wrote in 2006 that when she examined the nearby galaxy M31 through a telescope, "often I wondered if an astronomer in M31 was observing us. Always I wished we could exchange views." (Vera Rubin was the GOAT of dark matter.) Most of the astronomy community doesn't share Loeb and his collaborators' interpretation of 'Oumuamua, or his latest claim about 3I/ATLAS. "It's strange, but it's not so strange that we need to fall back on the aliens hypothesis," says John Forbes, an astrophysicist at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. 'Oumuamua's unusual acceleration, which can't be explained by gravity's influence, could be explained by comet-like properties. 'Oumuamua may have released a tiny amount of gas as it thawed in the warmth of the sun enough to propel it along, but not necessarily to be observed by telescopes, says Darryl Seligman, an astrophysicist at Michigan State University. In the last few years, Seligman and his colleagues have reported the discovery of a dozen asteroids near Earth that vent gases just like comets do, but produce a tail that isn't visible to us. They suggest that these asteroids belong to a new class of celestial bodies, which they call dark comets. "This type of thing could be much more widespread that we haven't noticed before and potentially haven't even been looking for," Seligman says—and visiting objects could exhibit this behavior, too. Exploring our galactic wilderness While some scientists focus on chasing after these objects as they hurtle through our solar system, others are eager to investigate their journeys through the galactic wilderness. While they aren't bound to specific stars, interstellar travelers move around the Milky Way. Forbes, in his research, posits that space rocks, once unmoored from their home system, start traveling in a long, thin current through the galaxy. Stars ejected from stellar clusters can form streams, and Forbes predicts that interstellar objects may do the same. These currents would expand over time, becoming more diffuse, because "the galaxy is messy, and there's all sorts of things going on that perturb your nice, simple orbits," Forbes says. He hopes that Rubin will spot multiple newcomers arriving from the same spot in the sky and traveling at matching velocities. "That's a pretty strong indication that we're sitting in a dense stream of interstellar objects," he says. Our sun could be drifting through millions of such currents. (What other mysteries could the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory solve?) A menagerie of interstellar objects could help astronomers solve a particularly puzzling aspect of planet formation, including Earth's own story. Planets form in much the same way that dust bunnies around the house do, with particles swirling and sticking together until they grow large enough to become worlds. Computer simulations have shown, however, that while it's easy for cosmic forces to make the leap from dust-sized particles to boulder-sized objects, it is actually quite difficult for those boulders to then grow into something larger. While the universe has obviously overcome this challenge—"we are living proof," Pfalzner says—astronomers haven't figured out how. Interstellar objects, she says, are just about the right size for this conundrum, ready to be glommed on and grown. If there's a lot of interstellar objects floating around in the vicinity of a new system—perhaps drawn in by the gravity of the freshly ignited star at its center—the universe has all the raw materials it needs, removing any friction in the process. The interstellar objects whizzing through our skies may someday, help shape someone else's solar system. Rubin's search for interstellar objects, whether it turns up only a few or dozens, provides a kind of knowledge that goes beyond pure empirical research. We can know, better than before, what kind of universe stretches out all around us, as if we've cracked open a giant secret and become privy to wonders we weren't meant to witness. What lies beyond Earth isn't nature in any sense that we might recognize, but it is a kind of wilderness nonetheless, shaped by many of the same forces that led to the familiar landscapes on this planet. Interstellar objects are a reminder that the cosmos is a shared place, and that we are just as much a part of it as those mysterious travelers, carving our own path through time and space.
