In many ways, this summer has been defined by floods. From the deadly July 4th deluge in central Texas to countless other torrential downpours across the country, the reality of a warming world has been on full display. But 20 years ago this week, water was wreaking havoc on the Gulf Coast.

Good evening, Hurricane Katrina, one of the most powerful and dangerous hurricanes ever on record, slammed into the Gulf Coast this morning with winds as high as 140 miles per hour. Parts of New Orleans and Mobile have been flooded, with many other communities also under water.

And the water continues to rise. A levee break the size of a football field is slowly flooding New Orleans. Huge sandbags are being airlifted in to stem the flood.

Hurricane Katrina killed nearly 1,400 people and displaced more than a million others across the Gulf Coast. It remains the costliest natural disaster in U.S. History. It would also become an enduring symbol of government failure.

No food, no water, helicopters flying over our heads.... It's ridiculous.

New Orleans is hot. We can't take this. We've been out here for three days, and we've been asking for help.

For days, the Black community in New Orleans felt abandoned, left to fend for themselves.

The mayor at one point has just told people there are no more busses to evacuate them out. Just get to the highway and start walking out of the city. We have never seen anything like this in the United States of America.

Despite the outrage, President George W. Bush infamously praised his FEMA director, Michael Brown, who would resign just 10 days later.

Again, I want to thank you all for, and Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. The FEMA director's working 24 hours.

But as the floodwaters started to recede and people along the coast started to put their lives back together, many wondered if the region, and New Orleans in particular, would ever be the same. Would Beignets and Bourbon Street and Mardi Gras still be a thing? Would the city known for jazz legends and iconic marching bands still have the same energy? Would there be music at all? Today, three generations of Katrina survivors tell me how music returned to the streets of New Orleans and changed their own lives along the way. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Rind, we're back in a bit.

What listeners don't know is that you've been doing this interview with a clarinet in your hands.

Well, I always tell people the clarinet is a prop. It's like the kid was at Linus with the blanket and stole Snoopy cartoons, but you know, I can say things with the instrument that I can't say vocally.

'Dr. Michael White is a life-

lifelong New Orleans resident. Well you know when you are born in New Orleans, music is all around you, it's a part of life.

'The Xavier University professor is an award-winning clarinetist, bandleader, and is considered a leading authority on New Orleans jazz history. Before Katrina hit, White joined the mass exodus and evacuated to Houston. What is normally a six-hour drive took more than 30. From there, he watched as the rain came and the levees broke. He used the internet to find images of his neighborhood. The only thing you could see, barely peeking above the waterline, were roofs of houses. He knew instinctively that he had lost everything. But eventually, he went back to his home to see it for himself.

When I got to my house, I got out my car, and the first thing I noticed was the silence. It was just this dead silence. And it felt like the city was dead. And I realized how much sound and music are always a part of the city. There's music going when there isn't. You feel it. There's a pulse, there's a vibration to New Orleans. And this was gone. It was this incredibly loud silence, if you will. And it was so bad that I remember finally hearing something and looking up, looking around, looking up. And it sounded like an engine, but it was a flock of birds way up in the sky. And it so quiet that I could hear that very clearly. So everything, I remember the first steps I made into my house. First of all, it felt like a heater was turned on. There was this kind of heat and humidity just seemed to come out of the house. And then I couldn't see anything, it was very dark, but the first steps in the house, every step was marked by a slosh and a crunch. I had a flashlight and I couldn't make out anything, but I finally realized the crunching were CDs that had fallen and floated all over the house and they were covered. So I couldn't see them, but I certainly could hear them. And this is your music collection. Yeah, it was my music collection. I lost a tremendous collection. Thousands of CDs, thousands of books, rare recordings. I had films, I had rare instruments and instrument collection. I had a lot of photographs, all of those things. Everything was just gone. It was there, but it was just destroyed.

How did that make you feel to know that all of that stuff was not gonna be salvageable at all?

Well, you know, it was like my life's work. I had plans on writing about the older musicians and about the jazz tradition. I had just started really composing songs. I had songs. And so it felt like a part of the history of the city was lost. It felt like part of my life was lost, so in a sense, it almost felt like part of me was dead among the rubble, among the ruins. I didn't really understand.

And how much damage water can do. Like Michael, Keith Frazier also lost everything in Katrina. And he knows about the sounds that normally fill the city streets because he's usually making them.

'The Grammy Award-winning Rebirth Brass Band, and it is now showtime!

