His own approach and on-the-ground efforts earned the trust of many flood victims
Now-retired Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who led military recovery operations in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina while thousands remained stranded and most of the city was still under water, says some of the same lessons from the catastrophic flood still apply today.
Namely, he says, Americans should look out for and rely on their neighbors -- not just the federal government -- when facing evacuation.
"The government's got a responsibility in preparedness to give you warning," he tells PEOPLE in this week's issue. "We pay big money to get warning."
Then, says Honoré, who became the face of the federal Katrina relief effort and whose approach earned the trust of flood victims, it's up to local officials to turn those warnings into action. Even then, he says, when it comes to evacuating people, the government isn't best suited to do that.
"FEMA is not going to be there the hour after the storm," he says, referring to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "It takes action at the local level, neighbors helping neighbors and people having redundant communications capacity."
Katrina, which ranks among the worst storms in U.S. history, killed 1,392 people in majority-Black New Orleans and many of them were among the most vulnerable -- elderly, disabled and poor.
Most of them were also alone in their homes, Honoré says. And officials at the local and federal level were strongly criticized for how they handled the aftermath, with many believing racism was at play.
Honoré says he was adamant about being on the ground. After he arrived in New Orleans, he flew to Baton Rouge to meet with Louisiana's then governor, Kathleen Blanco, who gave him clear instructions -- the priority was evacuation and providing food, water and medicine to the people who needed it -- along with the FEMA chief Mike Brown, who, he says, wanted him to coordinate the rescue and relief efforts from there to have a unified command.
"I wasn't going to sit in Baton Rouge in an air conditioned building -- I needed to be forward if I was going to make a difference," Honoré says.
Now 77, Honoré says he believes that because of the role he played in informing the public of what the military was doing, he became the face of the federal relief effort.
He commanded the units who got people out of a convention center and Superdome where thousands had massed.
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"As the commander of Joint Task Force Katrina, leading the federal military response, I was on the ground in the city, not at a headquarters in Washington and not 75 miles away in Baton Rouge," he said. "So I became a target for the media to ask, 'When are we going to get the people out? Where are they going? What are you doing about getting busses in?' "
While he helped prioritize that work and to organize the evacuation, Honoré says much credit is owed to the National Guard and first responders.
"It was a collective effort that got it done, but I became the voice of it, and to make sure that when we said we were going to do something, we got it done," he says.
Honoré quickly learned he was up against more than just the Katrina's devastation. He was also battling misinformation, including about looting and violence.
"There was a lot of talk about looting, where, actually, people went to locations on the top of the inner seat, the Superdome and the convention center, and some of them, on top of their houses, and they went into stores to get food and water, and that was labeled as looting," he says.
But "I never labeled it as looting." he says. "I labeled it as survival."
He adds: "We shouldn't denigrate them for going in and getting survival food. And that, by and large, was what people went in and got."
Honoré says he hopes in future hurricanes, people take that into account.
"There was a preconceived notion in the American psyche that there's a bunch of poor people, and most of them are Black, that they're going to steal," he says. "That hurt my heart. That wasn't the case. People were trying to stay alive."
Honoré believes the federal response to disasters has gotten better since Katrina, thanks in part to advancements in technology and social media platforms.
"Technology has improved the ability for everybody with a phone to get information, that's a big improvement," he says. "We didn't have Facebook, as we know it, we didn't have Twitter, and we didn't have many of the social media programs we have now, and we didn't have apps that pop up on your phone because you live in that area that said, 'Hey, there's a hurricane coming,' "