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City Paper Publisher, Paul Blake & News Editor Corey Hutchins pack PB&J’s and a .38 and arrive at New Orleans immediately after Katrina hit.
The devastation was incredible and so was the wait for help.
(Competitors had a lovely issue on Cultural Season at the time)
“You’ll need gas cans,” a reporter from Florida said over the telephone when we told him we were going to New Orleans. “And all communications are down so you’ll need a satellite phone. A chainsaw too. And a .38 Special in the glove box. Loaded.”
We’re bringing everything but the chainsaw. Hours before, we’d loaded five red gas cans in the trunk of the car with enough gasoline to blow us to Canada if we were much as tapped from behind.
On I-20 from Columbia the southbound lanes were deserted. To the left was an endless flood of headlights. Victims. Survivors. Evacuees. Refugees. Whatever the papers were calling them today.
We were seemingly the only car on the road headed toward the devastation. And sitting on 300 miles of liquid explosives, we felt more nervous than guilty.
On the news, the streets of New Orleans were being compared to Somalia by their own law enforcement. We were hearing first hand reports of babies floating in the floodwaters, of rat infestations, E. coli and venomous snakes. A news correspondent was advising everyone to stay away from all dogs.
They’d gone rabid and were crazy with hunger and stress.
Police officers started turning in their badges; two already had taken their lives with their own guns.
We left Columbia at midnight. For days, with newspapers and the television news conferences, we’d been checking the pulse of our nation’s worse natural disaster, but somehow felt disconnected. 
From so far away it was so easy to accept. It was happening on TV, on broadband, in black and white on recycled paper. But on the highway it felt like we were a part of something and as the lights of Atlanta dimmed in the rearview I only first started justifying why two reporters for a Columbia weekly were headed down there. Maybe it was hearing the mayor of New Orleans screaming on the radio telling the federal government to “get off their asses and do something.”
Maybe it was hearing BBC describe the Gulf of Mexico’s coastline like that of a poverty-stricken Third World nation.
Or maybe it was reports of officers outnumbered by roving gangs of armed and starving lunatics, of crazed snipers on rooftops, gang rapes, murders, death and disease in the Louisiana Superdome.
In an interview, Aaron Broussard, the president of Jefferson Parish, broke down in tears during NBC’s Meet the Press, saying New Orleans had been abandoned by its own country.
“The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in US history,” he said.
“It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here… bureaucracy has committed murder. ”
“Nobody is coming to get us,” Broussard continued choking through tears in what is sure to be a moment in broadcast history that will be televised in every journalism classroom for years.
“The secretary has promised. Everybody has promised…They’ve had press conferences… I’m sick of the press conferences. For God’s sake shut up and send us somebody,” he sobbed before putting his head on the desk while the news cameras slowly faded out.
So what were we doing in this car headed toward the disaster zone with our bottled water and lap top computers? Our digital cameras and electronic media gadgets.
Getting a story to move some newspapers?
How altruistic.
We could donate blood tomorrow and save lives. We could give the money we’d spend on printing this week to the Red Cross. If it was a story we were after, couldn’t we just read every wire report published by the lazy machine of the local journalism market?
Sure.
But if this is the story of a lifetime, the story that makes or breaks the United States in the world poll of opinion, then I wanted to be there.
Who in history now wouldn’t want to say they stood on the shores and watched Atlantis sink into the ocean?
As the mile markers and exits signs ticked away in the breakdown lane, I started counting them like a countdown to human destruction.
Really, this wasn’t an environmental tragedy at all. It was a human one.
Really, this wasn’t an environmental tragedy at all. It was a human one.
Once across the Alabama line the reflective paint on the road disappears and the clock goes back an hour. In Birmingham they said the city was starting to fill with people retreating from the damaged southern coast. But at five o’clock in the morning the city was asleep, deserted.
No story.
Every mile outside Montgomery another car could be seen abandoned on the side of the road. Often times the tires are missing, the vacant cars pillaged, gutted.
