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FULL
TEXT OF JAMES O'BYRNE'S SPEECH
Keynote
address delivered to the ACES conference
Friday, April 21, 2006 in Cleveland, Ohio,
by James O’Byrne, Features editor for The Times-Picayune
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This is a story about the power of newspapers. On Monday afternoon,
Aug. 29, the day that Katrina hit, I and the art critic for the
paper, Doug MacCash, stood on a railroad bridge over Canal Boulevard,
a broad avenue that spans the city from the Mississippi River all
the way north to the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.
As we looked to the north, over the Lakeview neighborhood where
I and many of my colleagues lived, I lifted my digital camera and
snapped this picture. The Shell station where I bought my gas is
visible to the left. My coffee shop is just out of frame, to the
right. My house is less than a mile away.
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 see that this was not in fact a sea, but a river, flowing
rapidly and inexorably south, toward the Superdome, the newspaper,
the core of our city.
Earlier, as Doug and I had headed out from the paper, riding down
the abandoned interstate on our bikes, a symphony of national media
reports was trumpeting the fact that New Orleans had lucked out
again. Even as we stood on the railroad overpass, national news
programs were broadcasting that the city had, quote, “dodged a bullet,” words
that became a virtual media catchphrase for the rest of Monday and
well into Tuesday.
But these national media outlets had sent to town in most instances
a single reporter, and from where each of them stood, in their downtown
and French Quarter hotels, on the high ground close to the Mississippi
River, the phrase seemed to fit. It was all they could see.
On the other hand, Doug and I were merely two of more than 30 Times-Picayune
reporters, editors and photographers who fanned out across the city
and the suburbs as the winds subsided, which made us, the local
newspaper, the most fully informed, the most vital and the most
comprehensive source of immediate information about what was happening in
New Orleans. It is a role we have never relinquished. Because this is a newspaper
story.
As it happened, Doug and I were the only reporters who made it
to the edge of Lakeview that day, and were the first reporters to
grasp the extent of the catastrophe that would soon engulf us.
For New Orleans, the unfathomable was occurring. Over the next
24 hours, most of the city went under water, and stayed that 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 and mud
and sewage and oil. Within a single day, our way of life disappeared.
In modern times no American city has been ravaged by disaster quite
in the way that New Orleans was struck down by the flood that followed
Hurricane Katrina.
For the newspaper, it has been the most extraordinary story of
our lives, as we report each day on a nightmare that we also live.
We are narrator and subject of the story of New Orleans, a quandary
that, pre-Katrina, we were usually able to avoid. Among the 30 staffers
in my department, for example, 13 had homes that suffered significant damage
or total destruction in Katrina. They, like dozens of Times-Picayune employees,
understand the stress, the despair, the frustration and the struggle
that is life in New Orleans these days.
Now, hurricane threats are a familiar way of life for anyone who
lives in harm’s way. And it’s a dirty little secret of life along
the Gulf Coast that whenever a hurricane gets into the Gulf, everyone
starts rooting for someone else to get slammed.
When Katrina got into the Gulf, it was pretty clear it was going
to hit somewhere. And we were frankly OK if it hit somewhere else.
It had been 40 years since our last great storm, Hurricane Betsy,
and even though we had narrowly missed disaster a few times since,
and were long overdue, we were confident that our luck would hold.
Then came the phone call to the paper that made everyone’s heart
skip a beat. The call came on the Saturday before the storm from
Max Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami,
to our reporter, Mark Schleifstein. Now, Mark and Max knew each
other well, because of Schleifstein’s extensive reporting on the vulnerabilities
of New Orleans to hurricanes. Indeed, Mark had been the harbinger of
doom for so long that his annual hurricane warnings were sometimes dismissed,
even by his friends and co-workers, as ‘weather porn.’
But now, one of the greatest storms every recorded in the Gulf,
a Category 5 killer, was bearing down on us, and the director of
the National Hurricane Center was on the phone, and Mark had our
full attention. Max had a simple question: “Mark,” he asked seriously,
“how far above sea level is the third floor of your building?”
We started to get the idea that we might be in trouble.
But as it turned out, New Orleans survived Hurricane Katrina in
relatively decent shape considering her wrath. The power grid was
devastated, trees were down all over the city, roofs were torn off.
