BATON ROUGE — Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina devastated southeast Louisiana and changed cities like New Orleans and Baton Rouge forever.

The capital city's population exploded with the storm as thousands of evacuees looked to Baton Rouge for safety. Jeff LeDuff had just been named the brand new Baton Rouge Police Chief and witnessed the effects of Katrina firsthand. 

"Words can't express how many people really was in this little city," LeDuff said. "We grew to one of the largest cities in the south overnight."

LSU sociology professor Dr. Tim Slack studied the influx of an estimated 250,000 people into Baton Rouge.

"It was definitely noticeable," Slack said. "It was noticeable in terms of people and traffic and stores being picked over, but in terms of really having a sense of how many extra people were in the city, we really don't know."

LeDuff said that although crime spiked early on, it was not as bad as much of the public said. Although back then, he said, BRPD had around 150 more officers than it does today. 

Some of that crime led to the formation of a full-time SWAT team, which still exists today in Baton Rouge.

Another permanent impact was the creation of the still-nationally-used mega-site disaster plan, which LeDuff said was developed from lessons learned while taking in evacuees at the River Center. 

Slack said that although the majority of New Orleanians did not stick around Baton Rouge, the number of people who did made East Baton Rouge Parish the most populous parish in Louisiana. 

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