Twenty years ago this past Friday, Hurricane Katrina, a Category 5 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico, made landfall as a Category 4 storm with 145 mile-per-hour winds. New Orleans – three to twelve feet below sea level, wedged between Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi – has always depended on levees and pumps to survive.
Katrina exposed not only infrastructure failures but human ones, leading to nearly 2,000 deaths and millions displaced, many never to return.
National Geographic’s Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time released last month opens with an elderly survivor: “To prevent something from happening again, you have to understand why it happened in the first place.”
It wasn’t just levees that failed. The Federal Emergency Management Agency did too. And to our country’s detriment, FEMA is again showing cracks.
Since January, FEMA has lost a third of its full-time employees. This week, 180 current and former staff sent a letter to Congress criticizing both the cuts and the lack of a qualified administrator with disaster-response experience. One of the painful lessons-learned from Katrina was George W. Bush’s FEMA Director, Michael Brown, whose legal and political background left him unprepared for crisis management and slowed response.
Recent torrential rains helped extinguish local wildfires but triggered flash floods in some places. When Katrina destroyed power lines and communications, radio became a lifeline. Stations broadcast from makeshift studios with backup generators. Calm, familiar voices cut through chaos with instructions and hope. Radio delivered alerts, news, and reassurance when everything else failed.
As our community faces wildfires, floods, avalanches, and mudslides, Katrina’s lessons on infrastructure and funding shouldn’t be forgotten. Yet Washington is holding back FEMA grants that support public radio equipment and emergency alert systems. Once again, we risk the silence that cost lives two decades ago.
In February, FEMA awarded KSJD in Cortez and KSUT in Ignacio a $55,000 and $537,288, respectively, Next Generation Warning System grant to upgrade failing transmission towers. KSUT Station Manager Tami Graham described them as “held together by duct tape and glue.” The funding – frozen soon after – for KSUT would have added generators, solar panels, and remote equipment to keep broadcasts running during outages. For KSJD, it would also upgrade aging radio transmitters and improve back up power in the event of emergencies when communication is critical. FEMA tasked the Corporation for Public Broadcasting with contracting the funds. But with CPB now defunded and closing Sept. 30, it’s unclear if the money will ever reach the ground.
KSJD and KSUT reach hundreds of thousands of people across Montezuma, La Plata, Archuleta, and San Juan counties (in CO and NM), including the Ute Mountain Ute, Southern Ute and Jicarilla Apache Nations, and the northeast portion of the Navajo Nation all the way to Monument Valley where little to no internet connectivity exists. And as Graham recently told The Associated Press: “There is nothing partisan about emergency alerting in rural areas. That is just an absolute basic need” (AP News, Aug. 25).
When digital and electrical networks fail, local analog radio can prove essential. Community resilience depends on clear, reliable, local information. FEMA’s cuts – including withholding grants for public radio equipment – threaten that.
It’s smaller, rural, and tribal stations that need help most. Without upgrades, radio systems may fail when we need them most. The risk is repeating Katrina’s silence – people unable to access information about evacuation routes, shelters, or aid. That silence, two decades ago, cost lives.
FEMA and Congress must prioritize communication infrastructureand release these funds. We look again to local residents, community leaders, Rep. Jeff Hurd and Sens. Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper to raise their voices. When local and state capacity is overwhelmed, as with Katrina, our resilience depends on it.
Katrina taught us the cost of neglect. Twenty years later, we cannot let history repeat. In a disaster, information is as vital as food and water. Cutting off radio lifelines cuts off communication and community connection when it’s needed most.
Readers can support both stations during their upcoming fall membership drives. KSJD is kicking off their drive with a concert by Little Brother at the Sunflower Theatre on Sept. 20, and KSUT’s runs Sept. 15-19.
