In 2005, as Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, an Audubon Zoo curator and 11 staff members stayed with the animals; careful planning meant the zoo’s animals survived the storm

When a hurricane approaches a city, residents are usually advised to evacuate. For a zoo manager, however, evacuation is rarely an option, because animals cannot simply be loaded into a car. This is what happened during Hurricane Katrina when a small group of Audubon Zoo employees chose to stay rather than evacuate. The current paper will focus on who chose to stay, what happened to the city because of the hurricane, how the zoo residents survived, and how Katrina shaped later planning for animals in disasters, particularly for household pets.Curator Dan Maloney and a staff of 11 stayed at Audubon Zoo through KatrinaAccording to PBS Nature's Katrina's Animal Rescue, curator Dan Maloney and a staff of 11 stayed with the animals right through the hurricane. It credits the zoo's high elevation and the staff's careful emergency planning for the animals' survival. An NPR report from that November calls Maloney the zoo's general curator and says the zookeepers rode out the storm in the reptile house. The PBS feature adds that Maloney later asked soldiers stationed at the zoo to walk the grounds when off duty, and that the elephants and primates in particular began to respond.Katrina made landfall near Buras, Louisiana, on August 29, 2005The National Hurricane Center's Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina, 23-30 August 2005, by Richard Knabb, Jamie Rhome and Daniel Brown, gives the storm's track. Katrina peaked as a Category 5 hurricane with 150-knot winds on August 28. Afterward, it weakened and made landfall near Buras at 1110 UTC on August 29 with maximum winds of 110 knots and minimum pressure of 920 millibars. Later on August 29, the National Hurricane Center's report says, Katrina made a second landfall near the Louisiana/Mississippi border, still as a Category 3 hurricane.Most of New Orleans saw Category 1 or 2 windsThe same report also indicates that much of New Orleans probably saw sustained winds at the level of a Category 1 or Category 2 hurricane, despite being a Category 3 at landfall. The larger issue was the water; the storm surge was 15-19 feet in eastern New Orleans, the flood walls were overtopped/breached, and 80% of the city flooded to a depth of up to 20 feet. According to Britannica, the Army Corps of Engineers pumped the last of the floodwaters out of New Orleans on October 11, 2005, about 43 days after Katrina made landfall. The zoo sits on elevated ground. Twenty years later, in a 2025 interview with WHAS, Maloney, now director of the Louisville Zoo, recalled that the zoo did not flood and that broken tree branches were the most visible damage. He also said his team lived at the zoo for two months, a difficult time.Out of nearly 1,500 animals, a raccoon, two young otters and a Bali monitor were lostAccording to NPR, quoting Maloney, the total number of animals at the zoo is almost 1,500, and the list of the losses goes like this: there was one raccoon who drowned, two young otters that passed away several days after the storm and one Bali monitor that disappeared. According to NBC News, Audubon Zoo reopened on the Friday after Thanksgiving in 2005, the first day it had been open since Hurricane Katrina. According to NPR, without revenue the zoo furloughed three-quarters of its overall staff, and the animal care staff went from nearly 65 to 35 people.The zoo's plan called for stockpiled fuel and foodAccording to a report on Mongabay from the week of the hurricane, a quote by zoo spokeswoman Sarah Burnette says that "the zoo has been in close coordination with Miami MetroZoo following Hurricane Andrew and has since revised its hurricane response plan". Prior to Katrina, the zoo had prepared a supply of fuel and other food supplies. This was important because according to the National Hurricane Center report, Katrina resulted in about three million people being without electricity, for a period of about several weeks.The Aquarium of the Americas lost about 10,000 of its 15,000 animals when life support failedAs for the aquarium located next to the aquarium in this case, it is clear how the storm could impact the building relying on its mechanisms. According to NBC News, about 10,000 aquatic animals at the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas died because of the hurricane. Among the survivors were a green sea turtle, 19 penguins, two sea otters and an anaconda.Katrina also changed policy. Did Harvey Learn from Katrina? Initial Observations of the Response to Companion Animals during Hurricane Harvey, by Steve Glassey in Animals, interviewed six key officials involved in the response to Hurricane Harvey in 2017. They were queried regarding the effectiveness of the federal PETS Act, which followed the hurricane. The act helped encourage evacuation planning that includes pets alongside their owners. Another observation made by the author was the poor development of the plans as per the requirements of that act and also the unresolved lessons of previous emergencies. The study looks at household pets rather than zoos and relies on a small sample of six officials, so it cannot show how the Audubon Zoo experience shaped zoo planning. It does show that planning for animals in disasters moved into government policy after Katrina, and that gaps in that planning were still being worked out in 2017.Accounts of the staff count and the losses differ slightlyInformation about Audubon Zoo is mostly first-hand. Accounts of how many people stayed differ. PBS Nature reported that Maloney and a staff of 11 stayed with the animals, while WHAS reported in 2025 that Maloney and 14 others stayed. The sources do not explain the difference. Information about animal loss is taken directly from Maloney.You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.