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By Matthew Crowley
The lights went down and James O’Byrne let thepictures start telling his story.
A house reduced to a pile of sticks.
A Volkswagen bug with both doors ripped off, holes where the windowsand windshields were.
A man wrapped in a black trash bag, huddled under a store awning.
Cars up to the top of their hoods in water.
A woman on her knees, mouth agape midscream, her face a mask ofanguish.
Katrina had been there. She had ripped and ravaged and ruined.
For the staff of the New Orleans Times-Picayune, thestorm became a test of resourcefulness and will. The staff membershad lost their homes, their possessions, their office. They wereseparated from family and neighbors. But nothing, Times-PicayuneFeatures Editor O’Byrne said, was going to stop them from telling thestory of what had happened to them and their city.
“This is a story about the power of newspapers,” O’Byrne said inhis keynote address at the American Copy Editors Society’s annualbanquet Friday night at the Cleveland Renaissance.
O’Byrne started against the backdrop of a picture of water. Itfilled the street and the frame of the picture. This, he said, wasthe Lakeview neighborhood where he and many of his colleagues lived.The gasoline station where he fueled his car was on one edge ofthe frame, the sign peeking through the water. His house was less thana mile a way. He’d snapped the picture from a railroad bridge, sitting onhis bicycle.
“As I tried to process this extraordinary, life-changing event,I looked down through the gaps in the railroad ties beneath my feet,and I could that this was not, in fact, a sea, but a river, flowingrapidly and inexorably south, toward the Superdome, the newspaper,the core of our city.”
Some reporters from out of town arrived on the scene and declaredthat New Orleans had “dodged a bullet” when the storm hit. Fromtheir vantage points in the French Quarter, on high ground, thephrase seemed to fit, O’Byrne said; it was all they could see.
But the staff of the Times-Picayune knew a different story. Reporters,editors and photographers would fan out across the city to tellit.
“For New Orleans, the unfathomable was occurring,” he said. “Overthe next 24 hours, most of the city went under water, and stayedthat way for a very long time. Our urban landscape, our way of life,our people, our commerce were buried by a black flood of water andmud and sewage and oil. Within a single day, our way of life disappeared.”
No American city had ever been so ravaged in the way the stormand the following flood had wrecked New Orleans, O’Byrne said. Multiplelevee failures sent three feet of water streaming into 80 percentof the city, an area seven times the size of Manhattan. More than1,200 people died in Louisiana, almost all in New Orleans, as a direct resultof the storm, he said. More than 1 million people were displaced; more than 200,000 homes were heavily damaged or destroyed.
And, of the 30 staff members in O’Byrne’s department, 13 had homesseverely damaged or completely wrecked by the storm. Forty of O’Byrne’sneighbors died. Seventeen are still missing.
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| O'Byrne,left, receives a standing ovation after giving an addressat the ACES conference banquet that left few dry eyes. | | The water O’Byrne, and his Aug. 29 bike partner, DougMacCash, had seen from that railroad bridge, arrived at the paperthe next day, he said. Three feet of water stretched in every direction,and was still rising. Dry land was three miles away on the interstate,he said, reachable only by traversing a flooded service road forthree quarters of a mile.
“These were the conditions under which our team of reporters andphotographers did extraordinary and memorable journalism,” O’Byrnesaid, “siphoning gasoline to run cars and recharge cell phones andlaptops each night, huddling in unairconditioned houses during theworst heat wave of the year and risking their lives every day to getthe story.”
In the days after the storm, one T-P reporter, Gordon Russell,got caught in a police dragnet and had an automatic weapon pointedat his head. He was released, minus his notebook, badly shaken,O’Byrne said. In another case, photographers Ted Jackson and DavidGrunfeld got permission from a neighbor to break into a house for food. Jacksonbroke a window to get in and met a shotgun barrel. A neighbor, who’d been told to shoot looters on sight, was holding the gun. Lucky for thephotographer, O’Byrne said, the gun-toting neighbor listened toJackson’s explanation. He didn’t shoot.
O’Byrne’s job was to build a newsroom from scratch in a rentedtechnology-park space in Baton Rouge; the staff had headed thereseeking haven. An information technology staff member used his owncredit card to charge $22,000 in computer equipment. O’Byrne rented30 cars on the publisher’s plastic. He sent the assistant sports editor to Wal-Mart for gasoline, gasoline cans, food and water. He used thegeneral manager’s credit card.
The paper published an online edition Tuesday night in Houma. Printwould follow.
“In less than 18 hours,” he said. “We had a fully functioning newsroomagain.” By Thursday night, three days after the storm hit, the paperwas back in print, first in Houma, La., later in Mobile. The Website was transformed, he said. Pages that averaged 80,000 page hitsa day before the storm were getting 80 million hits a day after.
"Copy editors produced papers on Sunday night while the storm raged,and on Monday as the city filled up," O’Byrne said. “They boardedthe trucks as we fled the building. They lost their homes and theircommunities. They arrived in Baton Rouge without possession or aplace to live. And they did whatever they could to keep us operatingas a newspaper.”
The headlines, hundreds of point sizes large, told the city’s storyover several days: “CATASTROPHIC.” “UNDERWATER.” “HELP US, PLEASE.”
New Orleans residents, O’Byrne said, expressed their gratitudefor their newspaper’s work during the storm. When O’Byrne and MacCasharrived on a Lakeview bridge, where firemen had pulled people fromroofs and the second stories of their homes, they were met warmly.
“… I thought to myself how can they be happy to see us,” O’Byrnesaid. “They’re stranded, surrounded by water and have just losteverything. But what became apparent was this: the newspaper hadarrived, and that was enough for them.”
When Jackson and other photographers went to the Convention Centeron a later day, people rushed to them, took them by the arms andshowed them devastation.
“Tell the truth,” the people said.
The gratitude continues now, O’Byrne said. One e-mailer wrote recentlyto say how proud she was of her hometown paper.
“I can well remember sitting is Roswell, Ga., (physically OK) readingevery word on Nola.com trying to get the real picture of what happenedto our city,” she wrote. “ … without the courageous efforts allof the people at the Times-Picayune, we would not have made it.”
The Times-Picayune won two Pulitzer Prizes for its work, one forpublic service, the other for distinguished reporting for breakingnews.
“So the members of the Times-Picayune copy desk, who worked throughKatrina’s aftermath, including two in this room, Paula Devlin andCarol Carpenter, are Pulitzer Prize winners in every sense of theterm,” O’Byrne said.
Now, more than seven months after the storm, New Orleans livesin limbo, O’Byrne said. Although uptown New Orleans, spared by theflooding has come back, and now buzzes with traffic, the suburbsare still dark, desolate, destroyed. O’Byrne someone can drive throughsuburban streets for three hours without seeing an inhabitable house.
“We understand why for so many, this story seems to be windingdown,” O’Byrne said in closing. “But for us it’s just the beginning.So my request — you can call it a plea if you like -- to you andanyone else works in the media is very simple:
“Please, don’t forget about us.”
Matthew Crowley is a business copy editor for the Las VegasReview-Journal. He can be reached at matthew_crowley@copydesk.org. ROBINSON PRIZE WINNER AND AUBESPIN SCHOLAR SPEAKAT BANQUET |
