Hurricane Katrina may have cost them their homes and split up their families, but some credit it as the impetus to reinvent their lives for the better, explains Nicole LaPorte. The New Orleans divorce rate has spiked in the wake of the storm five years ago. “Having already lost homes and the lives they knew, some people found themselves using the storm as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean, ending marriages and walking out on relationships they felt no longer worked,” she reports. For one thing, physical separations caused by the storm made divorces less messy.