"I was a rolling fireball."
What Hurricane Katrina taught me about heartbreak and the collapse of systems.
Dear friends,
I wrote this essay in 2015 on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. I never really published it anywhere, except for maybe on Facebook? Re-reading it seven years later, I think it deserves a wider audience. So I’m sharing it here, on Labor Day weekend, a time I always associate with the chaotic days of the storm’s aftermath and the losses so many people experienced.
A note on writing process: I didn’t publish much work in 2015, which was a barren year professionally and personally. I was trying to have a baby and trying to maintain momentum on a book project that was still years away from fruition.
But I wrote a lot, mostly for myself. Writing sustained me. Looking back, I can see how with this essay and another I wrote that year, I was teaching myself to write memoir—as well as learning to cultivate a critical eye for the failings of the systems we inhabit and sustain. Although this essay went unpublished, it laid the groundwork for Windfall. It’s a good reminder for the writers out there, myself included, that all effort has purpose. And sometimes, things can be re-purposed!
Love,
Erika
Content advisory: The essay is R-rated, for adult content, profanity, minor sexual situations and police violence.
For the first week or so after the storm, a bunch of us journalists squatted in a conference room in the Hyatt next to the Superdome.
As the city emptied, the Hyatt was one of the few reliable places with generators and electricity. Since we were near a telephone exchange, we had working wireless internet access. The electricity powered only a few rooms, including those used by city officials, but it kept our laptops and satellite telephones charged. There was also a bank of working pay phones in the basement of the hotel, an old-school convenience that proved vital in a city without cell phone service.
Reporters and photographers wrote, transmitted photos and slept in a room ripe with the smell of people who cared more about the story than personal hygiene, myself included. Shit piled up in the unflushable toilets down the hall. The bathrooms, thankfully, were dark. I had a headlamp, but I didn't really take a close look in a mirror for a week or so. When I did, I noticed the tiny silver and pearl earrings I had been wearing since the storm were tarnished with gray grime. I must also have been covered in that same grime, tarnished by the city.
I'd been walking around in rubber boots for so long that I had horizontal slices in the flesh of my inner calves from heat and friction. I was worried about infection, so I asked some of the other Miami Herald reporters who were coming into the city in an RV stocked with supplies to bring some ointment and clean socks. One reporter back in Florida, hearing I might be injured, campaigned to take my place. I refused to be outmaneuvered. I'm fine, I told my editors. I got a tetanus and hepatitis shot from one of the Army doctors at the casino and I carried hand sanitizer in an LSU fanny pack. I offered it to anyone who looked like they needed it, including a city councilwoman and a well-known television reporter who braved the mounting crap in the Hyatt bathrooms when she stopped by with the Pentagon brass for one of Mayor Ray Nagin's press conferences.
We were there to tell other people's stories, so even now, 10 years later, I'm a little uncomfortable telling my own story about the storm. It's my story, but it feels selfish, when more than 1,400 people died, when so many lives changed — often not for the better. There are other more important stories about what remains undone in that city and this country, about people who are still suffering. My own story pales next to theirs.
I didn't suffer, after all. I didn't lose my home or my livelihood or loved ones. I eventually went home to Florida, to a good job and a nice apartment and a new nephew. But I was there, and you don't walk away from that unscathed.
For a long time, when people asked, I would just say that covering Hurricane Katrina was a "life-changing experience."
"I bet!" some people would say, cheerfully, not wanting more. Or wanting the funny stories, like the one about how a few days in, those of us squatting in the Hyatt passed around a bottle of rum I'd swiped from a friend at another newspaper. He'd left his bags behind when his editors ordered him out of the city after the photographer he was working with got mugged. He had hidden the rum inside his duffle bag. We were all so dehydrated and so exhausted that we were tipsy after only a swig or two.
Even now it's hard to explain exactly what was so sad about seeing an American city fall apart, why it was so life-changing. I'd been covering state and local government for 10 years, so I had good instincts for when things were and were not working, as did my Miami Herald colleagues with me in New Orleans. We were especially skilled at nosing out when things had gone wrong, when they were veering toward injustice, indictment, malfeasance and negligence. I and the other reporters covering the story had a front-row seat to all of those things in New Orleans, as they were happening in front of us. Many of us knew their shape better than the people we were covering did. We could see the coming storm before they did.