In one small truck a man lay slumped over the steering wheel as if he’d given up his last hope on one more mile of gasoline.
As the sun came up, the gulf coast gets closer and the sides of the road look like lumberyards. Trees bend into the highway, painted splinters of smashed billboards scatter throughout the median and the highway signs twist on their metal legs or simply tear in half.
All trees stand at fractured right angles. Stalled somewhere near the state border an old man just finishes boarding up a cardboard sign on the back of his pick up that reads “NEED GAS/HELP.”
But people are too afraid to stop.
Every exit off the highway is a longer line for gas, and cars are parked all the way up the on ramps. In one town, police direct a quarter- mile long winding line of traffic through a neighborhood of broken windows and sunken porches.
It takes forty minutes to fill half a tank. In Mississippi, the Hattiesburg town sign is slashed in half, giving it a more accurate description. At the pumps, people sweat and stand in line under swarms of mosquitoes and the mid-day sun. Red gas cans wave in the heat, while military police stand watch, their guns pointed at the dusty ground.
It’s on a seemingly deserted stretch of tree-lined roadway that we stop and fill our gas tank with two extra barrels from the trunk. Passing cars slow as their passengers watch.
Our eyes go from the taillights to the glove box that we hope we never have to open.
The wait for gas can be up to an hour.
As we pass the state line, the Mississippi welcome center sign is peeled down the center in the mirror and we first see the wreckage that is the state of Louisiana.
Red cones and roadblocks obstruct all entrances to New Orleans. Gas stations are toppled over, crushed into the pavement. “KEEP OUT” reads the boarded-up windows of a ravaged strip motel.
Parking lots are scattered with the signs of previous businesses, tossed trees and bricks. One carwash looks like what would happen if you put a hand grenade in a microwave. Fast food signs are lodged in rooftops.
Traffic lights are knotted up with frayed electrical wires. Transformer boxes lay on the ground, creating roadside bombs waiting to explode. The police have set up tents at each interstate on ramp toward the city and the bridge.
They don’t turn away any cars. Because there are none.
On the Louisiana Public Broadcast System, at 1:30pm on Sunday, correspondent Corey Johnson says the French Quarter is almost entirely dry, though some parts of the city still have water up to the eaves. He can’t wait to eat shrimp remoulade at his favorite seafood restaurant in the coming weeks he says. A few minutes and a few blocks later, Johnson has changed his tune. He’s seen his first dead body.
“There’s a cart here,” he said, “with a body in it, obviously left out here so someone will see it.” There is no more talk of shrimp remoulade.
“There’s also a large black man… with no shoes on… face down… in the water here on the corner…. He’s obviously dead…. It seems like he’s been here a long time.”
With the cell phone towers burnt out and power lines jumping and sparking and coiled on the roadways, the communications become primitive. In one limb-scattered section of Slidell, La., a spray paint and particleboard message wards off potential looters with the threat of death. “Looters will be shot,” it reads in sloppy lettering.
At the entrance gate to a once-affluent neighborhood, orange spray paint tells residents to boil all their water until further notice, while the teeth of fifty chainsaws sparkle in the sun from the side of the road.
There, a man sits under a tent with a spray painted piece of plywood. “Generators and chainsaws,” it reads.
Just across the toll bridge is ground zero for the people of New Orleans. At the checkpoint, police turn our car around. Not being able to go farther south, we head east to the coastal towns that took most of Katrina’s inland force.
Just after the turnaround, a fire department truck idles on the side of the road with a group of people standing and looking into a runoff stream and pointing.
Some speculate it’s a dead body, others an alligator. All it looks like is filthy black water boiling in the reeds.
We’ve been on the road 13 hours when we reach Gulfport, Mississippi. The small coastal city is flattened. Words are ripped off water towers; the University of Mississippi’s Long Beach football stadium is shredded, the bleachers ripped up and sent through the air, piercing buildings and fences.
