[Aug 29, 2025: Los Angeles, CA] Kevin Patrick is the president of the board of directors in the small town of Villa Park, Illinois. He’s a veteran of the Coast Guard, a patriot dedicated to service, and perhaps most tragically, a victim of the incompetence that characterized the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Was he there when the waters first swelled over the levies? No. Was he at risk of drowning, losing property — or his life? No.
He was a first responder. Quite literally. Before FEMA sent in their emergency response teams, the Coast Guard was deployed, and President Kevin Patrick was at the forefront.
Upon speaking with Patrick, the first thing you notice is his temperament. His earnest desire to help. His interest in serving others and his community. He was thrilled when told that he was shipping off to New Orleans to provide for his fellow Americans, deeply imperiled.
“I was super excited. Here I am, finally, I’m in the Coast Guard, I’m able to put my skills and knowledge to work and go out and actually help people that need it,” Patrick said.
He was 23, eager, and well-intentioned. Perhaps he knew his deployment was something he’d always remember, but he certainly didn’t think it would haunt him for decades to come.
“As we show up, you’re starting to see signs of the devastation. As you’re rolling through the debris in the streets, navigating around roads that are blocked up onto sidewalks, you see the destruction, and you really can’t fathom the destruction… you’re seeing the remnants of lives, of businesses, of where people used to be, what things used to be. It was almost like an apocalypse, like an atomic bomb went off,” Patrick said.
History is doomed to repeat itself, unless we do something
We’ve all heard a disparaging story before. I know you’re inclined to ask… ‘So what?’
You might be thinking, ‘We all know Katrina was bad, but that was 20 years ago. What about Ukraine? What about Israel? What about the Congo?’
I could bombard you with graphic detail after graphic detail, or the feelgood story of Patrick suffering from PTSD and fighting his way back into a service-oriented mindset so much so that he’s now the leader of his hometown, but that’s not the point. All we can do with the past is learn from it, and make sure it never happens again.
20 years after Katrina more than 100 waterlogged bodies were pulled from the mire of the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, Texas. Scores more dead in surrounding counties.
This wasn’t an uncounterable act of God. This was the result of reckless negligence.
Mother Nature didn’t have us in a checkmate; we just wiped all our own pieces off the board.
The Trump Administration has:
- Cut the National Weather Service employment roster by 10%
- Slashed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s budget by $1.5 billion
- Intends to further reduce NOAA’s budget by an additional 50% ($3 billion)
- Hopes to eliminate FEMA by Dec. 2025 (leaving emergency management to the states)
The long and short of it is, if you don’t want to be left for dead in the event of a disaster, you’d better live in New York or California… states with the budget to pull you out of the water before you run out of energy to tread.
At some point in our history, we were the *United* States of America. It seems that now we are a Confederation of States in America.
“When I see the coverage [of the floods in Texas], not only does it hit home because of my experiences with Hurricane Katrina, but it makes me angry. I don’t know how we cannot learn from our previous mistakes,” Patrick said.
He is a resident of Illinois who sacrificed immeasurably to help Americans on the other side of the country. Now, he has a responsibility to protect his own community. All this about eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse by slashing emergency services… it scares him.
“If a catastrophe happened like that in Small Town USA, Villa Park, Illinois, we’d be resilient, but we wouldn’t have a lot of resources. If FEMA was not there to help us… that would put us in jeopardy,” he said. “That means everybody’s affected, not somebody that you see on TV. That means moms, dads, teachers, grandparents… everyone’s affected. It’s really hard to be resilient, when you have nothing.”
“If we let FEMA die, Americans will die with it,” writes Kevin Patrick in an article for the Palast Investigative Fund. Learn more about how the FEMA cuts — and the privatization of emergency response — will kill. Watch our new 1-hour special, All Washed Away: The Untold Story of the Drowning of New Orleans and Texas — out now on YouTube and Substack.
Ethan Jude Lieberman, Associate Producer with the Palast Investigative Fund, is an investigative journalist, poet, and chronic observer of the decaying political-social environment that we collectively refer to as the early 21st Century. From martial arts, to philosophy, to artificial intelligence, his areas of expertise vary widely. Lieberman’s work for the Palast Investigative Fund is supported by the Puffin and Park Foundations.