'He and his brother Phil co-founded the Rebirth Brass Band in 1983. They started by playing on Bourbon Street for tips. Now they're considered a New Orleans institution and tour around the country.

We gon' rock all day, gon' roll all night, do all night.

But in October of 2005, barely a month after the storm, recovery and cleanup were the only things on most people's minds. However, some still wanted to get music back on the streets as soon as possible.

Everyone was like, hey man, let's do the parade anyway.

Keith says the band got invited to do a second line parade. The tradition can be traced to West Africa, but it was brought to Antebellum, Louisiana in the late 1800s. They're put on by social aid and pleasure clubs around the city, and they consist of, well, two lines. The first line has club members and local brass bands. They're all dressed up in elaborate costumes. Some are twirling umbrellas and batons. The second line is anyone else who wants to join in on the fun. The public is encouraged to follow along the route and dance their hearts out along the way. Some refer to second lines as jazz funerals, but Key says this one in October, 2005 truly felt like one.

'It felt more like a funeral because there was nothing good to see. It was not, you know, it was like, wow, everything's just damaged beyond belief. But we were thinking that by playing Parade and Wrong, that would give the people doing the recovery work, that that would kind of uplift them. But it was just so much damage that you, it just felt like, man, we're playing it just as like a funerals, not like a celebration. Like nobody was really in the mood. Right, no one was in the move to celebrate. Everyone was just like, we just want to try to recover as best we can and do what we can until we can get some relief from the federal government. And the relief was long and coming and people just busy just trying to get back to their normal lives. In the winter, maybe in November, December, there was another second-line parade that was more upbeat.

'Buh-bye!

The damage recovery was moving along at a pretty good pace and so people kind of felt like hey man maybe this is the time they have a celebration and we did another second lap raid. It was a lot better, but you can still feel the tension of people like, Hey man, I'm not back home. I don't know when I'm gonna get back, but while I'm here, let's try to celebrate. The parade was helpful in that it gave people something to believe in. Like, hey, man, I think we could come back. I think you can make it work.

And slowly but surely, they did make it work. But scars remain even 20 years later. There are still entire neighborhoods that have never been rebuilt. And the music sounds a little different too.

So what happened to the levies? Why wasn't they steady? Why wasn't they able to control this?

Rappers like Lil Wayne helped boost the New Orleans music scene while criticizing the federal storm response.

Ain't nobody tried. Just no doubt on my mind it was Georgia...Bush

and artists like Big Freedia have helped the bounce subgenre climb up the charts. But that doesn't mean the tradition of brass bands has gone away. In fact, Keith says it might actually be getting more popular.

'Before Katrina, it was mostly older people, middle-aged people, who would celebrate. But after Katrina, you see a lot of younger people at second-line parades. They're embracing their culture 100%. They're like, man, I don't know if this will be wiped out during the next storm or maybe we won't be able to celebrate like we used to. And so you see, a lot young people from age 15 to 25 who are really into the culture. That's interesting.

So you think the young people have a sense of why this is so important to the city, even if they may not have been older or even alive when the storm hit.

Exactly a lot of young people after Katrina when they realized that our culture was almost wiped out I think they're just like, okay, you know what I think? They're trying to pass it down to me let me take hold to this and Participate you know because it was hard to get young people to participate for a long time But now we see brass bands. There's a plethora the numerous brass bands with guys 15 to 25 taking part and you know, they're creating new songs and doing different things and they're very serious about

When we come back, we're going to meet one of those young people.

Jaron Bear Williams, always wanted to be a football player.

I just knew I was going to the NFL. I was the biggest kid, fastest kid.

That is until Katrina came and changed everything.

I was in the middle of my football game and that's when they were on the news saying about there was a storm coming. My dad told me he was leaving right now. We didn't even go home. I didn't go home and get no clothes or nothing. We just left straight out and went to Houston, Texas. And it was months, maybe close to a year. It was a long time before we finally came back.

Says when his family returned to New Orleans, all the fields where he used to play football were either gone or unusable.

So being a kid, you know, who used to just play football, it was nothing to do. So then Mr. Derek Tapp created the Roots of Music. And create a marching band.

'Roots of Music is a local non-profit that was started in 2007. Their team works with low-income kids across the city and give them a full-blown music education. They teach music theory and history, audio recording skills, and of course, how to play in the marching band. Geron says Roots of Music changed the whole trajectory of his life, even if he didn't know it at the time.

