Covering Katrina: navigating New Orleans in the days after the storm

0:0020 years ago, this week, NPR reported on one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in American history.

0:11It is gorgeous, it's sunny, and it is hard to believe that 12 hours from now or 24 hours from now, I mean, it will be anything but what I've just described. A Category 5 hurricane bears down on New Orleans. It's all things considered from NPR News. Hurricane Katrina.

0:28Greg Allen:As the storm approached, Gulf Coast communities prepared for the worst. I was based in Kansas City for NPR at that time and got the call from one of our managing editors, you know, can you go? And it was clear to all of us that this was the big one. Correspondent Greg Allen was in New Orleans for NPR. He had reported on storms before, but this one was clearly different. I'd never covered a hurricane where there had been that much anticipation and, you know, dread beforehand. Katrina was shaping up to be a monster of a storm. And many worried about the scale of the destruction in New Orleans, a city that on average sits several feet below sea level.

1:06The belief was that the entire city was likely to flood. There had been a number of stories about how vulnerable New Orleans was to flooding from a big hurricane like this. Consider this. Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans 20 years ago. And in some ways, the city has never fully recovered. NPR's Greg Allen reflects uncovering the catastrophe.

1:30From NPR, I'm Scott Tetra.

1:44It's Consider This from NPR. 20 years ago, NPR correspondent Greg Allen was on the ground in New Orleans reporting on Hurricane Katrina. For this week's Reporter's Notebook, I asked Greg about what it was like in New Orleans in those days after the storm. And we started our conversation by returning to the archives. In this segment, from August 29, 2005, you will hear Greg reporting on how, at first, people seemed to think New Orleans had caught a break. A survey downtown shows nearly every building sustained damage from Katrina's winds. Despite that, the good news is that the extreme flooding feared from a storm surge didn't materialize here.

2:20Just before she hit land, Katrina turned slightly east, a factor that may have eased the damage to the city. The storm hits and people think New Orleans dodged a bullet. Take me through what happened next from your memory, from your point of view.

2:33Greg Allen:Right. I mean, it's really, of course, not our finest moment because what happens is that the storm had veered toward Mississippi and actually did terrible damage in Mississippi, a 38-foot storm surge there. We knew that Louisiana did not get that large storm surge. So because of that, you have the sense, oh, we've dodged a bullet. So we didn't really understand at that point how bad it was because we didn't learn until the next morning when we woke up that there had been levy breaches. And I think some people knew. I mean, people were being rescued from rooftops on that first day as it hit, and we weren't aware of that.

3:07Though the reason we played that, though, is because that was by and large the initial view of a lot of people covering it, right? That wasn't unique to us. It was just a sense. And it's also, it's just hard, as we talk about in the middle of stories like this, it's hard to get a full sense of the scope of things. But you're reporting more information is coming in, and it is clear that there's catastrophic flooding, that levees have broken. I want to play something from your reporting on August 30th. This was an All Things Considered. Albertine Arsenault lives in the B.W. Cooper Housing Project, an aging complex of two-story brick buildings.

3:40She was one of many out this morning surveying the rising floodwaters. Last night when I went to bed, I didn't have no water in front of my door. We didn't have no water out here. This morning when I woke up, my house has water in it. I'm in the next block, the 3600 block. I have water. What floor are you on? I'm on the first, my apartment is like this, the first and second. I'll have to spend the night on the second floor if I stay the night. I don't know how to swim. That was the day after the storm we were able to go out. And as soon as we went out, we could kind of see that the water was coming in.

4:11And I was there with a producer, Mathoni Maturi, who you could hear there. And we parked our car. We were talking to some of these folks at this public housing complex. And then I looked over, and our car, which had been on dry pavement, suddenly was in a puddle. Water was coming in. And so we realized that we only had a limited amount of time before we had actually moved because our car could be flooded itself. And that's when you started to get the sense people were realizing the water was coming in, and we didn't know how high it was going to get and how much in danger we might be. And I feel like we're kind of tracking the progress of this story through clips of your reporting.

4:46I want to play something from this moment you're describing where you talk about what you're seeing as total chaos in New Orleans. Throughout New Orleans, the scene is one of almost total chaos. There's no power. Trees, debris and rising water make many roads impassable. Police and emergency officials are overwhelmed. On Earhart Boulevard, not far from the Superdome, a man lay on the side of the road today dead. his body covered by plastic sheeting. Residents said police said they'd handle it later. Katrina was a story that was about so many things. It was about the widespread devastation of American city.

5:21It was this very clear look at income inequality in a country and racial inequality, the way that black neighborhoods sustained so much more damage than white neighborhoods in New Orleans. But it was also a story about widespread distrust of government. And I feel like Katrina was one of those first moments where it was clear the government was not able to get the job done, right? You saw George W. Bush's administration really crater and never recover after this. You saw so many other things, just the FEMA's failure to be helpful, the chaos that you saw. I'm wondering what you make of government's role in this and what the legacy is so many years later from what you saw on that initial trip and in follow-up reporting.

6:05Well, you know, of course, the biggest surprise is how, you know, these kind of things happen like Katrina and you and you wonder if people really remembered. I think the popular consciousness people do remember. But on the other hand, a lot of our public policy behaves like it never happened. You know, I mean, what happened with Katrina, as you well know, this was a time when the George W. Bush administration had looked to downgrade the role of FEMA. And they said much of the same thing we're hearing now about that it's really up to states to do this to respond to disasters. And to a certain extent, it was the federal government's design of the levees that turned out to be somewhat faulty.

6:44And that led these levee failures, which led to the flooding. So the federal government's failure actually created this situation. And so you can say it was a lack of preparation.

6:54Greg Allen:And then also the response, as we've discussed, the response was just not there. Katrina, it's the story of what happened that week, and it's the story of the long, slow rebuilding process. Is there one story, reporting trip, that is most memorable to you about the rebuilding? Well, you know, the problem is, as a reporter, is that sometimes you go to places where the need is greatest. There's a story to tell. So I've spent a lot of time in Lower Ninth Ward over the last 20 years. I've gone there for several stories. And, you know, in some ways, it's not indicative of New Orleans as a whole because Lower Ninth Ward is a special case.

7:27It was always, I mean, it was a strong African-American middle-class community before Katrina. It has never come back. It's like a quarter of the population it had back then. But those are the stories that stick with you because I remember what it was like before. And then you go there and it's just after 20 years, you think it might never come back. And so, you know, you talk to people who are trying to make a go of it and you feel for them because they're living on a street where they used to have 20 neighbors. and now they have four, you know, and there used to be a bar down the corner, a church down the corner, a school down this other corner, and none of those things are there even now because the population is not there to sustain it.

8:08And so I, when I go there, I see the failures. I've talked to my colleague, John Burnett, who covered at the same time, and he's much more positive. He spends more time going back there and he says that the food's great, the culture is great. And I think He's right. New Orleans has come back in so many ways. But unfortunately, for a lot of people, it's just not the same city as it was before Katrina. And here's Greg Allen, who covered Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago. Thank you for talking to us about what you remember from that really terrible week. You're welcome.

8:50This episode was produced by Kai McNamee. It was edited by Adam Rainey. Our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.