A Katrina Odyssey: A Reporter Recounts Devastation, Confusion, Moments of Grace

Then Katrina became a monster overnight. While I slept, the Category 3 storm intensified into a Cat 5 as its whirlpool clouds filled the entire Gulf of Mexico. Katrina meant business. It was time to bolt.

I spent that frantic Saturday preparing my wife and three children to join neighbors fleeing the storm. As a reporter for The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, I would stay behind. When my family departed the morning of Aug. 28, I figured they’d be gone a few days. 

I wouldn’t see them again for more than a month.

Twenty years later, partisans on both sides still wrangle over its memory to advance their causes, casting the tragedy as a symbol of racial indifference, economic inequality, the incompetence of state and federal government, and the politicization of disasters.

Although it is remembered by all as a horrific natural disaster connected to the deaths of close to 1,400 people and the displacement of hundreds of thousands more, this was a man-made tragedy, at least in New Orleans. Longstanding warnings about problems in the levees built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were ignored, leading to the epic floods.

In many ways, this lingering confusion is appropriate. As a reporter who spent more than a year on the ground covering Katrina’s dreadful aftermath, I witnessed the often heroic and dangerous efforts of human beings to wrest some sense of control in the midst of almighty chaos. While others try to contain the memory of Katrina through pat answers and a list of lessons learned, the experience on the ground was defined by awe and dread.

Sunday, August 28

After waving goodbye to my family, I  hunkered down in The Times-Picayune’s St. Tammany Parish bureau on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain. Like everyone else, we anxiously awaited the National Weather Service’s constantly changing updates. 

At midnight, the map showed the storm tracking the western edge of Lake Pontchartrain along the Tangipahoa/St. Tammany parish line, about three miles west of my house, meaning we were in the worst place to be: just east of a hurricane’s eye where its counterclockwise swirl is most powerful.

“We’re matchsticks,” I said, shaking a colleague awake.

But at 4 a.m., the updated map showed Katrina’s eye had toggled a fraction to the northeast. It appeared that my house, and the city of New Orleans 30 miles away, would be spared its full force. This was happy news for us, but spelled catastrophe for the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Monday, August 29

Katrina hit before sunrise and howled for hours in the dark outside our building. Louisianans experienced winds of 125 miles per hour, although the hurricane that struck New Orleans and St. Tammany Parish was not the full-force Cat 5 storm that slammed Mississippi. As dawn broke, through the nearly horizontal rain and fog, I could see a line of pine trees across the street gyrating like Gumby. For some reason, I thought if they could remain standing, all might be well.

At about 10 a.m., with the wind still whipping and the rain falling vertically, David Grunfeld, a Times-Picayune photographer, and I went out in his car to a fantastical scene. St. Tammany Parish looked like a can of pick-up sticks dumped on the living room floor. Trees and debris were everywhere; power and phone lines were not so much down as dancing in the streets, slanted at crazy angles. The roofs of innumerable homes were smashed. 

Grunfeld and I had been in Nicaragua and Honduras right after Hurricane Mitch in 1999. In La Ceiba, Honduras, we flew with U.S. Army crews on Black Hawk helicopters, delivering food and water to banana farmers and others huddled on islands of high ground along the Caribbean coast, and days later, traveled in our filthy clothes to Tegucigalpa to find the international press in full, clean bloom.

Incredibly, something similar was unfolding at home.

Although Katrina hit just two decades ago, it was then a very different world. There was no Twitter/X, few people had a Facebook page, and while cell phones were becoming common, the hurricane obliterated the towers. Those of us who lived in the power-less zone for weeks moved in a kind of cocoon of ignorance about what was happening in other places, and how the country was viewing New Orleans. Unable to communicate with editors, we headed to the Louisiana/Mississippi line, about 25 miles west of us and closer to where Katrina made landfall. 

The New Orleans radio station we could hear in the car continued to broadcast, and while it reported some skyscraper windows had blown out and other signs of storm debris, it seemed New Orleans had dodged a bullet. In Slidell, Louisiana, the water of Lake Pontchartrain had flooded north for roughly a half-mile, and standing where Interstate-10 now plunged into the lake, I could just make out a giant catamaran cast atop the federal twin-span bridge. 

As Grunfeld and I stood on what now appeared to be the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, a man and woman pulled up with a skiff and outboard motor attached to their truck. They were headed to check on their house, which stood closer to Lake Pontchartrain’s normal northern shore, and allowed us to accompany them.

