From resilience to resurgence after Katrina

Ten years ago this week, Randall Tassin and about a dozen employees at Hydronic Technology's office in New Orleans wrapped up an ordinary Friday at work. Weather forecasters were reporting a strong storm brewing off the coast that could be headed their way, but few took it seriously at the time.

"It's so fresh in our minds. It seems like it happened yesterday," says Tassin, the executive vice president and treasurer at Hydronic, a company that sells fluid-handling equipment such as heating, piping and plumbing systems. "We left our office on a Friday, before Katrina hit. We were joking amongst ourselves, 'We'll see you Monday.' We never really worried about it too much on that Friday. The hurricane was supposed to hit Florida, and it did, and that was supposed to be the end of it."

SEE MORE: Special coverage on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina

But Tassin woke up on Saturday, Aug. 27, 2005, to news that New Orleans residents should start evacuating the city as Hurricane Katrina, freshly recharged after swerving into the Gulf of Mexico, barreled straight for them.

See photos of residents bracing for the storm:

"So I called a woman named Lisa who still works here and came to the office and we basically tried to take all the important papers," Tassin says, recalling the morning he lifted all the company's filing cabinets off the ground and onto desks, on the off chance that floodwater somehow worked its way into the building. "The storm hits, and initially we thought we'd dodged a bullet. You didn't really start hearing about the water and the flooding until late [Monday night] or the next morning."

About 1.5 million people were evacuated from New Orleans and nearby areas in Louisiana before Katrina walloped the region, submerging entire houses and sweeping up people, animals and debris in its path.

Between 150,000 and 200,000 people are thought to have remained to ride out the storm. Survivors were stranded for days on rooftops throughout New Orleans and beyond, awaiting rescue efforts that drew heavy criticism for being overdue and inadequate. More than 1,000 people are estimated to have died as a result of Hurricane Katrina, and hundreds of thousands more were displaced or chose to leave the region entirely.

"It became a life-or-death struggle for thousands who were still trapped in the cities," Mitch Landrieu, the current mayor of New Orleans, said during a speech earlier this month at the National Press Club in Washington. He recalled "survivors trapped for days with little or no help, hundreds on the rooftops, people trying to keep their heads above water, the blazing Louisiana sun, American citizens crowded in front of the Superdome and huddled masses at the convention center."

Tassin is one of thousands of regional business executives who had to figure out how to recoup his losses and stay in business once the floodwaters receded. Mold consumed water-damaged office buildings that weren't outright destroyed during the storm. And evacuees were reluctant to return, leaving local economies with a smaller pool of consumers. The combined populations of Mississippi and Louisiana declined by more than 204,000 people between 2004 and 2006. New Orleans lost more than half of its population during that same window, according to the Census Bureau. Renters, in particular, were slow to trickle back into the city, as they weren't tied down by mortgage payments and property ownership.

"If you're renting a house or renting an apartment and that gets wiped away, you have no backup plan," says David Butler, a professor of international development at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Butler in 2010 published a paper that examined Hurricane Katrina's employment impact on a handful of counties in southern Mississippi. He found that lower-income regions in which service industries such as education and tourism dominated employment were most heavily impacted by the storm. Jobs reliant on a steady stream of nearby consumers were walloped as populations fell and visits ground to a halt.

"If you've lost your job ... and you have no job and no home, you then pick up and go to a family member or go restart somewhere else," he says. "If you've been evacuated and the conditions are better in Houston or Mobile, Alabama, or somewhere further north and the conditions are better, you'd get a job there and it'd be harder to come back."

Tassin and his family spent their evacuation weekend in a Lake Charles, Louisiana, hotel about three and a half hours away from New Orleans. Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast on Monday, but the full extent of the storm's impact wasn't realized for several hours. When Tassin turned the television on Tuesday morning, he saw news reports that New Orleans' levees had been breached and that floodwater was engulfing his city.

"It's hard to describe. I would say it was scary. We knew, with the city being flooded, you always held out hope. You didn't know where the floodwaters went. You didn't know how much of the city was flooded yet," Tassin says. "We didn't know what was going to happen."

See photos of the Ninth Ward after Hurricane Katrina hit:

The New Orleans-based Data Center estimates roughly 80 percent of New Orleans was flooded during and in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In some areas, buildings were submerged under 10 feet of water. All told, economic losses related to Katrina have been estimated at over $125 billion, as hundreds of businesses in the region went under.

"During the first 10 months after the hurricane, [New Orleans] suffered an over-the-year average loss of 95,000 jobs. At the trough of the job loss, in November 2005, employment was 105,300 below the previous year's November figure," said a 2007 Bureau of Labor Statistics report detailing Katrina's effects on the New Orleans economy.

"Job losses during the fourth quarter [of 2005] were due to two factors: the destruction of the city's infrastructure, thereby eliminating places of employment; and the destruction of homes and the subsequent public-health crisis, which together forced large segments of the employed population to leave the city," the report stated.

In New Orleans alone, 134,000 housing units were damaged as a result of Katrina – about 70 percent of the city's total occupied residences. Nearby in Mississippi, another 134,000 homes and 10,000 rental units were destroyed or damaged, according to the Government Accountability Office.

"House after house after house and building after building after building for miles were destroyed," Tassin says of his city in the aftermath of Katrina. "It's amazing how much things float around when you have a flood like that. Things were just left on the street. It wasn't out of the ordinary to see a sofa just sitting in the middle of the street."

Tassin first returned to Hydronic's New Orleans office on Sept. 17, 2005. The city was still largely shut down, and National Guard troops patrolled the streets.