There were relatively straightforward failures, such as the local officials who waited too long to evacuate people, especially poor or sick people or those with pets. There were systematic failures on display, too. The storm revealed the inequities of centuries of racism and poverty and corruption, as well as the more modern failure to adequately invest in protective infrastructure or safe building codes. And there were unnecessary failures, including the callous and uncaring federal response.
Many of us in journalism tell stories for a living, because we believe things should work for everyone, and that people in power should always be working toward making things better for everyone. We share other people's stories because we believe we can make things better.
The social disorder and the leadership failure in New Orleans saddened the optimist in me. I could, for the first time in my life, see how everything I knew could go completely awry. To see these failures firsthand is to see America fail. And that is heartbreaking.
Cell phone networks weren't operational, but in the days following the storm I occasionally went up to the top of a parking garage to check my voicemail with my satellite phone, which required a view of the horizon to make a call. I had given out dozens of business cards the minute I stepped on the plane to New Orleans. People were flying in to help their loved ones get out. Call me if you have news, I told them. Let me know your story.
One of those people left a message I didn't get until it was too late. He had family stranded on a roof, and he didn't know who to call to get them help. So he called me. He thought I might be able to help. They had a landline, and they were able to communicate, so eventually, they were evacuated. I was powerless to aid them, though.
The Miami Herald, published in a place defined by refugees, had an internal debate over the use of that word in reference to people stranded by Katrina. Technically, they were not refugees, they were evacuees. But what do you call people, mostly Black and poor, who were driven from their homes by weather and poor leadership and had nowhere safe to go, simply because they had no money? This wasn't supposed to happen in American cities. This wasn't supposed to happen in the America I knew.
I interviewed dozens of people for a story about poverty that I was doing for our Washington bureau, with other reporters from other newspapers owned by Knight-Ridder. Many people couldn't evacuate, because they didn't have the money to fill their gas tanks to leave the city. Then they were stranded, mostly at the convention center or the Superdome.
"Conditions were so bad inside the Superdome that most people milled around on the exterior concourse," I wrote in 2005. "Someone had started a small fire inside, and the smoke puffed out in an odious fog. Feces and garbage littered the area around the dome. People sat on the ground, leaning against stinking piles of trash bags."
There was 39-year-old Ruby Martin, who told me she lived paycheck to paycheck supporting her two daughters and two grandchildren on $19,000 as a health care aide. That's what I'd made 10 years earlier as a cub reporter at a tiny South Carolina newspaper, I thought, trying not to view her age and fecundity through my own experience. (It was so unusual, though, that the copy desk called to make sure I'd gotten Ruby Martin's age right.)
"I think I have 30 cents to my name," Martin told me, as she sat by the side of the only road leading out of New Orleans and as her grandkids bounced on an abandoned air mattress. "We don't have nothing. And we don't have nowhere to go."
I thought of the hundreds of dollars in cash stuffed in my sweaty, grimy bra and at the bottom of my backpack. It would change their lives when they got wherever they were going. I couldn't help everyone, though. It wasn't my job. My job was to tell stories. My job was to tell as many people as possible what was happening so they could help.
You could see how some journalists wrestled with this, and how they snapped. They rescued stray dogs, at great inconvenience to themselves and their colleagues. They shouted at National Guard troops who drove by without picking up people in distress. They tried to get someone to care about the dead body that had been floating for days in the water pooled beneath an overpass. I may have done some of those things, too.
One of the things I learned during Katrina is that the stories we tell are shaped by our experiences as human beings, what we hold true and what we value and what we believe. Our most truthful stories, I have found over the past decade, are the ones we allow ourselves to experience. They are the ones that expose our humanity.
I started letting people use my satellite telephone the day I went to the Danziger bridge, shortly after police shot and killed two people there.
It's easy to forget that 10 years ago we didn't have video or even respectable cameras on our phones. There was no Twitter then, no Instagram, no Snapchat. I didn't carry a camera with me because I didn't want it to be stolen. Words in print were my sharpest tool in this storm.
