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The twentieth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina provides an opportunity to describe an Applied Psychoanalytic program that began with a grant to the Psychoanalytic Center in New Orleans three years after the hurricane, just as life appeared to be settling down for the survivors and yet the symptoms of Adult Onset Trauma were becoming more pronounced. In a previously unpublished talk that she gave to an audience of local mental health professional toward the beginning of this program, the author describes what she was learning from them about the ways in which their lives had changed since the hurricane, and their concerns about working under these circumstances. She described how the symptoms of Adult Onset Trauma might unfold over the next few years and how their program hoped to address these issues. In the final section of the current paper, the author reflects on changes in federal disaster preparedness that are being introduced by the Trump administration, along with a shocking celebration of the absence of empathy. She proposes that in these uncertain and ungenerous times, there is a particular place for applied psychoanalytic programs to offer therapeutic communities a very different kind of recovery work.