That became a surreal boat ride over a flooded landscape. The neighborhood there is veined with bayous, and most homes were wrecked, whole sides gone so that people could be seen in rooms like a cutaway drawing. Boats had been tossed about, and the wind whined in their spars and wires, and in some places the debris was so thick it looked like you could walk across it. Miraculously, the boat owner and his wife found their house dry and intact. We went over a golf course, the fairway visible eight or nine feet below us through surprisingly clear water.

It was dark when we returned to the bureau. The radio station in New Orleans was still on the air. With gallows humor, we burst out laughing when they said, “We haven’t heard from the Northshore so they must be fine.”

We considered heading to the Mississippi coast, which we knew must look like an atomic bomb had hit it, but decided to go to Baton Rouge first, where we thought we could file our story with Newhouse News Service’s Washington bureau.

Tuesday, August 30

The Baton Rouge Advocate kindly allowed us to work in their newsroom early that morning, and we got a story up online. It was there, via television, that we learned that at some point the 17^th Street Canal levee in New Orleans had broken near the lake, and a wall of the Industrial Canal had given way near the Mississippi. We all stared, slack-jawed, at the aerial photos of a flooded city.

The Advocate’s executive editor, Linda Lightfoot, told me The Times-Picayune had evacuated its flooded building in New Orleans, the paper’s staff was headed in newspaper delivery trucks to Baton Rouge, and we were asked to wait until they arrived.

When they did, there was a staff meeting in some warehouse the TP had managed to rent, and I stood against the back wall where publisher Ashton Phelps Jr. asked me what I was going to do.

“Go to New Orleans,” I said.

As we were heading out, a staffer I knew was having a nervous breakdown in the hallway. She and her husband, a staff photographer, lived near the London Street Canal, where a levee also broke, and their home had been annihilated. The woman was hysterical, screaming in the hall as colleagues tried vainly to comfort her.

That drove home the point of what was happening, and getting to the city wasn’t easy. Phelps told me that a handful of reporters and my friend David Meeks, whose house was underwater to the roofline, had turned back in a truck and were somewhere in New Orleans, though no one knew exactly where, and there was no way to reach them. 

Grunfeld and I hit the road, heading south on I-10 east, which was virtually empty. We got as far as Metairie, roughly a mile west of the New Orleans line, where at dusk we encountered a roadblock of cops and soldiers. As we spoke to them, military and Coast Guard helicopters emerged from the dark gray sky and landed on the grassy median, where they disgorged small knots of filthy, shellshocked people, clutching their belongings in plastic bags. They had been plucked from their rooftops. 

On Veterans Boulevard, which runs parallel to I-10 a bit closer to Lake Pontchartrain, we were stopped not by authorities but by a ziggurat of empty boats, their shells pointed at crazy angles and their motors scraped or bent by the pavement. People fleeing the flooded zones had simply run the boats right up onto the road and ditched them.

Following a roundabout route, we finally made it to the city at night.  It’s hard to believe how dark a city can be without electric power. It was an unforgettable view, spooky and beautiful at once, with the downtown cluster of skyscrapers etched in shadow and moonlight, and a lone helicopter fluttering above, darting its spotlight among the buildings. 

The nearly 15 inches of rain Katrina had dumped on the area had stopped by this point, and from the bridge at night, Grunfeld and I could not tell what was flooded. Everyone was winging it at this point, less than 48 hours after the storm had passed. On Poydras Street, several blocks from the Superdome, we were stopped by high water and a New Orleans Police Department SWAT team, whom we decided to spend the night with at a public park on the other side of the river. 

Again, the total blackness was unsettling: we had no batteries, no working cell phones, no change of clothes. This worked to our disadvantage when a commotion occurred that agitated top SWAT officers, some of whom left the park by vehicle. It was impossible to follow them or learn what was happening. Only later would we discover an officer had shot and killed a suspected looter, Henry Glover, on the West Bank, and a decision was made to cover up the shooting by burning the corpse in a car down by the Mississippi.

Wednesday, August 31

A frustrating inability to get the full story became something of a running theme. Then, like some cosmic joke, the weather turned picture perfect. That’s often the case after a big storm comes through and clears everything out, this time leaving us to walk across a Katrina-shattered city under a cloudless sky of gorgeous blue. Day after day, the temperature soared near 100 degrees, and you could not find an ice cube, let alone air conditioning.

