Floodlines

The podcast explores how the New Orleans Police Department, the Federal government of the United States, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, and the news media in the United States were all responsible for exacerbating the crisis.^[2] The first episode focuses on the story of Le-Ann Williams who was a fourteen-year-old girl living in the Sixth Ward of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.^[3] In one of the episodes Newkirk interviews Michael Brown from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.^[4] Comparisons were made by Time magazine between how the George W. Bush administration handled the hurricane to how the Donald Trump administration handled the COVID-19 pandemic.^[5]

Vann R. Newkirk II, Katherine Wells, and Alvin Melathe spent a year researching, writing, and producing the eight-part miniseries.^[6] The podcast is the first long-form narrative podcast produced by The Atlantic.^[7] The whole miniseries was released on March 11, 2020.^[8] Each episode is between 22 and 53 minutes long.^[9] The podcast used a mix of interviews and archival content.^[10]

During an interview on Fresh Air, Nicholas Quah—a writer for Vulture and the creator of The Verge's podcast newsletter Hot Pods—commented on the show saying that "It's fantastically written, tightly composed and it sounds like a million bucks."^[11]

Wesley Morris of The New York Times commented on Newkirk's role in the audio documentary stating that he "narrates and interviews with a warm inquisitiveness and sly skepticism. People seem incapable of being anything less than honest with him."^[4] Vince Mancini—the senior film and culture writer for Uproxx—also commented on Newkirk's role, stating that he "does a wonderful job of not just telling stories from in and around Hurricane Katrina ... [but] synthesize[s] them into a fuller understanding of what actually happened".^[12]

• List of environmental podcasts