# Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (2025)

> A five-part National Geographic docuseries that revisits Hurricane Katrina through the testimony of survivors, rescuers and officials.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/199962

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 5
- Episode runtime: 44 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: documentary, history
- Network: National Geographic
- Cast: Russel Honoré, Malik Rahim, Thanh Truong, Kevin Goodman, Marty Bahamonde, Lynette Boutte, Ivor Van Heerden, Alice Craft-Kerney
- TMDB rating: 7.8/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37458027/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: accessible
- Violence: none
- Tone: somber, raw, unflinching, intimate, angry, resilient

## Synopsis

Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (2025) is a five-episode American docuseries for National Geographic, a limited series of roughly 44-minute installments that revisits the 2005 storm that devastated the Gulf Coast. Rather than dramatizing events with actors, it builds its story from the testimony of people who lived through the disaster, among them retired Coast Guard admiral Russel Honoré, New Orleans resident Malik Rahim, and levee and emergency-response figures such as Ivor Van Heerden, who speak directly to the camera about what they saw and what went wrong. The engine of the series is the gap between what people were promised and what they experienced: rooftop rescues, flooded neighborhoods, and the scramble of ordinary citizens and officials trying to act while the water kept rising. Each episode threads critical moments of the crisis together with the decisions and failures that set them in motion, so the storm's personal, political and societal consequences accumulate across the run. The tone is sombre, raw and unflinching, a documentary register that foregrounds grief, anger and resilience over spectacle. Fans of When the Levees Broke and Chernobyl will find resonance in its blend of survivor testimony and institutional accountability, and viewers drawn to true-events accounts of public failure will find a serious, emotionally direct record of a city's ordeal.

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