Unit 6 katrina: facing the storm

Activity 1

Read the text.

KATRINA BECOMES a hurricane on Thursday, August 25, and that evening it hits southern Florida. Twelve people die. Over land, the storm weakens, but once it returns over water, this time the Gulf of Mexico, it begins to re-form.

Saturday morning, I fly out of Dubrovnik, bound for Houston. In Louisiana, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco hold a press conference, asking city residents to leave. Nagin and Blanco don’t, however, make the evacuation mandatory. That evening, Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center calls the mayor to warn him personally of the seriousness of the storm. It’s only the second time he’s called a politician to do that.

New Orleans’ emergency plan requires authorities to provide buses to evacuate the one hundred thousand residents without access to transportation. No buses, though, are organized to get people out of the city. On Sunday, over the central Gulf of Mexico, Katrina turns northwest as expected, becoming a monstrous category 5 hurricane. Sustained winds 175 miles per hour. The mayor and governor finally declare a mandatory evacuation.

I arrive in Houston late Sunday and drive to Baton Rouge. I get there around 1:00 A.M. on Monday, just as the outer bands of rain are beginning to hit. It’s another hour-and-a-half drive to New Orleans, but when I call into my office, they tell me that the roads are closed. I am furious with myself for getting there late, but it turns out that CNN has pulled its satellite trucks from New Orleans because they anticipate flooding. Even if I were able to get there, I couldn’t broadcast during the storm, so I decide to ride it out in Baton Rouge, then head to New Orleans as soon as it’s over.

Katrina is the sixth major hurricane I’ve covered in the last fifteen months, the second one this year. I never used to understand people’s fascination with the weather. One of the great joys of living in New York is that I’m able to ignore what little bit of sky I ever see. Since covering Hurricane Charley in 2004, however, I’ve continually volunteered to report on hurricanes. It’s not just the storm itself that I find compelling, but also the hours before and after. There is stillness, quietness. Stores are shut, homes boarded up. In many ways it feels like a war zone.

A few hours before Hurricane Charley made landfall, I checked into a waterfront hotel in Tampa, Florida. The manager, a large woman with a small parrot perched on her head, agreed to let me stay if I signed a waiver absolving the hotel of any responsibility for my safety. As I signed the paper, the parrot defecated on the woman’s shoulder.

“She’s just a little nervous about the s-t-o-r-m,” the woman said, spelling the word out, worried the parrot would hear.

Reporting on a hurricane, you depend on your skills for survival; it’s all in your hands. You rent an SUV, load it up with water, food, whatever supplies you can buy; gas cans, coolers, and ice are always the hardest to find. In a war, you head to the front; in a hurricane you head to water. You pick your location as if you’re planning an ambush. You want a spot near the water, so you can see the storm surge, but you need to be on high ground so you don’t get flooded when the water rises. You don’t want too many trees or signposts near you, because they can become airborne and turn into flying missiles in high winds. You also need several fallback positions so that as the storm intensifies, you can retreat to ever more secure locations.

In Baton Rouge, a team of CNN engineers has already found a riverfront location on a pier. There’s a big building several hundred yards away that can protect the satellite truck. As long as the satellite dish works, you can broadcast, so keeping it safe is essential. The problem is, the dish acts as a sail. It can get picked up by a strong wind, causing the truck it’s attached to flip over. You have to find a spot where the satellite truck is protected by a building on at least two sides. That way even when the hurricane winds shift, the dish will not be directly hit.

After covering several hurricanes, you start to know what to expect. At first the winds just pick up gently. Then it starts to rain. Your fancy Gore-Tex clothing keeps you dry for about thirty minutes; then the water starts to seep in. Within an hour you’re completely wet. Your feet slosh around in your boots, and your hands are wrinkled and white. If you’re ever wondered what your skin will look when you’re eighty-five, try standing in a hurricane for a few hours.

