Accounts of Katrina: Survival and Recovery

Larry Lorenz
A. Louis Read Distinguished Professor
Department of Communications
Loyola University New Orleans

Day 1
We are refugees, but we are safe.
And, thank God, we are much better off than most our fellow refugees: in a house with running water, a stove, a washer and dryer, a computer, telephone service and a pool (I am tempted to add, “none of which we looted from the neighborhood Wal-Mart,” but I’ll resist.)
“We” are my wife, Kathy, and I; son Bob; daughter Abby; her husband, Neil; and their five-week-old infant, Sullivan; Shadow, our faithful golden retriever; and six cats, four belonging to Kathy and me and two belonging to Neil and Abby. We are all bedding down in the Pensacola house of Neil’s mother and her husband and their anti-social, deaf dachshund who considers anything new on the floor a potential pee target. Daughter Mary fled to Dallas with a college friend and is staying at her parents’ house.
We know no more than anyone else who is following the New Orleans/Gulf Coast story on CNN and MSNBC, except that the anchors and reporters don’t seem to be concerned with pronunciations or geography. Back when I was a crack broadcast writer with UPI, for example, we always put a “pronouncer” on Biloxi (bih-luhk’-see). And we could trust that reporters knew something about the communities they were reporting on; none of the displaced New Orleanians in this house can understand why today’s tele-visions have not bothered, apparently, to look at a map of the city they are covering.
Complaining about such minor things, I guess, keeps us from sobbing about the uncertainty of our future.
We ask prayers for ourselves, but more for those hundreds of thousands who are less fortunate.

Day 2
I saw my house yesterday in a satellite photo posted by NOAA. It took some doing to find our section of town, but the photos are good (though some areas are hidden by cloud cover). My house is standing in some water, but I don’t believe there was enough to reach the first floor. I could not tell whether water had seeped into the two cars that I left in the driveway, but at least they were still there. And I saw no one partying in the backyard, so perhaps no one has yet found the beer in the minifridge in the back shed.
Responding to my note on the reporting, our department chair’s husband, Hank Henley, a former newspaper reporter, wrote:
“My mind has also been boggled by the obvious lack of local knowledge displayed by the talking heads on CNN, Fox, etc. I guess I can forgive “Orleans County” and the “9th District” or even the “North Bank,” but yesterday I heard two whiz kids reporting from Christian Pass (mispronounced) and St. Louis Bay and began screaming at the television. I wonder why the national guys couldn’t hire or buddy with a local reporter just to get this stuff correct.”
Hank wrote later of seeing Geraldo Rivera standing in the spotlight with the city’s police superintendent and saying, “I am standing here with Chief E. Compass of the Los Angeles Police Department.”
Is this solely an opportunity for the reporters (if you can call some that) to get face time on the tube? Looking at the likes of Jeanne Meserve, Rita Cosby and some newschick named London, one would think so.

Day 3
We have been tortured by what we have seen on television and what more is to come that we don’t want to even imagine. From what I’ve been able to piece together, what water there was in our immediate neighborhood did not flood houses. But we and the neighbors whom we have been in touch with are worried about looting and, now, the burning.
I have also struggled with the conflicting emotions of seeing poor blacks the main actors in New Orleans. I despise the looters, and at one point I shouted, “Shoot the bastards!” at a screen that showed police standing by while looters sauntered out of a store with television sets. On the other hand, I can understand so much better how much the social, educational, economic structure of New Orleans is at fault. If you have not yet read it, pick up John Barry’s “Rising Tide,” the story of the 1927 flood. Conditions are no better now, and perhaps even worse. Will we learn any more from this than the residents of Mississippi and Louisiana learned from the 1927 flood?

Day 4
Here in Pensacola, we’ve been to the washer and dryer more than a few times with the two changes of clothes we brought under the assumption (echoing from some recess of the mind is the old editor’s harrumph: Don’t ever assume, son….) that we would be back by Tuesday or Wednesday.
We’ve been making telephone calls to State Farm and Wells Fargo and all the other firms that hold our financial fate in their hands. All goes well until the voice on the other end of the line says like “We are all so sorry for your loss,” and a sob rises in the throat before we can answer.
A Loyola vice president has established a blog where faculty and staff can let others know where they are. Students and alumni have set up other sites for making contacts. We are spread from coast to coast to coast and border to border.
We are told that the university administration is gathering in Shreveport to establish what one official called “Loyola in exile.” I gather we will be paid on a regular basis—those of us on contract, at least. What will happen to those who work for the auxiliary services that provide food and maintenances may not be as fortunate.
The university sustained little damage, but the city’s infrastructure is in such shambles that it will take months for basic services like water and electricity and telephone to be back to normal. There will be no school this semester—a lagniappe sabbatical for faculty and staff.
Students, however, are scrambling to get into universities around the country, and some have written to ask about the relative merits of those they are considering and what courses they might take. The university certainly must be liberal in evaluating the transfer credits and waive the usual prohibitions on credit for major and common curriculum courses taken elsewhere.
In the email is a note from a Loyola colleague. She asks: “Did the Bush administration finally screw up so badly and so brazenly that they will be thrown out? I’m hoping for impeachment and a trial for war crimes and murder.”
I seem to recall that Bush was going to put Cheney in charge of government efforts. But he has been in some undisclosed location. http://michaelmoore.com has the best comment on their response to the disaster.

