“When people talked about ‘Katrina,'” a New Orleanian told a New Orleans Gambit reporter in 2008, “they are not just talking about the storm anymore. It’s the insurance crisis, the mental health crisis, the crime, the homeless under the bridge—the whole ball of wax.” What is Katrina now? A storm, a flood, or an engineering failure? A problem of race, class, or environment? A personal experience or a collective one? An open wound or a healed scar? An acute catastrophe receding into New Orleans’s past or an enduring trauma resounding into America’s future? In Katrina: A History, 1915–2015, Andy Horowitz writes that Katrina has come to “seem like one of the great Rorschach tests in modern American history, less a window than a mirror. But these [are] not competing interpretations of the same picture so much as they [are] different experiences of the same country.”

On the eve of Katrina’s twentieth anniversary, Southern Cultures asked people, “What does Katrina mean to you now?” Here is what they said.