Texas floods: how to talk to people on the worst day of their lives

0:00From NPR News, this is All Things Considered. I'm Scott Detrow. Two weeks ago, Austin-based NPR immigration correspondent Sergio Martínez-Beltrán was on a reporting trip in Detroit when catastrophic flooding hit the Texas Hill Country. He was reporting a totally different story, but as often happens with breaking news, reporters switched gears. He was soon on a plane headed back home to cover the Texas floods. Landed in Austin, left my personal car in the airport parking lot, rented a car and just like went straight to Kerrville. Even though he rented an SUV, getting to Kirk County, the epicenter of the disaster, took much longer than usual.

0:35There were a lot of roads that were closed because they still had water on them. In those early hours, his GPS wasn't helping much either. It was kind of scary because the GPS was not aware of those road closures. So at times it was sending me through areas that as soon as I got to those roads, I had to stop and slam on my brakes because there was water and I could not see it. Once he arrived, Sergio's first stop was an elementary school that had been turned into a reunification center for victims and their families. Right away, I knew this was pretty bad because there were hundreds of people there.

1:07And it was 9 p.m. and hundreds of people were out there waiting for their loved ones. So I came on Tuesday, which was four days after the floods. That's NPR reporter Kat Lonsdorf. She was part of a later wave of staffers sent to Texas to cover the disaster, the scope of which was still coming into focus when Kat arrived in Kirk County. There's a little bit more clarity of what the destruction is. There's more clarity of the numbers of people lost, of the people still missing. And quite frankly, a lot of times around then is when it starts turning into a recovery operation. Water from the river had receded by then, but Katz says the destruction that was left behind was unlike any natural disaster she'd seen before.

1:45I was driving in off the highway, which is about two miles away from the river. And as I'm driving in, everything looks normal. And it's not until you get a block, two blocks, three blocks from the river, it just feels like you flip into the upside down. Consider this. Covering natural disasters is one of the hardest assignments out there. Coming up, we hear from two NPR reporters on how to ask questions and report these stories with empathy and care.

2:16From NPR, I'm Scott Tetreault.

2:26It's Consider This from NPR. NPR's Sergio Martinez-Baltron and Kat Lonsdorf both brought different approaches to their coverage of the Texas floods this month. I started our interview by asking both of them about how they approached people who experienced the worst in the floods. I am always trying to keep in mind, front of mind, that you are approaching people on what is probably one of the worst, if not the worst day of their life. I am always telling them who I am, what we're there trying to do. And then if they have really any hesitation whatsoever about talking to me in that moment of what they're experiencing, I don't push it.

3:06Because I think that someone letting you into that space of grief, that space of mourning, is kind of just a sacred space for someone to let another human, especially a stranger, into. And for me, I'm always amazed how many people allow us into that space with them. And I always try to be just really respectful of that time. Sergei, were you thinking, what to you was the most important thing for you to get out of those interviews? Was it a sense of what happened? Was it a sense of how they were feeling? What were you thinking about as you faced those hard conversations? For me, it was to give our audiences to a sense of who was impacted by this.

3:48For me, for example, it was important to go into the trailer parks near the Guadalupe River and talk to people there and tell their stories. For me, it was also important, and I always try to approach it this way, of trying to go to places where maybe people have not been annoyed by reporters as much, quite frankly. So that means driving more, trying to get to places that are a little bit more complicated, at times a little bit more dangerous, but doing that. So, for example, one of the days I tried to go to Hunt, Texas, which is also an area affected. And it's usually a 20-minute drive from Kerrville to Hunt, but the roads were closed.

4:29So I drove an hour and a half through back roads, going through bridges that were kind of sketchy to get to these areas and talk to people because those stories had not been told. People had not been approached by reporters there yet. So for me, that was super important. And it's also always giving the person I'm talking to the control of the interview. That's how I approach it. At the end of the day, I'm so grateful they're talking to me. And I'm going to ask a bunch of questions that might sound invasive or uncomfortable or might feel a little bit hard to talk about because it's about their worst day of their lives.

