Twenty years ago this week, the waters came for the Lower Ninth Ward. Not slowly, not gently — rushing through broken levees like the inevitable consequence of centuries of deliberate neglect finally made manifest. On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall. The levees broke, and the world watched as bodies floated through streets that had held Black homes for generations.

When Katrina approached the Gulf Coast, the climate denial merged with the same racist logic that had spent decades placing toxic facilities, highways, and industrial death in Black neighborhoods, only this time with the fury of wind and water. The French Quarter stayed dry — tourist dollars matter. The business district stayed protected — capital flows uphill. But the Lower Ninth Ward, where families had passed down houses like heirlooms, where community was a verb and survival was an art form? That was always expendable. This wasn’t just a natural disaster. This was warfare by water; environmental racism with the volume on max, until even the willfully deaf could hear it.

Picture this: National Guard helicopters circling overhead, but not to rescue . . . to patrol. To point M16 rifles down at Black people who were trying to cross a bridge to safety, or were committing the crime of surviving while Black in America. People begged for help while the state’s priority was containment, not aid or rescue. This is why we cannot expect the State to save us or provide us with safety or resources to survive a natural disaster — as communities, we need to be ready to step up and contribute to liberatory mutual aid.

In the vacuum that was created in a post-Katrina landscape, a group of radical anarchist organizers from New Orleans and outside came together to ask the people what they needed and then they set out to meet those needs.  As scott crow, (CLDC advisory board member), anarchist, author, and co-founder of Common Ground Relief details in the Green and Red Podcast with CLDC comrade Scott Parkin, the government’s response revealed the true function of state power: “restoring law and order” meant deploying armed forces to protect white capital, while Black people drowned in their homes, and died of dehydration and starvation on rooftops. Police and National Guard units were mobilized, not for rescue operations, but to prevent looting — as if desperate people seeking water, food, and supplies for their literal survival from abandoned stores were the criminals in this scenario. The state treated survival as theft and mutual aid as a threat to be contained. This wasn’t disaster relief — it was counterinsurgency against people who were guilty only of refusing to die without a fight.

On September 5, 2005, Malik Rahim (former Black Panther and longtime community organizer from Algiers) joined with Sharon Johnson (neighborhood resident, local organizer, and holder of community knowledge and local power) and scott crow (anarchist organizer from Texas, bridge-builder between movements, and CLDC advisory board member) to form the Common Ground Collective – dedicated to empowering the local community and providing relief services that the government had (willfully) failed to provide. Together they birthed something unprecedented: “the largest functioning organization based on anarchist ideals in the United States since the IWW.”

“Solidarity Not Charity.” Three words that changed it all. As scott crow explains in the recent Green and Red Podcast, this wasn’t just a slogan — it was a revolutionary framework that rejected the paternalism of traditional disaster relief in favor of building community autonomy, and resisting the very systems of oppression and exploitation that had made the disaster so devastating in the first place. Where charity creates dependence and reinforces existing power structures, solidarity builds power from below, creating the conditions for communities to liberate themselves. Common Ground picked up garbage, prepared and served meals, ran health clinics, started free schools, provided bicycles and trailers, planted community gardens, built affordable housing (more than Habitat for Humanity did with its millions of dollars), and launched worker cooperatives. They dug in – even when it was hard and uncomfortable on many levels.

In the podcast, crow speaks of cultivating our “emergency hearts” — that capacity to urgently respond with love and solidarity when the systems that claim to protect us reveal their true nature and a crisis results. It’s about moving beyond charity’s condescension, to build the revolutionary infrastructure communities urgently need – not just to survive disasters, but to transform the conditions that bring them about and make them so devastating.

But here comes the cruelest verse in this tragic song: while storms grow stronger and communities grow more vulnerable, the federal government is gutting the very programs designed to help frontline communities survive. At the direction of President Donald Trump, the EPA has targeted billions of dollars in grants for termination, and confirmed this week that the agency will shutter the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, created under the George H.W. Bush administration (we never thought we’d be missing a Republican in office so badly). And this is why we need to take of us, and we need to start rethinking community reliance on government infrastructure.

Twenty years after August 29, 2005. We know what’s coming: More storms. Stronger storms. More communities in the crosshairs of climate chaos and state abandonment. More Black and Brown neighborhoods designated as sacrifice zones for white supremacist capital.

But we also know something else. We know we need to organize. We know how to build power from below. We know how to create solidarity not charity, mutual aid not saviorism, community self-defense not dependence on the state that would rather see us drown.

This week, as we reflect on twenty years since August 29^th, we remember not just what was lost, but what was born in breaking the levees. We remember that every disaster is also an opportunity — for communities to discover their own strength.

The storm will come again. The state will fail again. The people will rise together again.