Talk Justice, an LSC Podcast: Katrina’s Lasting Impact on Legal Aid 20 Years Later

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Maria Duvuvuei    

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WASHINGTON – Twenty years after the disaster, a Louisiana lawyer tells how Hurricane Katrina changed civil legal services forever on of LSC’s “Talk Justice” podcast. LSC President Ron Flagg speaks with Laura Tuggle, executive director of (SLLS). SLLS is the largest nonprofit civil legal aid provider in the state, serving 22 parishes from seven offices, with the largest office in New Orleans.   

In 2005, before tragedy struck, Tuggle had been a staff attorney in SLLS’ housing law unit. At the time, she says, legal services related to natural disasters were not a part of the conversation at all. They didn’t have any connections to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) back then or even know what it was.

“Nobody really talked about disaster law or disaster preparedness,” Tuggle says, “When Katrina came, everything changed.”

People from the impacted area were dispersed across the country. A handful of SLLS staff headed north to Shreveport and set up an outpost to start providing services.

“There were huge numbers of folks impacted by Hurricane Katrina that were trying to apply for FEMA benefits, and at that time, the only way that you could do that was being on the phone literally for hours because there was no online application,” says Tuggle.

FEMA set up disaster recovery centers, but because approximately a million Louisiana residents had fled to different states, most of them couldn’t get to services in person. An additional obstacle was that many people’s IDs and important documents were lost or destroyed, so they could not prove they were eligible for recovery benefits.

Tuggle says that the hit to the housing stock was a “real jolt to the system.” Since people had evacuated, some landlords considered their units abandoned. Rents skyrocketed. Both legal and illegal evictions spiked—but the courts weren’t open to properly deal with either.

Other common problems included child custody and unemployment. Children were evacuated with one parent and often taken far away from the other. Since so many Louisianans lost their jobs overnight, applying for unemployment was another big legal need, which required SLLS to help people get new legal documents and IDs.

Tuggle explains that before Hurricane Katrina, SLLS did not do any heirs property or probate work that would ensure home titles were properly inherited by the owner’s chosen heir. Now, it is a crucial part of their disaster preparedness efforts.

“One thing I learned after Katrina was that Louisiana has the lowest rate of emigration—of people that move out of the state—in the United States of America,” Tuggle says. “And [New Orleans is] an old city, we're over 300 years old. So that means we have people with really deep roots, and a lot of them have been here for multiple generations.”

To have the documentation to prove ownership of a home you inherited in Louisiana, you have to file a “succession,” which cost about $2,500 even back in 2005, Tuggle explains. Cost was prohibitive preventing many people from getting their paperwork in order. Many didn’t know they needed to have documentation of their inherited property until their homes were destroyed in Katrina and they struggled to prove ownership to get recovery assistance.

In the years since, legal services have evolved, and SLLS is one program helping other organizations understand how to respond to disasters through conversations, online resources, conferences and partnership-building with case management groups, faith-based organizations and government partners.

“It's a very different world in terms of disaster legal services than it was 20 years ago,” she says. 

While a lot of lessons have been learned and services have greatly improved, this type of work still has its challenges. She says that one challenge is that major disasters are more frequent than decades ago. While Katrina was a global and national news story for months after the fact, more recently, significant disasters can seem like a “blip” that is quickly forgotten.

“Four years ago, the same date as Katrina, we had Hurricane Ida,” says Tuggle. “A lot of folks probably don't even know what that was, but it is the sixth costliest disaster in United States history, and it impacted 22 of [the] 22 parishes [that SLLS serves.] And I think we had 816,000 applications for FEMA assistance.”

Tuggle senses that there is “compassion fatigue” when it comes to these disasters.

“The impact of disasters disproportionately falls on folks that are least able to recover from them,” she says.

Tuggle explains that it is difficult because the influx of resources after a major disaster are incredibly helpful, but these special grants and other resources usually dry up long before the recovery work is over. Legal problems related to disasters can keep impacting survivors for many years following the event. In fact, SLLS still sees clients today whose legal problems were caused by Katrina.

“If you can't get [legal] services to people when they need them, the longer that is delayed or if it's not available, the more likely it is that you're going to have homes and neighborhoods that can't recover,” Tuggle says. “And then you're going to be looking at blight situations, you're going to be looking at folks that wind up being displaced and can never really get back on stable footing.”

Talk Justice episodes are and on Spotify, YouTube and Apple Podcasts. The podcast is sponsored by LSC’s .