Generation Katrina: Six NFL stars who survived deadly hurricane tell their story as Super Bowl returns to New Orleans 20 years on

Back in August 2005, the city of New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Nearly 2,000 people were killed, with one million displaced. Around 80 percent of New Orleans was left underwater after the levees broke. It caused $161billion worth of damage and remains the most expensive storm on record. Two decades on, the Super Bowl is back in New Orleans. A number of young boys survived the hurricane and have now reached the NFL. This is Generation Katrina.

OFFENSIVE TACKLE, WASHINGTON COMMANDERS. AGE WHEN KATRINA HIT: 14. We moved away from New Orleans a month before Katrina hit. My stepdad was an electrician looking for work so we went to Atlanta. But all my stuff was still in the storage unit back home and everything got wiped away. To this day, I don’t have a baby picture. My sister, grandmother, grandpa and cousins were left behind in New Orleans, too. They were staying in a high-rise building and they got on a boat from the second floor. That's how high the water was. Most of them ended up making it to the Superdome, where there was lawlessness - people p***ing and s***ing and getting raped in the bathroom.

My sister had to sleep on the highway for a night. She was a diabetic and all she had? A pack of gum and maybe a bottle of water. Back in August 2005, the city of New Orleans was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Nearly 2,000 people died after around 80 percent of New Orleans was left underwater. DailyMail.com spoke to six NFL players who lived through the storm before reaching the top. We didn't know where they were, cell phones were dying, and we were seeing the news about the flooding. When the storm hit, it knocked down a lot of the cell phone towers. So we were trying to connect on a call for what felt like hours. After about a week, they came to where we were.

But we moved back immediately, because all the work was in New Orleans. It was still flooding and the smell was awful – a stench of sewage and mildew and terribleness. It was like that for months, almost years and I would have headaches from just being around mold all the time. It was lawless for a while, too. There weren't enough police officers. So people just got to roam and do whatever they wanted. People were driving crazy and you were protecting yourselves when the lights went out. You couldn't call the police or order pizza or walk to the store. We only had one McDonald's on the entire Westbank.

I used to go to church in the ninth ward, where the levee broke, and I remember going over there once the water settled down. It was a flourishing community but an entire row of houses were gone. They got washed away and the second block got washed away into the third block. A lot of people didn't want to deal with the hassle of cleaning out their house. So they auctioned it off to whoever wanted to do it. So I signed up with my grandpa, gutted out a few houses and probably made $5-600. I learned the value of hard work but had tremendous headaches from it. And seeing the mold, the waterline, what was left behind - those pictures will never leave my mind.

The stench is in me forever, too. Walking into my grandmother's house after they got flooded with 12ft of water, it was putrid and I smelled it for months because the city was underwater for weeks and sea water doesn't dry like regular water - the salt, the fish, the mud that came rushing in. I was living in a FEMA trailer in the driveway of my aunt's house. Damn near my whole family was staying at her two bedroom, one bath house. They set up camps for people in need, where they would have underwear, socks, toiletries, peanut butter and jelly.

Walking through those camps, you felt helpless and homeless and I went to school feeling like a refugee. A few of my friend moved to Texas, and I see them on Instagram now, but I have yet to see them in person since Katrina. Cornelius Lucas of the Washington Commanders helped gut houses following the storm. Lucas' family were rescued on a boat from the second floor, 'that's how high the water was'. One million people were displaced from New Orleans after the deadly hurricane 20 years ago.

My father drowned when I was seven and after the storm, it was just like: ‘F***, I can’t escape this.’ Just loss after loss. The feeling of something being here today and gone tomorrow - that never fades from my mentality, to this day. My great aunt made it through the storm and the travel. Then, a month or two after Katrina, she passed away. I feel like, no doubt, it had something to do with all the stress. A whole city of people have tremendous trauma - and never talked about it. Never saw a therapist about it. I just talked to others from New Orleans, and I feel like that is therapy for a lot of us.

People my age are terrified of water because of Katrina. At pool parties, I would sit on the edge, I wouldn't dive under. Getting into the ocean, lakes or rivers? That was a no. Football wasn't big on my mind until I came back from Katrina. In that period I hit puberty and grew like 6 to 8 inches. I went back to my original high school and my football coach was on me from day one. He just stalked me.