The levees along the Mississippi River had held. That left a half-circle of New Orleans dry, which you could roughly trace with a protractor using the river as the baseline and, starting at a point by the Industrial Canal east of the French Quarter, arcing back west to the river’s bend.

Within this zone, the looting was widespread. We saw people shattering the plate-glass fronts of stores in the French Quarter and downtown, and then emerging with armfuls of booze, cigarettes, and even luxury items. At one point, I saw three teenagers lifting a heavy leather armchair from a furniture store, a theft for no apparent purpose, as this was far from a residential neighborhood.

We went to the bridge that crosses the Industrial Canal on the city’s east side. It turned out that what had happened there, in vintage New Orleans style, was that some clown left a heavy barge untethered, and it had banged about in the canal until punching through its eastern retaining wall. It was that water, along with the storm surge, that flooded St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9^th Ward, one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, creating epic devastation.

On the dry street along the canal’s western side, however, people were congregating, grilling, and drinking beer. It was astonishing: just a couple of hundred yards away, a steady stream of boats were bringing refugees to the bridge, which they would cross clutching their remaining belongings in plastic bags.

Aside from those incongruous small parties, New Orleans was largely a ghost town, with few people and fewer vehicles. Fortunately, my friend Robert Buras, who owned the Royal Street Grocery in the French Quarter, had stayed with his wife, daughter, an employee, and a handful of rifles to defend his small store. He had some food, a giant cooler stocked with beer that was getting warm, and a land phone line that hadn’t gone out, and thus the Royal Street Grocery became a makeshift news bureau for us.

A land line became a valuable commodity. Days later, I saw lines of people on Bourbon Street corners, and when I asked what they were waiting for was told, “a pay phone.”

At this point, the days tend to blur in my memory, and while I have a good idea of the order of events, I can’t pinpoint specific days. For the first week at least, we’d seen the looting, and rumors of violent criminals roaming the dry streets had everyone on edge. We’d take turns staying up with the rifles to defend the grocery, but no one bothered us.

Supposedly, there was going to be a forceful evacuation of everyone remaining in the city; I can’t even remember how stories like this started to circulate, but we wanted to stay. So on Wednesday or Thursday night (Aug. 31 or Sept. 1), I walked a few blocks to the Royal Orleans Hotel, which New Orleans police officers were commandeering. The place was swarming with cops, teams with bulletproof vests, guys with machine guns, guys with sniper rifles, and ballcaps turned backward, a scene much like the ones I had seen two years before in Iraq.

I asked the police captain there if we could remain in the city. He told me he had heard there were people in the Royal Street Grocery, and if we wanted to stay, we could, but he could not guarantee our safety. As I turned to leave, he shouted to me, “This is bigger than 9-11!”

Two days later, the Buras family called it quits, locked up and left, leaving Grunfeld and me to scavenge a sleeping spot, which we eventually found at the Uptown houses of The Times-Picayune’s Gordon Russell and Stephanie Grace.

Thursday, September 1

We were told that most people had left the hellish Superdome, which would become a symbol of government failure amid the maelstrom, so Grunfeld and I turned our attention to the scene along Convention Center Boulevard, the second major group of refugees. Here, a crowd of almost exclusively African American residents of the flooded neighborhoods who had not evacuated was gathered by the thousands. There was a dead woman being pushed along the street in a hotel luggage lorry; Mulate’s restaurant and a convenience store were shattered wrecks, the former reeking of excrement and the latter with most everything gone from the smashed shelves except wine that required a corkscrew to open.

As I walked down the Boulevard one morning, having not bathed, shaved, or changed clothes for days in this furnace, a family, frantic but polite, ran up to me. A young woman was there on the sidewalk, leaning against the wall of Mulate’s, doubled over in pain. She was going into labor, the family told me excitedly – could I deliver the baby?

I’ve replayed this moment in my mind many times these past 20 years, exactly as I did then – delivering that child would probably become legend. On the other hand, I am not a doctor and I hadn’t washed my hands for almost a week. 

I comforted the young woman as best I could, and then sprinted about three blocks to the sweeping riverside entrance of a casino, which had been fashioned into an ad hoc command center by authorities.  

There, I convinced an ambulance crew to go help. To this day, I don’t know what happened to the woman or the baby.