Katrina comes ashore at 6:10 A.M., on Monday near Buras, Louisiana. The sustained winds are estimated to be 125 miles per hour, a category 3 hurricane. In Baton Rouge, conditions deteriorate rapidly. What seemed like high winds just a few hours ago now seem calm by comparison. The electricity goes out, transformers explode, lighting up the darkened sky with greenish blue flares. I can’t see any debris flying through the air; I can only hear it: the snap of tree branches, the twisting of signs, aluminum roofs ripping loose. You can’t tell where the noise is coming from or where the debris is headed.

Between live shots I sit inside my SUV, dripping in steamy darkness. As the storm intensifies, other reporters’ transmissions get knocked off the air, so the network starts coming back to me more and more – live shot after live shot. Chris Davis, my cameraman, can barely see through his viewfinder, but he keeps working, steadying himself against the railing of the pier. After a while I’m just repeating myself: “It’s really blowing now… and the rain, it’s torrential.” There’s really not much else to say. It’s water and it’s wind. How many ways are there to describe them?

You see weird stuff in a storm: floating Coke machines, boats washed up on roads. During Hurricane Frances, two guys in a brand-new Humvee with HURRICANE RESEARCH TEAM printed on the side pulled into the marina where we were working. From their matching yellow raincoats, I assumed they were scientists, but it turned out they were just two guys with a storm fetish. I last saw them around 1:00 A.M. They were hooting and hollering and videotaping each other getting tossed around by 110-mile-per-hour gusts of wind.

It’s easy to get caught up in all the excitement, easy to forget that while you are talking on TV, someone is cowering in a closet with their kids, or drowning in their own living room.

After Hurricane Charley, I drove around Punta Gorda, Florida, surveying the damage. There was aluminum siding wrapped around trees, shockingly silver in the morning sun; a family’s photo album lay in the street; a sofa sat on top of a car. A relief official mistakenly said that there were a dozen or more bodies at one trailer park, and all the morning-show reporters in mobile news vans crisscrossed the small town searching for the dead. They’d slow down and ask local residents if they knew of a nearby trailer park where “something” had happened. (No one wanted to come right out and ask, “Seen any dead people around here?”)

In the end, the real power of a hurricane isn’t found in its wind speed. It’s in what it lives behind – the lives lost, the lives changed, the memories obliterated in a gust of wind. Anyone who does hurricane reporting for any length of time knows all too well that standing in the aftermath of a storm is much more difficult than standing in the storm itself, no matter how hard the winds blow.

At the height of Katrina, I’m holding on to the railing of a pier, surrounded by a whirling wall of white. Between live shots, my arms stretch out, my eyes close, I don’t care if anyone sees. The storm is a phantom, rearing, retreating, charging. It spins and slaps, pirouettes and punishes. I’m submerged in water, corseted by the air. I lean my shoulders into the wind, spread my legs so I don’t fall when the gust weakens. If I shift the wrong way, it will take me. I could just let it. I’ve felt the tug. A few more steps and I’d be gone. Crushed by the wall of water and wind. It’s that close. I can feel it.

It sounds a little crazy, perhaps, but you do get caught up in the challenge, trying to stay on air, trying to get as close as you can. During Hurricane Ivan, in 2004, I kept insisting on staying out longer and longer. We were on a balcony in Mobile, Alabama, a perfect spot to witness the storm. At one point, my producers tied a rope around my leg so they could pull me back if I got knocked down. Finally, they insisted we move inside. I reluctantly agreed.

In Baton Rouge, for a while I can’t see the camera lens because of the rain. It doesn’t really matter, though; I know what I’m supposed to say: “I am powerless in the face of the storm.” That’s what reporters always say. “The storm’s a reminder of how weak we humans really are.” Right now, however, at this moment, I don’t feel any of that. I feel invincible. The storm whips around me, flows through me. I am able to work, to stand, even when it’s at its worst. The satellite dish is up, we are on the air, we’re just about the only ones left. We have beaten the elements. We have won.