This is the worst damage we’ll see. Uprooted trees slammed into houses, whole strip malls ripped open and gutted, their contents strewn across the leveled parking lots.
Every house is somehow affected. Red Cross and Salvation Army tents have sprung up under the eaves of devastated businesses.
Power lines sag into the street and are either cut or driven over. In front of us, a man climbs atop his utility truck and tries to fix a broken wire. If he can’t, he’ll simply cut it in half.
While getting a press pass to photograph the coastline, a police sergeant tells us they’re about to declare it a biohazard site.
“Trust me guys, you don’t even want to go near there,” he says.
News reports claim that alligators are feeding on the dead.
The National Guard had just set up camp and parking vehicles on the roadways that lead to the wrecked and tattered beaches. With no idea exactly who is in charge, the young guardsmen look as confused as the exhausted citizens they are here to help.
“Are we letting the press in there?” one of them asks. Another shrugs. As the car window rolls up, the terrible scene is reflected in the guardsman’s sunglasses: Downed tress, crumbled buildings and the sad faces of people carrying their only belongings to the curb outside their shattered homes.
As we drive east past Biloxi and onto the highway that will take us home, the southbound lanes are finally filled with traffic. An additional 30,000 guardsmen have just been ordered to the relief, but many hurricane victims feel it wasn’t fast enough.
The news briefs, sound bytes and quotes all echo one another with the same sentiments. What was going on down there seems like something you hear about in wars. And like most wartime coverage you only hear what someone else hears until it becomes like the old schoolyard game of telephone, one newscaster to another.
Leaving New Orleans, coastal Alabama and Mississippi behind we watch as the Army trucks descend down Route 10, Route 12, and I- 20 as if they’re headed to Baghdad. Along the interstate, helicopters fly low over the trees while tractor-trailers, tour busses and flatbeds carry construction equipment and jockey for position in the opposite lanes.
On the radio they say they’ve had already begun to pump water out of the city and let some people back into their homes to check on damage. Busses are filling at the Superdome. People are being evacuated. On I-20 east, as the sun sets, it seems like help is finally on the way.
When we arrive back in Columbia, the former NAVY reserve is being converted into a shelter for evacuees from the hurricane. Chomping on a cigar, volunteer coordinator Sam Tenenbaum presides over the operation.
His mission is to have enough volunteers to walk each evacuee through this process personally, and he wont stop until he’s accomplished it.
“I don’t want them waiting in line,” he said. “They have already been waiting in line up to this point.
If they want take a shower, let them take a shower.”
A woman approaches Tenenbaum and tells him she doesn’t have anything. She wants to know if he can tell her where she can get some personal supplies.
Tenenbaum gives the woman his personal card.
“Call me personally,” he says. “I’ll get you the stuff.”
With so many military personnel being rushed to New Orleans and the gulf coast, and so many evacuees fleeing their own cities, the situation has been described with words generally reserved for war zones.
Ironically, some say the money that was supposed to go to New Orleans in the first place, to defend the city from such a natural disaster, actually went to its descriptive counterpart thousands of miles overseas for the war over there.
“The cost of the Iraq war forced the Bush administration to order the New Orleans districts office not to begin any new studies, and the 2005 budget no longer includes the needed money,” Army Corps of Engineers project manager Al Naomi said of the money New Orleans needed to fix their levees in 2004.
The president has said we must continue the war in Iraq to save our people at home, but it seems as though when the time came to appropriate the most needed money, he got his gulfs mixed up.
Some argue this is not the time for blame. Others argue that without finding that blame we can’t fully take care of what needs to be done right now. With rising editorial attacks on FEMA, the president, and bureaucracy in general, it is certain that when everything is over someone is going to have to stand trial. If our current war isn’t proof enough right now, the United States has never been a nation to let disasters go unpunished, natural or not.
“Whoever’s at the top of this totem pole,” Broussard said before his breakdown on national news, “that totem pole needs to be chain sawed off, and we’ve got to start with some new leadership.”
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