Meanwhile, stories were circulating that alleged terrible things had happened at the Superdome – rapes, beatings, and perhaps killings – and some people told me the same was happening in the cavernous Convention Center, which stretches for blocks. While I saw nothing in the two or three interior areas I visited, I was told there were bodies somewhere in its sprawling mass, and supposedly, a criminal element reigned inside at night. 

Two things happened that brought the force of these rumors home to me. One was a day when, seemingly out of nowhere, some Army (or National Guard) units came across the Crescent City Connection, which arcs over the Convention Center. The units formed up in Humvees over by the bus station and post office, and then came toward Convention Center Boulevard.

“Ah, the cavalry’s here,” I thought.

Wrong. A half-block before the Boulevard, I approached a female soldier sitting in the back seat of an open, stopped Humvee. “You getting the people out of here?” I asked. Instead of answering, she simply stared ahead, wide-eyed, her hands nervously fidgeting on her machine gun. I realized, astonished, she was scared.

The second moment was when a Black Hawk helicopter came over a big parking lot on the riverside of the boulevard. Dangling from it was a pallet stacked with bottled water, and people were motioning, trying to bring it down to the ground. But the helicopter did not descend and instead dropped the pallet from a height. The pallet smashed to the ground, and hundreds of bottles burst; several people shook their heads in disgust.

There was fear aplenty. But the truth is, a lot of the panic Americans saw on television was performative. The throngs of people along Convention Center Boulevard sat patiently in the broiling weather, five or six deep in folding chairs on the sidewalk, waiting for something, someone, to arrive. Then, a television crew or photographer would show up, and people would pour into the street, falling on their knees, screaming and gesticulating to the camera. It was an awful situation, obviously, but when the camera wasn’t on them, it was remarkable how patient and orderly everyone was.

Eventually, the 82^nd Airborne showed up. But its soldiers patrolled without bullets in their guns, according to an NOPD officer with whom I rode in a kind of monster truck through perhaps a foot or two of water out to a flooded zone. Several bloated, fully clothed bodies were still bobbing face down in the brown water.

“So the 82^nd guys told me they’re going around with nothing in the chamber, but personally I told them that if we see anything we’re lighting it up,” said the cop, who turned out to be the one that had annoyed NOPD brass by hanging a “Fort Apache: Bronx” sign out a window in the First District headquarters on the edge of the French Quarter.

The city began to stink, too. One day, I accompanied some refugees on one of the helicopters the military began flying from a pad near the Convention Center to the airport. As we flew over the Superdome, a pillar of stench rising from the wrecked building almost knocked me out of the helicopter.

In addition to the genuine personal tragedies, or nightmares like the one that unfolded in stranded places like Memorial Medical Center, horror stories about the desperate 72 hours or so after Katrina’s hit remained rife. But none of these stories of violence rang true with my own experience. Grunfeld and I went about armed but never, thankfully, had reason to fire our weapons. 

After a couple of weeks, city officials began holding daily press conferences. I spoke privately at one such briefing with Marlon DeFillo, then the NOPD spokesman, and asked him how many bodies were in the Orleans Parish morgue that had been ruled violent deaths. Zero, DeFillo told me. 

For two or three days, I asked DeFillo the same question, and he had the same reply: not one. That’s when I knew the stories of children being raped, of criminal gangs terrorizing people inside the Convention Center, or industrial freezers there filled with bodies were just wild rumors. Like virtually every media outlet in the world, we had published more than a few such tales in The Times-Picayune, so it was gratifying to have the hometown newspaper break the story that these reports were false.

One story that was true, however, was that NOPD officers had got in on the looting. I was taken aback one day to see officers pull up to the ad-hoc command center at the casino in a spanking new Cadillac. So I walked over to Sewell Cadillac, then located on Baronne St. in a downtown neighborhood called the Warehouse District, where a general manager told me that, yes, cops had looted the showroom, with one of them getting pulled over in a stolen vehicle in Texas.

Friday, September 2

Although he had flown over the city days earlier, this was when President Bush first put his boots on the ground to see the New Orleans devastation in person. To most of us who had been in the city throughout the ordeal without power, trying to offer support to friends whose homes were gone and pulling bodies out of the muck, it wasn’t clear how hard the press had hammered him over the delayed response. There was plenty of anger on the ground, however, and more of it was directed at Bush than at Mayor Ray Nagin or Gov. Kathleen Blanco.

