BATON ROUGE - Twenty years ago, Jeff LeDuff was a brand new police chief and about to face one of the biggest challenges of his career: Hurricane Katrina.

"The whole city of New Orleans came to Baton Rouge," LeDuff said. 

While the capital city took in thousands of evacuees before the storm hit, the real flood of people came after the levees broke and homes were destroyed.

"The days after, we started getting all these folks. The helicopters, the Chinooks, they were just picking up people, and busloads of people were coming in."

At first, the evacuees were housed at the PMAC and Southern Mini Dome, but eventually officials, with the help of BRPD, opened the River Center to the masses.

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

In the days and weeks immediately following the storm, it's estimated the capital area gained a quarter of a million residents. Though most of them eventually went back to New Orleans, a little less than 100,000 stuck around.

A study by LSU estimated the influx caused traffic to increase by around 40 percent.

"To go to a movie or go to a restaurant, we started having to make reservations at that point. You never made reservations in Baton Rouge before but a good thing came out of it too, we had a lot of new restaurants open."

Although crime spiked a bit at the beginning, LeDuff says it wasn't as bad as a lot of the public said it was.

"It went up a little bit, but we were able to get on top of it. Back then we had a full complement of police officers. Back then we had 150 more police officers than we had now."

Some of that crime caused LeDuff to form a full-time SWAT team, which still exists today.

Despite the challenge the city went through for months, LeDuff looks back at Katrina with some fondness.

"I've always said we got a lot of benefit out of Katrina."

LeDuff says the lessons learned from the River Center helped develop the mega-site disaster plan in use today nationwide.

"I met some incredible people in that shelter and we welcomed them to Baton Rouge. It wasn't all bad."