I don't have any pictures of me covering what could be the biggest story of my career. I grabbed a sleeping bag, hiking boots, bottled water, and power bars on my way out of town... but not a camera. I have regretted that several times since. One of the few pictures I do have of me in New Orleans is this one, taken before the storm. It was fun then. The last time I saw the city it was swallowed in those rancid floodwaters.
I got to cover Katrina quite by accident. The storm came ashore with much fanfare. It rotated east so that the northern part of Louisiana where I called home didn't get so much as a drop of rain. It did, however, get hundreds of refugees that swelled the population and stretched city services and charities for days to come.
The morning after Katrina everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The levees worked. Things were okay. Our news director called back the crew who rode out the storm. After I anchored the morning show, I was sent to a blood bank to get a quick story on blood donations needed. By the time I returned, the levees had broken and of course, all hell had broken loose. I was there, in the newsroom, so someone pointed at me and told me to go home, get my clothes, and be ready to go south with a caravan of law enforcement from local parishes. And oh yeah, there's no place to stay when you get there and no satellite truck either. We'll figure it out as we go.
By the time we rolled into Gonzales, Louisiana, filed our story, and found a place to sleep, I had been up more than 24 hours. I stretched out my sleeping bag with 3 other men from my station on the floor of Jimmy Swaggart's church. We slept for less than 5 hours before getting up again and trying to get into the city. I was there for 5 days, and I got less than 5 hours of sleep each night. Ironically, this didn't seem to bother me. There were no restaurants open. No one had food. We ate what we carried on our backs. In the nights to follow, we slept and showered at a friend's apartment. There was one bed there and we took turns sleeping in it.
My first day out I learned a very important lesson as a journalist: never go to a story thinking you know what the story is. As we rode with volunteer and law enforcement crews in a long caravan of airboats and rescue boats in and around the city. No one could get permission to get in and actually rescue anyone. No one was in charge. We would have to turn around this long line of boats on streets blocked by trees and debris. It was chaos and everyone was frustrated. My photographer and I didn't get many pictures of this. Why? We were waiting to get the rescues--I thought that was the story. By the end of the day, when we understood what the story was, we scrambled to get our story of the confusion in.
Another day my photographer and I got through the barricades in the back of an ambulance with our local fire department. We were supposedly with the first crew to get into Chalmette area. We got our rescue footage all right, and it was a sad thing to see. People dirty and disheartened. A few spoke English with such a heavy cajun dialect that I could barely understand them. I've heard the arguments on if race was a factor in rescuing the people of New Orleans. These were poor, rural people who were rescued after the people in the Superdome and Convention Center. The delayed rescues might have had something to do with class, but more than anything I just think it was such a unforeseen event that no one knew what to do and no one would stand up and take charge.
I have several images in my head from Katrina that I will never forget. I remember writing my social security number on my arm before going "in" each day. I remember seeing a railroad yard with rail cars pushed every which way. I remember a large tanker boat pushed up on a levee. They looked like they were toys in a sandbox. I remember seeing one woman pushing a shopping cart full of Nike tennis shoes calmly by a row of squad cars. I remember seeing another woman driving a small car absolutely packed with groceries. She had Hungry Jack baking mix all across her dashboard. It reminded me of how I used to pack my car all the way to the top when coming home from college. It was that full of loot....and no one really cared.
I remember seeing groups of people begging for food, but in order to avoid a riot, the rescuers I was with only passed out food to people standing alone. I remember seeing a bloated body on the side of the road. I remember another rescue team bringing in a group of people to triage and then wheeling one woman in a wheelchair off to the side to die. When she did, they covered her up with a sheet. I remember one woman tell me how she cut her hair off with fingernail clippers, because they stayed in the attic so long and her hair was so dirty and that's all she had to do it with. A man told me how he would shoot area dogs because they went mad after drinking the water. I remember seeing the dead fish all over the road. And I remember the mountains of trash that were just everywhere.
I reported for five days with little to eat, no where to sleep, and with little to no makeup. It was far from glamorous, but I loved being there covering the big story. I didn't want to come home because I knew I wouldn't be back--the bigger anchors would be sent instead. I was right, but that was okay. There was plenty to cover where we were-- FEMA trailers popping up, refugees spending ATM cards at the casinos, charities sorting out mounds of donations, refugees looking for loved ones, relocated nuns, rescheduled bat mitzvahs, increased school populations, refugees starting over. Hurricane Rita came through a month later, giving us minor flooding and bringing us more people without a home.
As I left the flooded area on my last day there, I saw an alligator swim through a flooded Winn Dixie parking lot. If I could have any picture from those days, I think that's the one I would keep. That alligator was so out of place, but somehow reassuring. He was alive and exploring a place he wouldn't be in a few short days. Things might be very, very wrong, but time would eventually make some of it right.
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