5:09But I always tell them, if you want this to end, we stop the interview and we move on. So Kat, you have had a lot of experience covering hard stories, whether it's this most recent assignment, whether it was a lot of time you spent reporting in Israel, whether it was reporting you've done in the war in Ukraine and elsewhere. I mean, how do you manage the just very overwhelming nature of the stories you're covering and the interviews you're doing? Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the more challenging things when you're covering this kind of stuff is also taking care of yourself. So really taking the time once you can to sit and think about it, you know, and really like, you know, talking to your other colleagues, because they're also seeing a lot of the same things that you are.

5:52And it's just so important to acknowledge it between each other. I think, too, what makes it hard for us, or at least for me, is that many times we do this type of coverage, right? And there's no closure or it feels like there's no closure. Like we go in for a few days and then we are pulled out of the assignment and then that's it. Right. So for me, it helps me to stay in touch with people. So I tend to follow up with folks even when I'm no longer on the assignment. I tend to keep talking to them just to almost navigate the whole situation with them to see what's happening. So it doesn't feel like there's no closure for me in a way.

6:31And also, I feel like it's the right thing to do because we have asked these people to tell us their stories on their worst days. I think the least they deserve is for us to stay with them a little longer. I want to ask you both. It's been a couple of weeks now since you were back. What is one interview or conversation or just something you physically saw that's sticking with you and to you tells the story of this terrible flooding? For me, there was this moment, I did a story about people looking for other people's pets that were lost and that went missing. And, you know, on its head, maybe it's not the most serious story.

7:13But there was this moment, you know, I was following this woman who drove five hours from Dallas overnight to help people find their missing pets. It's this thing that she's done before in other disasters, and she really felt a calling to do it. And, you know, in that moment with this woman who was out there trying to find cats for people in a trailer park who had lost everything but were also looking for their pets, you know, I witnessed a moment where she actually found a cat that a woman who lived there, who was also there searching through the rubble of her ruined home, she thought her cat had died.

7:52And I got to witness the moment where they were reunited and this moment of just pure joy in such a terrible setting. That's Rambo. He's alive. Oh, good. How do you make you? That's Rambo. Yeah, he heard your voice, Mom. Rambo. Oh, goody. And those stick with me just as much as the tragedy. I will say as somebody listening to that story in the car, not knowing how it turned out, you really kept the listener in suspense until the cat was safely found. But like, yeah, I mean, like you said, it wasn't maybe the most important thing, but it's something that people can deeply relate to. And if it's your cat or dog missing, you know, that's a really terrible feeling.

8:36For me, it was to see how the community came together. And I know this happens often in events like this, but it does not stop to amaze me to see that. I went to a Salvation Army a few days after the floods and the line to volunteer was so long that they had to turn people away because they just didn't have enough space for volunteers. churches were bringing uh more supplies i mean they were they were driving trucks to bring supplies from different parts of the state and and they had you know they were turned away too because they didn't have space so they were like come back tomorrow we hope to have some space tomorrow so seeing that was very very moving i also when i think about these moments of like the community coming together i think i can also think about how you know we cover this as as a network too you know um cat mentioned there were a lot of us from npr on the ground physically on the ground but then there were also people behind the scenes like a research team helping us find folks and helping us go to places that you know maybe we didn't have access to but they were helping us from their offices in dc or whatnot uh we also had member station reporters texas public radio houston public media so many other local public radio reporters were on the ground from day one.

9:53And that, I think, made the difference in our coverage, too, because we're all, like, helping each other try to tell this story that, again, it hasn't ended. That was NPR's Sergio Martinez Beltran and Kat Lonsdorf. This episode was produced by Kiera Joaquim. It was edited by Adam Rainey. Our executive producer is Sammy Yenigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.