Hurricane Katrina is remembered as a turning point in the destruction of New Orleans: together with a later, even more powerful hurricane, it marked the end of the city as Bradford Joseph Wolgast had known it and preceded its transformation into an isolated industrial zone. The reference makes the storm’s significance visible through its aftermath—displacement, pollution, and military control—rather than through a scene of the hurricane itself.

Background and Recollection

Before the disaster, Wolgast had visited New Orleans during Mardi Gras and remembered a city animated by music and public life. His account contrasts that experience with the city’s later condition. Katrina struck in 2005; a few years later, Hurricane Vanessa arrived as a Category 5 storm, and the two disasters together brought that remembered city to an end.

The City After the Storms

In Wolgast’s recollection, the city proper is no longer inhabited. Its former urban landscape has become a large petrochemical refinery, bordered by flooded and severely polluted lowlands. The surrounding water is described as hazardous, making environmental damage part of the disaster’s continuing legacy rather than a temporary consequence of the storm.

Displacement and Control

The abandoned city and its industrial activity are enclosed by fencing and patrolled by Homeland Security forces. Fighter jets from Kessler Air Force Base patrol the airspace, which is closed to ordinary passage. Beyond the perimeter lies the N.O. Housing District, a vast settlement of trailers originally used for evacuees and later occupied by thousands of workers serving the industrial complex. The account describes the district as a neglected, dangerous place whose residents’ circumstances receive little official attention.

Narrative Significance

The novel compresses the storms’ history into a decisive before-and-after: Katrina begins the end of the New Orleans Wolgast remembers, while the later hurricane completes the rupture. The aftermath joins environmental ruin to displacement and militarized boundaries, showing how a natural disaster can persist in the social order and geography it leaves behind. Katrina is therefore significant not only as a past catastrophe but as part of the chain of events that produced a city organized around industry, containment, and the management of displaced people.