I didn't even want to get in the band. Out here, we had these things called color guards, which like more like a flashy dancing, jumping around and you know, attention grabbing and I wanted to be a part of that. So he told us they didn't have that. So I got on a trumpet and I just grew a love for music that I didn't know I had. So I went from a potential football star to a band star and football coaches coming to my house because it started back up like two years later, I think two, three years later. But by that time, I was fully indulged in music. I had the football coaches coming to my house or they coming to door trying to get me to come back and play football. And I just wasn't interested in it anymore. So that's why I say it changed the whole trajectory of my life. Wow. I might, yeah. Knowing that football money, I should have probably, I should probably should have chose some football.

You gotta do what you love. If you do what you love, you never work a day in your life. You know, that's what they say.

Right, that's where I'm at right now.

'28-Year-old Jaron is now the band director at Roots of Music. He says the kids he works with quickly find themselves loving all kinds of new music.

Even with concert bands, I introduce it to our kids and you know, their parents come telling me, oh, I don't know what you did, but this boy is at home listening to the orchestras and stuff like that. And I'm just like, you know they ain't doing anything. Once I introduced it to him, and once he saw like, oh, he has some type of interest in it, you know they just gravitate towards those types of things. And it's just interesting, especially once you give them something to push themselves towards to see if they can make it to that level of music.

Do you feel any kind of responsibility to keep some of these traditions alive with the program or just in the culture just kind of based on what the city went through with the storm and this idea that it's not permanent and nature can wash things away?

Definitely, definitely feel obligated to keep our culture going in New Orleans as far as marching bands. Not just marching bands, but we want to have the best marching bands for Katrina. Every marching band had a hundred plus people and everybody knew New Orleans bands were the cream of the crop. After Katrina, there wasn't too many bands available for people to go back to. So. Interest in band dropped off. It wasn't a middle school band at every school. The people who came over and took over the city, they cut marching bands from the middle schools. They took it completely out of schools. So a lot of schools didn't have middle school bands. A lot of the schools are just now starting to get their middle school bans back. And I think just the fact of us doing it, all the kids in this school going to the Roots of Music interested in band. So that pushes the principal and the superintendent and people like that to want to get that funding back in the music programs so that we can keep our marching bands going back to them so we can get them back to the level they were at before Katrina.

But whether it's school marching bands or just basic infrastructure, many people like Keith Fraser stress the rebuilding is not done.

I actually think the city is like, maybe 75% back. There are still neighborhoods that need work that are still damaged. And I think a lot of people are going through PTSD. You know, if a thunderstorm hits New Orleans, you can tell that people, they get tight because they don't know, like, is it going to flood? Are we going to have to evacuate? That kind of stuff. They're like, oh my God, I need to go run out and buy stuff. And it's just a regular thunderstorm. You know I know people from New Orleans who are living in different parts of Texas who have not been back to New Orleans since 2005. Wow. Because they're still traumatized by what happened. They're like, I can't go back. I'm like, wow, you can't. Like, no, I Can't. Can't do it. Wow. They left.

The storm hit and and just never ever came back. Exactly.

You know, we didn't have tornadoes in New Orleans before Katrina. Since then, we've had a couple of them that have been devastating. There was talk about a tsunami possibly coming from the Gulf after Katrina. So we have to realize that, you know, we can't just keep our eyes closed as to the realities of climate change. We need to be prepared for evacuation. We need to try to save a little something and, you know, try to push for more government assistance and preparation. For things like this.

Do you ever think about leaving the city at all?

New Orleans is in me. I don't know where else I would go, where else would live. I know a lot of nice places around the world, but what I've come to realize is I may not have a choice. You know, if another storm like Katrina comes and destroys everything, I think I won't be able to come back. But I know that wherever I am and wherever I go, New Orleans would be in me

Michael White said the storm and its aftermath changed his whole relationship to music. He said the stress and uncertainty of the time gradually gave way to a burst of creativity. He now writes new songs and sketches every day, a new normal that's part relief and part release. I don't want to put you on the spot here, but is there anything you could play me a little snippet of something that conjures a moment for you?

There are always things floating around, but let me see what's in my head right now.

You know, now 20 years later, you still see effects of the storm with different people in their lives, how things have changed, but we go on. And I think it's a message, in a sense, to America, just like with our music. You know we have to go on."

Well, Dr. White, thank you so much for talking to me. I really appreciate it.

Thank you!