Day 5
Our hosts, Neil’s mother, Vicki, and her husband, Jon, have been gracious and more than tolerant of their guests of both two and four feet. But we worry about wearing out our welcome. One sign: the dachshund has become less hostile. But human nerves fray.
We are talking about going to Chicago to stay for a time with Kathy’s mother, and Mary told us she, too, would like to go there. Another daughter, Kate, and son Patrick live in the city also, and Kate says she may be able to get Mary a job with her firm, careerbuilder.com. Bob is even open to the idea of working there and perhaps going to graduate school there.
Who knows, but we may just all settle in as yankees again; blizzards don’t look so bad in comparison to hurricanes.
But maybe I’ll feel differently after a morning swim under the Florida sunshine in our host’s pool.

Day 6
I finally located my friend and colleague Maurice Brungardt, a professor of history. He lives on Front Street, at the end of Walnut, next to the Audubon Zoo. The house is on high ground, near the Mississippi River levee, so he does need to work about flooding. But the winds could be fierce.
He and his wife, Mariangela, left their Buick of a pre-energy-scare era in the garage and drove their Geo Metro to Jackson. When they found gas, they went on to Memphis, stayed the night with friends of friends, found more gas, and drove on to Kansas City to stay with a sister and her husband. In talking to him, I remembered our having lunch the week before, when we had talked about the hurricane in the Gulf and reassured each other that it was not going to hit New Orleans.
This afternoon I went to the Postal Service site and changed our address to that of Kathy’s mother’s house in Chicago.
The good news: Geico told me that shifting our address to Chicago brought our auto insurance down by $100 a month for the next six months.

Day 7
Tonight we went to dinner at the Pensacola Beach home of friends of longstanding of Neil and Abby. They were among the fortunate few; their house was damaged, mostly by water, but not destroyed in Hurricane Ivan last year—which also disrupted plans for their friends’ wedding. Along the way, however, we saw the devastation left by Ivan. Many skeletons of abandoned houses dot the beach. Trash is scattered in a wide swath. For sale signs attract no buyers.
Is that what we will find in New Orleans?

Day 8
From Fr. Ray Schroth, S.J., a one-time Loyola journalism professor comes this plea:
“I realize that this letter is for the most part too late to achieve its purpose. But my friend Peter Reichard, a New Orleans political writer who was my student friend and editor of the Loyola U New Orleans Maroon when I taught there, now safe in Chicago, left a message on my phone which I have just received.
”Peter asks me to write or call all my friends in journalism and impress upon you that ‘New Orleans has been hung out to dry by the Federal government.’ His own brother, who volunteered to stay behind and help, was now trapped in Charity Hospital with no help in sight. The situation is a ‘national shame,’ he said, and ‘FEMA is not doing squat!’ The ‘American can-do spirit,’ he said, has been forgotten. He fears that his brother might die. Meanwhile snipers are on the rooftops.
”I realize that you have already read many reports like that, and most likely the crisis has abated. But I also figure you should know of Peter’s trust in you. It reminds me of the great scene in the old black and white film, ‘Deadline USA,’ where the old immigrant woman, mother of a girl murdered by the mob, brings the incriminating evidence to Humphrey Bogart, courageous managing editor of “The Day,” which has been sold to its competitor and is in its last day of publication. Bogart asks Mrs. Schmidt why she did not bring this evidence to the police. She replies: ‘I no know police. I know you. I know newspaper.’”
The New York Times today published a story about the Times-Picayune’s efforts to continue publishing during the crisis. One person mentioned is Mary Chauvin, a copy editor, who got her education in journalism at Loyola and at The Maroon. The Times-Picayune is often criticized, but it has been doing an extraordinary and excellent job of reporting and publishing the news this week—even after its own building was flooded, its presses under water, its employees and their families in danger of losing their own lives. Today it published an open letter to George W. Bush. It deserves to be printed in full:
Editorial: Not Acceptable
The Times-Picayune Editorial Board
A day after a normally easy-going Mayor Ray Nagin blasted federal officials’ seeming indifference to the plight of New Orleanians who are stranded and dying, President Bush stood on the lawn of the White House and conceded the point: The federal government did not move quickly enough or forcefully enough to help those people hit hardest by Hurricane Katrina. “The results are not acceptable,” the president said before boarding a helicopter to go survey the storm’s damage.
It’s good to hear the president admit his administration’s shortcomings, and it’s even better to hear his promise to help all of us who are in need. But the sad truth remains that the federal government’s slow start has already proved fatal to some of the most vulnerable people in the New Orleans area. Water has killed hundreds, if not thousands, of people. A lack of water to drink is exacting its toll on others.
“I don’t want to see anybody do anymore goddamn press conferences,” the mayor said during a WWL radio interview Thursday. “Put a moratorium on press conferences. Don’t do another press conference until the resources are in this city.”
The mayor had obviously become fed up with federal bureaucrats’ use of future tense verbs. “Don’t tell me 40,000 people are coming here,” he said. “They’re not here. It’s too doggone late. Now get off your asses and do something, and let’s fix the biggest goddamn crisis in the history of this country.”
We applaud the mayor for giving voice to an entire city’s frustration. How could the most powerful and technologically advanced nation in the history of the world have responded so feebly to this crisis?
The president’s admission of his administration’s mistakes will mean nothing unless the promised help is deployed immediately. Each life is precious, and there isn’t a second chance to save a single one of them. No more talk of what’s going to happen. We only want to hear what is being done. The lives of our people depend on it.

Day 9
We leave for Chicago this morning. In a few hours we will load the car with cat cages and what little luggage we have, kiss daughter, son-in-law and grandson good-by, bid farewell to our hosts and be snarled at by the dachshund one last time.

Updated on December 2, 2005