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Years before the storm, Tonie Waltman had been told a premonition of its disastrous aftermath. Around 1997, her dad, a Black man named Hardy Jackson, was hit by an oncoming train. He’d ultimately survive, but not before being induced into a coma, from which doctors predicted he’d never recover. “In ‘98, my dad sat me down on the front porch and said, ‘Prepare yourself,’” recalls Waltman, 35, Hardy’s youngest daughter. “He said, ‘When I was in that coma, the Lord showed me there’s going to be a really bad storm and I’m going to lose your momma.’”
Living in the Gulf town of Biloxi, Mississippi, as storms came and went, Hardy became more protective over his wife, Tonette, a white Creole woman. The day before Katrina, Tonette instructed Waltman and her siblings to leave for higher ground. Waltman, then 14, and her sister tried convincing their parents to leave, but they decided to stick it out. Tonette was stubborn and Hardy was loyal, useful characteristics that kept them together for decades, especially during the years their love was illegal in Mississippi. “She was like, ‘We’re going to be okay, you know how these storms do.’” But before dawn on Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina split Waltman’s childhood home in half, separating her parents forever. Tonette, a strong swimmer, had fallen into the water, while Hardy grabbed the branch of an oak tree. Hardy tried his best to pull her up, but the flood waters were too strong. “My mom looked up at him and said, ‘You can’t hold me. Just let me go and make sure you take care of the kids and grandkids,” Waltman tells Rolling Stone.
Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, devastating millions. More than 1,500 people were killed in the Louisiana city, while coastal Mississippi towns like Biloxi took in up to 30 feet of water, drowning another 300-plus people. Hundreds of thousands of others were displaced from their homes. While the coast of Mississippi rebuilt, investing in tourist attractions like casinos, progress in New Orleans — particularly its impoverished Ninth Ward, where the levees broke — stagnated. That resulted in endless coverage of the city’s struggles, and left some survivors feeling overlooked. Now, as the anniversary approaches, people who lived through the storm are going on TikTok to tell their stories — proving that the narrative around Katrina, and the systemic racism it exposed, is still as complicated as ever.
The discourse took off on Aug. 10, 2025, when Kam Tarvin posted a TikTok about how she and her fellow Mississippians felt ignored in the discussion surrounding the storm. “Why every time y’all mention Hurricane Katrina it’s always about New Orleans, like it didn’t hit us too?” she said, standing in her backyard. “Whole neighborhoods gone… entire cities. Somehow, Mississippi still ain’t make the highlight reel?”
In an email to Rolling Stone, Tarvin, who is from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, 90 miles from the Gulf Coast, explained her intentions. “What led me to make the video was seeing everyone talking about it on the internet. A lot of people never knew that the hurricane hit Mississippi until I made the video, so I was putting it out there that we were hit too, not just New Orleans.” Katrina had left Tarvin, then nine years old, and her grandmother without power and water for weeks, forcing them to evacuate to a shelter. She didn’t lose anyone to the storm and only a few family members’ houses were damaged. “I don’t think people from Mississippi are trying to compare, we’re simply sharing our story as well. We’re just letting others in the world know that we were hit by the hurricane. I just simply want us to not be left out.”
But many residents from New Orleans feel the conversation about Mississippi’s lack of coverage is incomparable to the reality of how the storm affected New Orleans. “It’s weird,” says Timphany Jean, a TikToker who was in New Orleans for the storm. When the levees broke, Jean was 15 years old and stuck with her family in her grandmother’s attic in New Orleans’ Gentilly district. The house was the first property that someone in her family had owned, but the flooding damage —and little help from FEMA —resulted in them losing it. “Natural disasters are to be expected. The damage from the disaster wasn’t what made it such a big deal for New Orleans, it was the after affects and how we were helped. There was no urgency.”
Hurricane Katrina exposed systemic oppression. News outlets reported stories of crime, labeling white residents “foragers,” and reducing Black residents — who were being shot by law enforcement and other white citizens — to “looters.” “The police pointed a gun at my momma with a newborn in her arms,” says Christopher Stewart, who also posted about his experience to TikTok. To share his story, he used images from Google Maps, showing his old building, before the storm, in New Orleans’ Chalmette neighborhood. He was 12 when Katrina hit. “They were trying to protect a store that wasn’t going to be there. We were trying to survive and get what we needed.”
