General Tasked with Saving People During Katrina Remembers Painful Lessons from Hurricane’s Aftermath

Now-retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who oversaw military recovery efforts in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina left much of the city underwater and thousands stranded, says the lessons from that catastrophic flood are still relevant today.

One key takeaway, he stresses, is that Americans should rely on their neighbors as much as the federal government when evacuating.

“The government’s got a responsibility in preparedness to give you warning,” Honoré tells PEOPLE. “We pay big money to get warning.”

But, he says, once the warning is issued, it falls on local officials to turn it into action. And even then, the government isn’t always best equipped to handle immediate evacuations.

“FEMA is not going to be there the hour after the storm,” he explains, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “It takes action at the local level, neighbors helping neighbors and people having redundant communications capacity.”

Katrina, one of the deadliest storms in U.S. history, claimed 1,392 lives in New Orleans, disproportionately affecting the elderly, disabled, and poor. Many of the victims were alone in their homes, and local and federal authorities faced intense criticism for their response, with accusations of racial bias surfacing.

Honoré insists he needed to be on the ground. After arriving in New Orleans, he traveled to Baton Rouge to meet with then-Governor Kathleen Blanco, who emphasized the importance of evacuation and providing food, water, and medicine. FEMA chief Mike Brown asked Honoré to coordinate the rescue and relief efforts from Baton Rouge to ensure a unified command.

“I wasn’t going to sit in Baton Rouge in an air-conditioned building — I needed to be forward if I was going to make a difference,” Honoré says.

Now 77, Honoré believes his visibility in informing the public about military operations made him the face of the federal relief effort. He led the units that evacuated people from the convention center and Superdome, where thousands had gathered.

“As the commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, leading the federal military response, I was on the ground in the city, not at a headquarters in Washington and not 75 miles away in Baton Rouge,” he recalls. “So I became a target for the media to ask, ‘When are we going to get the people out? Where are they going? What are you doing about getting buses in?'”

While he organized and prioritized the evacuation efforts, Honoré credits much of the work to the National Guard and first responders.

“It was a collective effort that got it done, but I became the voice of it, and to make sure that when we said we were going to do something, we got it done,” he says.

Honoré also confronted widespread misinformation, particularly regarding looting and violence.

“There was a lot of talk about looting, where, actually, people went to locations on the top of the inner seat, the Superdome and the convention center, and some of them, on top of their houses, and they went into stores to get food and water, and that was labeled as looting,” he says.

“I never labeled it as looting,” he continues. “I labeled it as survival. We shouldn’t denigrate them for going in and getting survival food. And that, by and large, was what people went in and got.”

Honoré hopes future hurricane responses will take this perspective into account.

“There was a preconceived notion in the American psyche that there’s a bunch of poor people, and most of them are Black, that they’re going to steal,” he says. “That hurt my heart. That wasn’t the case. People were trying to stay alive.”

He notes that the federal response has improved since Katrina, thanks in part to technological advancements and social media.

“Technology has improved the ability for everybody with a phone to get information, that’s a big improvement,” he says. “We didn’t have Facebook, as we know it, we didn’t have Twitter, and we didn’t have many of the social media programs we have now, and we didn’t have apps that pop up on your phone because you live in that area that said, ‘Hey, there’s a hurricane coming.'”