Grunfeld and I got the Bush-visit assignment; the newspaper even got us clean t-shirts. Still, it was amazing to see the press with powered laptops, working communications, clean hair, and the rest.

Flying with the president’s press corps on the helicopter that followed Bush in Marine One as he toured the flood-ravaged city, the event brought back memories of Hurricane Mitch in Tegucigalpa. 

Bush made several more trips in short succession. Mayor Nagin made some interesting choices on where he took the president. One night, Nagin chose Mother’s, a famous tourist sandwich shop on Poydras Street. The pols all went to a banquet room, and the crush of press piled into the small restaurant itself, startling Rob Lowe, who was eating there with his kids. Lowe could not have been nicer – I think he said they had planned the trip before Katrina and decided to follow through with it – but we had only a few minutes with the actor before Secret Service agents came in and said, “Mr. Lowe, the president and the mayor would like to see you,” and whisked him away.

Another time, Nagin took Bush to Betsy’s Pancake House, a greasy spoon New Orleans institution. Like at Mother’s, the press was not allowed inside, but as Bush walked in, an African American waitress made some crack about the slow pace of help, which Bush parried as the door closed. A member of the White House press corps said, in all seriousness, “Well, there’s a dozen more votes for him.” According to his press corps, Bush was going to charm everyone inside and have them on his side.

Almost forgotten today is Hurricane Rita, another monster storm that improbably ripped into the western Louisiana coast on Sept. 24 after Katrina. It was barely front-page news for The Times-Picayune when, a few days later, I accompanied Lt. Gen. Russell Honore, whom Bush had named the commanding officer of Task Force Katrina, in a Black Hawk helicopter to tour Cameron Parish. Flying over Louisiana, thousands of homes looked from above as if some explosion had occurred within them, blowing all the belongings into the areas around the still-standing houses.

Cameron Parish itself looked like something in black-and-white. There just wasn’t anything left alive after it was lashed by 120 mph winds and the Gulf’s storm surge. As we approached New Orleans on our return, I pointed to a tower of smoke near the French Quarter; the fire made it seem as if everything was going to hell.

But within the craziness, there were flashes of humor, too, such as the appearance of wannabe celebrity journalists. Mike Perlstein, a Times-Picayune reporter, tried to get a word one day with actor Sean Penn, whom he spotted at the casino command center, only to have a flunky run over and tell him, “Mr. Penn’s not taking questions at this time.”

At night, Russell and I slept in a pond of sweat, or journeyed to the Bourbon Street hangout Johnnie White’s Sports Bar, which we had always called “The Clubhouse” and never closed. It became a watering hole for some of the oddballs that refused to leave the city, out-of-town press, doctors, and relief workers, and once even for a tipsy but very amiable and cogent Dan Akroyd, who had come to check on his House of Blues.

One night, J.D. Landrum, the owner of Johnnie White’s, asked me to help him bring over more booze from another bar he owned, the Blue Nile, in the Faubourg-Marigny. There I saw a touching “thank you” some grateful locals had stapled to the boarded-up window, a sign I still have.

Things returned to normal very slowly in New Orleans. The death count now stands close to 1,400, but that includes hundreds more than those who perished in the city. Still, there were blue tarps on hundreds of roofs for months, and trailer park cities were constructed in parts of the city for returning residents. A few weeks after the water was gone, the land out by Lake Pontchartrain was covered in what looked like a sand-colored, baked crust. But it was thin meringue, and underneath it was an evil-smelling black goo that, if it got on your shoes or clothes, was impossible to wash off.

The photographer and his wife, whose home was lost by the London Street Canal, hosted a gutting party, where, with a keg of beer, we tore the water-logged ruins down to the studs. The woman who had a nervous breakdown in Baton Rouge cried again when someone found her engagement ring in the wreckage.

My family had fled to New Jersey, where the kids enrolled in school, and it was October when I flew up to bring them back. For months on end, it seemed we wrote about nothing but Katrina. Among the more revealing stories, Russell and I did one on the layers of contracts that made recovery more expensive; I did another on how the city had mysteriously spurned an offer to pay for the removal of each wrecked car littering the streets, and instead chose to spend millions on the project. The Times-Picayune staff was pleased when we won two Pulitzer Prizes, for breaking news and the gold medal for public service.

But I’d gladly give them back for Katrina to have never happened.