That annual ritual of acknowledging the disaster and flood of Hurricane Katrina. Here we are. I spent the first 18 years after Katrina avoiding any media related to it. Now, guests regularly ask me about it on tours. It’s always a different question, but Katrina is the still one of most significant events in New Orleans history, especially recent memory. My recommendation for paying homage is the Flooded House Museum in Gentilly.

I live in Gentilly, one of the neighborhoods that the levee failure completely destroyed. We bought our home in 2013, eight years after Katrina flooded the neighborhood. It felt like a lifetime ago already then, but half the houses on our block were either still blighted or were just empty lots. We still have never repaired our garage, so it still has the the rust mark showing us exactly how high the water was. Our house only flooded once in its nearly 100 years of history.

In Gentilly, levees.org converted one of the destroyed homes into the Flooded House Museum and Levee Exhibit. It sits at the site of the one of the levee failures, the one that flooded my home. You look through the windows of the house to see the scene a family would have returned to after the disaster. There is also an exhibit that explains exactly what happened, why it happened, and what’s been done to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

This museum is quite literally in the middle of a middle class New Orleans neighborhood, and it’s an extremely heavy topic. So it’s a different kind of experience than I typically recommend in New Orleans. A deep New Orleans experience. If you’re interested in learning more about both the human impact and the science behind the levees, I highly recommend the free Flooded House Museum in Gentilly.