Meanwhile, it was sometimes the armed agents of the state—the very people who were supposed to keep the peace —who violently impeded rescue. When two black families tried to cross Danzinger Bridge to find medical and other supplies, they were met by New Orleans police officers toting guns. The cops on the bridge killed two unarmed men and injured four others; all told, eleven civilians were shot by police in Katrina’s aftermath. Police and soldiers broke up the self-organized solidarity built by people stuck in the city. Larry Bradshaw and Lorrie Beth Slonsky, two paramedics visiting New Orleans for a conference, recalled a group of people banding together to find food and shelter, only to be lied to by police, who knocked down their makeshift shelters and blocked their route out of the city. “We were hiding from possible criminal elements,” they wrote, “but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.”

Katrina produced an extreme situation, but the crisis was not unprecedented—and neither was the response. Disasters are times of disruption, trauma, even horror. But they are also moments when people can—indeed must—come together to help each other as equals.

Nearly 90 years before New Orleans flooded, Frank Brinton was a schoolboy in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He was just starting the day at elementary school one bright December morning in 1917 when a munitions ship bound for the French front blew up in the harbor down the hill. The explosion destroyed about a quarter of the city, killing about 2,000 people and maiming another 9,000. Frank went with his mother to the hospital, whose face and arms were injured, and then they went home to begin to repair the physical damage to their house. “Someone helped us to board up the windows with something and put blankets up, and this and that,” he recalled to historian Janet Kitz 68 years later. “But the lady next door, they lived in a small house. She had a room and she wanted us to come in there. So we went there and stayed over night.”

Like Denise Moore, the Brintons illustrate how people and communities respond to disaster. They received help from friends and neighbors in fixing their own house. Other Halifax survivors came together to build temporary shelters and shacks, or to share food and warmth. Those with still-inhabitable houses, like the Brintons’ neighbor, welcomed friends and family. These were ties of mutual aid. Frank Brinton’s recollection that their neighbor “wanted us to come” is telling, since it suggests that the neighbor got something—company, emotional support, perhaps their practical assistance closing up windows and cleaning up the house—from the Brintons. Surrounded by death, groups of neighbors, families, and friends offered not only warmth but literal conviviality. Choosing to stay with familiar people in familiar spaces also signified a refusal, or at least reluctance, to use the formal, hierarchical aid offered by the state. Going to a friend’s house meant not going to an official shelter, with its rules and power relations and loss of privacy.