"The first time we came to our office, the devastation and the smell were just god-awful. I can't even describe it. ... I got to my office and got out of the car and guys with AK-47s were walking down the street," Tassin says, recalling bumping into the National Guard troops. "It was just so surreal being on the streets in New Orleans in America and the National Guard's walking around trying to keep the peace."

Tassin says the smell of mold in the building was overwhelming. A quick survey of the office was enough for him to conclude that Hydronic had lost everything its employees had left behind.

"We came in with a Bobcat and just shoved everything out of the office and onto the street ... FEMA had hired hundreds of companies to come down and stack debris in dump trucks and take them to landfills," he says.

With their New Orleans office in disrepair, Hydronic's employees didn't have a base of operations to return to after the hurricane. So they divided themselves between the company's offices in Shreveport, Louisiana, and Jackson, Mississippi. Some family members stayed with the employees in the new cities, renting condos or apartments while they sorted out what to do next. Tassin's home was left untouched by the floodwaters, so his family returned home while he worked out of Shreveport.

"It was added expense, so we just tried to accommodate as much as possible," says Tassin, who made the five-hour trip from Shreveport to New Orleans every weekend to be with his family. "Two people in our company lost their houses as well, and it was even more difficult for those guys because they lost their home in addition to their business. So many people were affected."

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates the number of employed individuals in Louisiana shrank by 216,000 in September 2005 alone, the month following Katrina's landfall along the Gulf Coast. The unemployment rate in the Gulfport-Biloxi region of Mississippi jumped 19.4 percentage points in September 2005, compared with the year before. Unemployment in Pascagoula, Mississippi, meanwhile, climbed in September before peaking in October, as it ballooned 7.8 percentage points from October 2004. Unemployment in the New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner metropolitan region also peaked in October, gaining 10.6 percentage points from a year prior.

Labor conditions in the New Orleans metro area had been in decline before the storm. In August 2005, before Katrina's impacts could be recorded by the Labor Department, the region's unemployment rate jumped 1.3 percentage points for the largest year-over-year gain of any major metropolitan area in the country.

Still, the hurricane's timing could not have been worse, with a recession right around the corner.

"You're looking at right before the market and the [housing] bubble burst. So you had investment coming in, but then it just stopped. You had the storm, which was Disaster 1. And you had the Great Recession as Disaster 2," Butler says. "If you're in the middle of an upswing or near the top of a business cycle, it's the worst time for a disaster to hit. Because when the disaster hits, you already have all the business investment that's going on and the capital that's out there. People are starting to pull capital back."

Tassin's firm was able to work for a few months outside of New Orleans, split between its two other offices. And as a supplier of heating and piping units, Hydronic's inventory was in high demand when the disaster was finally over and the region started to rebuild.

"The casinos in Mississippi were some of our first calls from contractors. The casinos had to figure out a way to reopen. They needed pumps and boilers, so we started feeling a little optimistic. But it was incredible how much unknown there was," Tassin says, noting how difficult it was to get the word out that Hydronic had weathered the storm and was back in business. "You didn't have people's emails like you do today. We had a guy stand by a fax machine and we were just faxing everybody that we knew, all of our factories and all of our customers, to let them know that we survived and we were in Shreveport and Jackson."

Hydronic eventually tracked down a 12-by-60-foot rental trailer that allowed employees to return and work in New Orleans. A group of eight operated out of the back of the trailer for close to a year before the company found a vacant office for sale.

"As hard as it was, as resilient as we were, at the end of the day you almost could say it became a blessing. The opportunity for business increased. Once you got back on your feet, you were able to take advantage of the opportunity, and that's what we did," Tassin says. "We were in place and were able to provide products for the rebuilding of the buildings down here in New Orleans and Mississippi. And we took great pride in the fact that we stayed here in New Orleans. We could have moved to a suburb, but we decided to stick it out."

New Orleans started to regain its footing as funds poured into the Gulf Coast region. The Data Center estimates the federal government spent $120.5 billion related to Katrina response, $75 billion of which went to emergency relief efforts. Another $6.5 billion flowed in from philanthropic giving, while insurance claims covered just under $30 billion in losses.

"The major parts of the city have been rebuilt better than ever, but there are some areas in New Orleans that are struggling to rebuild, and that's mainly neighborhoods. That's some of the poorer areas, and that's unfortunate," Tassin says. "We constantly talked amongst ourselves. 'What's this place going to look like in 10 years?' And lo and behold, here we are, 10 years later."

Now, New Orleans is one of America's fastest-growing cities since the Great Recession, though there is still work to be done. The New Orleans-Metairie-Kenner metro area's civilian labor force – meaning all people employed or actively looking for work – has yet to return to pre-Katrina levels. The area's labor force in June sat at 606,476 workers, down from June 2005's 632,352 but up from February 2006's 488,451.

"As you were doing business and trying to turn a profit, you were able to use some of that profit to help with the rebuilding," Tassin says. "You constantly had to look at the positive at what would happen with the rebuilding, because the devastation was a lot to look at every day."

Another positive sign: The unemployment rate in the New Orleans metro area sank back down to 6.1 percent in June, above the national rate of 5.3 percent but still well shy of the region's 15.9 percent unemployment peak in October 2005.

That means job opportunities have returned as the city's infrastructure has been rebuilt. And local business owners resilient enough to weather the storm have helped revitalize a regional economy that was all but wiped out only a decade ago.

"The people who were able to outlast it had to have a resilience," Tassin says. "What's amazing to me is it's been 10 years already. How time flies is pretty amazing."

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