In New Orleans, race and class dictated whether or not you lived east — below sea level and prone to storms — or west, near the French Quarter, on higher ground. Stewart’s family always lived down river, on the east side of the city. “Being a child in New Orleans was amazing although we were poor,” Stewart says. After the storm, “I remember going months without electricity and just going to our neighbors, hooking up extension cords, or asking for ice and sugar.” Stewart’s family lived 10 minutes from the Industrial Canal, which flooded his neighborhood. In a viral TikTok, Stewart talked about his stay in the New Orleans’ Convention Center after it had been converted into a shelter. “When we went to the convention center, people that were close to the levees said they heard the levees explode, like they heard a loud bang.”
According to Jennifer Trivedi, a disaster researcher at the University of Delaware, the sheer scale of what was happening in New Orleans made it a national news story, rather than the more rote damage that struck the smaller cities along the Mississippi coast. Outside of New Orleans, the storm itself caused damage; within the city, the disaster felt more man-made. “A lot of people attributed the damage that happened elsewhere to sort of a natural hazard,” she says. “In New Orleans, a lot of people associated [the disaster] with human failure and human error, and that captured people’s attention in a very different way. There were the images coming out of New Orleans of so many people trapped in such a condensed space — spaces like the Superdome were just so striking. I remember reading through the news coverage, people making comments like, ‘This doesn’t happen in America.’”
That’s not to say the storm didn’t have profound effects on the less publicized areas. Biloxi’s diverse demographic of Black, white, and Vietnamese migrants is the reason why Hardy and Tonette moved there in 1977. Tonette was pregnant with her first child in Vancleave, Mississippi by a man who had run off. Despite that, Hardy assumed paternal responsibility much to the disapproval of Tonette’s family, who burned a cross on his family’s lawn. “Growing up there, it seemed that there was no type of racism at all. Everybody knew everybody and got along. It was a breeze type of city,” says Waltman.
In the aftermath of Katrina, though, the city’s priorities seemed to change. When Waltman was growing up, it was common to see people strolling the streets of Biloxi. But when she returned this past March, she saw her old stopping grounds had become more targeted towards driving tourists inside the casinos and restaurants that sprung up. “Even though Black, brown, and poor folks didn’t get the same resources, George Bush went to Biloxi when he was flying over New Orleans and met with the governor,” says Alisa Payne, showrunner of Netflix’s new docuseries Katrina: Come Hell and High Water. The series touches on Biloxi, but focuses mostly on the devastation in New Orleans. “We talk about Mississippi, but at the time, Mississippi was getting more resources from the government.”
That doesn’t mean everyone in Mississippi ended up back on their feet — when FEMA payments came through for Hardy, he only got around $5,000 for the house he and Tonette owned. According to Dr. Robert Bullard, a researcher and professor of climate justice at Texas Southern University, most of the money went to the booming new industry on the coast. “In the lower part, development was moving fast with resorts and gambling,” he says. “After the storm, you’re talking about money, power, and politics. A lot of the recovery dollars was diverted from housing to building casinos.”
In 2013, Hardy died from lung cancer, still not knowing where Tonette’s remains were. “He was depressed,” says Waltman. “He blamed himself for not being able to hold on to her.” Eleven years after his death, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation called Waltman. They had found Tonette’s body, buried in a grave near the town where she was raised. Leading up to the anniversary, Waltman is more at peace than in previous years. “It doesn’t really bother me like it used to,” she says. “Before it was more like, ‘My mom is just out there and we don’t know.’ Now, I got her remains, it’s like the missing piece to the puzzle is put together.”
The one thing that Waltman, Tarvin, Jean, and Stewart have in common is that they were all kids when tragedy struck. Many of them weren’t asked if they were OK and others were flat out ignored, expected to move on. “Everybody’s Hurricane Katrina story is different,” says Stewart, who tears up during our conversation. “Even me and my little brother, we were literally together but what he noticed and went through is different from what I noticed and went through. Everybody experienced a different Katrina.” And this is why, 20 years later, they are telling their stories.