I called an editor on a satellite telephone with a simple report of what I'd seen at the bridge: The body, the bullet casings, an eyewitness interview. Storytelling methods have changed (mostly for the better) in the decade since. But by that point in the day, around 4 p.m. in Washington, we'd already missed the deadline to move any sort of story about the shooting on our national wire. I pleaded to include a few sentences in the daily roundup. I'm not sure if any of it ever made it in — it was challenging for me to see my own work in the days after the storm, because of our spotty internet access.
Like everyone else in the city, the eyewitness I interviewed had no electricity, no way of charging his cell phone, and no working cell phone network anyway. It had been nearly a week, and he just wanted people to know he was alive, that he had survived.
It seems trivial now, but I was nervous about letting him use the phone. It was expensive. I would get in trouble with the paper if it were stolen, but, worse, I would lose my sole means of mobile communication. Mostly, though, I was worried about being out in the open, on that bridge. You had to be in an open place with a view of the horizon for the phone to work properly, and people had been shot and killed in that particular open place not much earlier. By cops.
How fragile it all is. How easily wires go down or networks collapse in the face of disasters. How easily a government can fail its people.
Afterwards, I let all people use my satellite telephone, anyone I met who needed a way of communicating with their loved ones. How could you not?
Five years later, the FBI interviewed that man about the events of the day. He still lived nearby and, inexplicably, he still had my business card. An agent called me, but the notes in my notebook weren't that helpful for their civil rights case against the police who shot the people on the bridge.
People have asked if I was afraid during Katrina. I was, but really only once, right before the storm. And even then, I don't think I was that afraid for my safety. The Miami Herald was really strict about covering hurricanes. Finding safe harbor during the storm was critical. After all, how could you cover the storm's aftermath if you were injured or dead?
At 32, I think I was more afraid each day of not getting the story or being shoved aside by other more ambitious colleagues with better relationships to editors who made coverage decisions. I spent the night before the storm drinking with fellow reporters — one way to face down the fear, or at least dull it. I went to bed with one of them — another way to face it down. I may have told him I was afraid. It seemed sexy at the time to be a little afraid. It was.
It occurs to me 10 years later that there has always been a man in New Orleans, every time I've been there. My first visit to the city was in my 20s with the kind of man who bought the hurricane glasses we drank from at Pat O'Briens in the French Quarter. He carried the glasses home with us on the plane. The glasses sat untouched in the cupboard above the oven range until we split up. I didn't want them.
A journalist friend from the city got married there about six months after the storm. I ran along the street in my party dress and gold heels, afraid of missing the shuttle to the church as I dashed around a St. Patrick's Day parade. These were the same streets I'd trod in my filthy hurricane boots. When I told some of the other guests I was turning in for the night, a tall man I hadn't yet met stepped forward. You're not leaving, he told me. He was right.
Other major American cities I've reported from don't have this baggage. Not Denver or Pittsburgh, certainly. Interesting places full of stories, too. But not romantic ones, not for me. I remember writing an email to someone the morning before the storm to say that I put extra butter on my biscuit at breakfast, because who knew what would happen next? If you lived there, you might grow accustomed to living each day that way. That sort of romantic fatalism could be deadly.
I went back to New Orleans again in 2012 with the man who is now my husband. His large family was gathering in the city to celebrate his brother's return from Afghanistan, and I was meeting some of them for the first time. Chris and I drank cold draft beer and danced in the street to the bands playing the French Quarter Festival. It felt good to be happy in this city with so much weighty history, with a man I loved and who loved me back, surrounded by a big warm family who loved me, too.
After the Hyatt kicked us out so they could clean the hotel and begin actually renting out rooms to the people who would be rebuilding the city, we moved into a house rented by a photographer based in New Orleans, Charlie Varley. The house, on Patton Street in the Garden District, was mostly unharmed by the storm. It still had no electricity, but we could stand under a cold shower in the evening to wash away whatever had stuck to us that day. The storm had maybe ripped a few shingles off the roof, but it was nothing that couldn't be swept or nailed back together with a few hours of work.
Inside, it was perfect except for the refrigerator and freezer full of rotten food. An orange juice tube had leaked inside the freezer, and Charlie scrubbed at it furiously. I knew what he was doing, he was scrubbing off the grime. Nothing had escaped unscathed.
It's just orange juice, I reminded him.
