By the fall of 2005, Sandy Rosenthal was one of thousands of Hurricane Katrina evacuees temporarily camped out in a home away from home. In late August, just days before Katrina hit, Rosenthal, her husband Stephen and their 15-year-old son Stanford, had packed three weeks' worth of clothing (because infamous Hurricane Betsy had knocked electricity out for three weeks in 1965) and drove three hours northwest from their home in New Orleans to Lafayette, Louisiana. They had no idea that they'd be gone from their hometown for longer than they ever would have expected.

On August 29, 2005, Category 3 Katrina barreled into New Orleans with winds of 125 miles per hour accompanied by torrential rains that battered the city and ripped holes in the roof of the Superdome. Many Americans may still believe the worst damage, including the massive flooding, was done during those hours that Katrina swirled over the New Orleans metropolitan area. The reality, however, is that massive levee failures — due to design and construction flaws — caused the floods hours after the storm came through. The notion that most of the destruction resulted from a natural disaster is just one of the myths that Rosenthal hopes to bust with Levees.org, the nonprofit she founded shortly after Katrina.

Rosenthal recalls an argument with a fellow Louisiana citizen that inspired her to start the organization: "He was telling me that the reason New Orleans flooded was because the city's in a bowl and the storm was just too big for the levees," she explains. "And I realized that if [a local] was so oblivious of the truth and facts, what must be going on in the rest of the nation?"


Officials and grassroots groups remained silent about this issue, so Rosenthal decided to start her own organization with her family's help. Levees.org launched on December 3, 2005. Soon after, Rosenthal decided she needed a core membership in order to cement her organization's credibility. Thanks to a petition she created to ask President Bush for federal help in New Orleans, Rosenthal almost immediately gained 200 members along with their signatures. "There it was: I had a membership, I had a goal, I had a mission and I had a website," she says.

Rosenthal herself admits that she is "awestruck" by the growth of her nonprofit. Since founding the group, she's had to turn her formerly full-time job as an advertising director into a part-time one. With nearly 16,000 members to date, Levees.org is credited with helping to pass the Feingold-McCain Amendments. These amendments legislate the reform of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, which Rosenthal believes played a part in the failure of New Orleans' levees. Today, Rosenthal campaigns for the passage of the August 29 Investigation, an independent, bipartisan analysis modeled after the 9/11 Commission that would examine the flood-protection failures in New Orleans.


After almost two years with Levees.org, Rosenthal recently decided to stick with her project for much longer than she ever planned. "People need to know the real story," she explains. Perhaps it's her pride in her hometown that makes Rosenthal want to fight so hard for it. "There's only one New Orleans, and it should definitely be preserved," she says. "It's not just the food, it's not just the pretty scenery. It's the people and the culture of hospitality."