Charlie took a break from the city, perhaps more fearful of what a house full of reporters would do to his home than what the storm had done. He met up with his girlfriend, who had evacuated north. They have a son now, a hurricane baby approaching 10 himself.
We ran a generator to power the wireless router. The broadband worked just fine, the phone lines hadn't been damaged. We plugged our computers and a fan and a lamp into the generator, and worked happily on deadline.
I finally left New Orleans because my sister was about to give birth and I wanted to be there. Slowly, the other Miami Herald reporters trickled out, too. Things were really bad down the coast at the Biloxi Sun-Herald, one of the other papers owned by the same company as the Miami Herald, so corporate leadership had understandably focused its resources there.
In the weeks after I returned from Katrina, Hurricane Wilma hit South Florida. At one point, it was the strongest Atlantic hurricane ever recorded. Of course I volunteered to cover it. I bought new rubber boots that covered my calves, boots that I used as recently as this summer when our basement flooded in Washington, D.C.
Wilma's trajectory threatened to pass over Lake Okeechobee. The newspaper sent me there because in 1928, storm surge from the lake sent a 20-foot wall of water into the communities south of the lake. More than 2,500 people drowned.
I was alone in a scruffy hotel room at a fish camp, and for the first time during a hurricane, I was deeply afraid. I don't know how I slept, but I did. It was the only thing I could do, all alone there. The Category 3 storm charged across Florida in four hours. It blew the roof off above the bathroom in my room at the fish camp. Water lapped up from the lake, making any exit perilous in my rental Dodge Durango.
Looking back, I realize that had the lake had flooded like it did in 1928, I would have been dead. Like the people in New Orleans who didn't evacuate. Once the winds had died down enough, I went out to see what had happened. The water was high, but passable. I called in a story from the Everglades, on the side of the highway, once again from my satellite phone. The high winds were so strong they blew the open door of my SUV out of alignment. It creaked, metal on metal, every time I opened and closed it. Someone at a gas station told me I could fix it with an industrial lubricant. I still have the tube of White Lightning in my tool chest, 10 years later.
Other reporters and photographers who'd weathered Katrina also started to get sloppy. One photographer I knew flooded out an SUV in too-deep water, a mistake she wouldn't have made during Katrina in Louisiana. Gas stations were rationing gas on the east side of Florida, and I brazenly drove across the Everglades from Naples toward Fort Lauderdale with full red plastic gas tanks in the back of the Durango. I was a firebomb on wheels.
I drove to Naples and wrote a story about how the rich people in a resort city coped with Wilma. You could see the contempt in my copy. We aren't demanding that FEMA show up and bring us ice, one man told me, proudly. Another man told me he didn't even bother carrying insurance on his property because the waterfront lot was more valuable than the structure itself. He didn't care if a hurricane blew it away. For tax purposes, it might even have been helpful.
It didn't occur to them how fortunate they were, how they could leave if they needed to or wanted to. Toppled oaks had ripped up water and sewer lines, but other than the stench of waste and privilege, the city was fine. You could see in my copy, though, how I'd changed, how Katrina had changed me.
Someone posted the story on a conservative website, and trolls sent emails calling me a socialist. You probably wear earth shoes, they bitched. You hate rich people, don't you?
"What are earth shoes?" I wrote back. Your fancy city stinks like shit, I thought.
I went home, I got to know my nephew. I met a tourist from London in a karaoke bar on Miami Beach and we had a fling that turned into a year of pricey plane tickets.
As the first anniversary of Katrina approached, I saw a psychiatrist in Florida. I had gotten a little sad about the man who lived in London, and I was having trouble finding my footing professionally after the storm. I no longer knew what sort of journalist I wanted to be. What kind of person I wanted to be.
The psychiatrist was blunt. You're not depressed, he told me, you've just had your heart broken. People who haven't experienced heartbreak have no empathy for the plight of others, he said. Humans experience heartbreak so that we learn compassion, he told me.
Ten years later, and I finally understand what that doctor meant. To live fully, to write truthfully means you don't get to walk away unscathed.
Loved reading this, and being inside your story and with your voice. Thanks for taking us inside your experience. I could have kept reading and reading and reading….
Great read Erika! I’m looking forward to reading your book.