But the core of the city remained intact.
Like the just-commemorated San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which
sparked a fire far more devastating than the quake itself, it was
the second catastrophe, after the worst of the storm was headed
north, that devastated New Orleans. This one, though, was man-made.
On the northern reaches of the city, hours after Katrina’s worst
had passed, key floodwalls designed and built by the federal government
collapsed one by one — an event that our reporting since the storm
has revealed to be one of the greatest engineering failures in our
nation’s history.
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| The ovation
continued for O'Byrne, his back to the camera, after he returned
to his table. |
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The water rose in the city for two more days before it finally started to
fall. The magnitude of the devastation caused by the flooding was
and is difficult to fathom if you have not seen it. Multiple failures
of the Corps of Engineers levee system inundated 80 percent of New
Orleans with at least three feet of water. That’s an area seven
times the size of Manhattan island.
In many neighborhoods of every economic stripe, the water exceeded
eight feet, and stayed for three weeks. More than 1 million people
were displaced. More than 200,000 homes were heavily damaged or
destroyed.
Indeed, if you add up all the houses that were heavily damaged
by Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005, in all of Texas,
Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, they still don’t add up to the
destruction caused in Orleans Parish alone.
More than 1,200 people perished in Louisiana, almost all in the
New Orleans area, as a direct result of the storm, which doesn’t
count hundreds of elderly, sick or frail who died shortly after
evacuating the city. In my neighborhood, 40 of my neighbors died,
and another 17 remain missing.
The reason for the missing, which number in the hundreds citywide,
is becoming clear. The devastation is so vast that body recovery
continues to this day, nearly eight months after the storm. Three
weeks ago, the remains of an elderly man were found in his attic
in my Lakeview neighborhood by cadaver dogs doing second searches of destroyed
neighborhoods.
And on Monday, five days ago, in the Lower Ninth Ward, debris removal
teams found the skeletal remains of two people underneath a shattered
house. Imagine a catastrophe so vast that body recovery is still
going on nearly eight months after the event, and you will start
to understand what we now know: If you haven’t been to New Orleans, it’s
hard to fathom the magnitude of what happened there.
Now the flood, and the ineptitude of the government’s response
to it, made for reporting conditions that probably do not have a
historical precedent in journalism on American soil.
The water that Doug and I had seen on Monday afternoon, and written
about on Monday night, arrived at our newspaper’s doorstep in force
early on Tuesday morning. We awoke to water three feet deep at our
doorstep, stretching in every direction, and continuing to rise.
The only dry land visible was the interstate that was directly in
front of us, but reachable only by traveling three-quarters of a mile on
a flooded service road.
Then we received word that a SWAT team had been called to the Orleans
Parish Prison, directly across the Interstate from our building,
and home to more than 1,000 felons. It, too, was flooded, and word
was that the guards were beginning to lose control of the place.
Under these conditions, we realized that we could not stay in our building,
and we beat our now famous retreat in the backs of our blue newspaper
trucks.
Now as we headed across the Mississippi River in about a dozen
trucks, one small group of trucks ended up at our suburban West
Bank bureau, about a 15-minute drive from downtown. Having seen
on their trip across the river that the strip of New Orleans closest
to the river was dry, our then-Sports Editor, now City Editor, David Meeks,
a veteran newsman who had once run our suburban operation, determined
to come right back across the bridge with a team of volunteers and
head Uptown to keep reporting.
At the bureau, David convinced the editor to give him one of the
trucks, and he took a motley group back into a city rapidly devolving
into chaos and danger. Among them were the music critic, the religion
writer and the art critic, my friend Doug MacCash, who I can only
assume worked for five straight weeks in the city by treating it as some
kind of performance art show from hell.
I can’t tell you how many battle-hardened correspondents from national
newspapers and television networks told us conditions were worse
in New Orleans in the first week after the storm than they experienced
in most war zones. A CNN producer who arrived the Friday after the
storm realized how much trouble the city was in when she walked
into the CNN trailer and saw Christiana Amanpour and the wartime camera crews
in the room, fresh from Iraq.
When our own reporting team crossed the river on that Tuesday morning
to head back downtown, scarcely an hour after we had evacuated our
building, they came upon police and citizens at a downtown Wal-Mart.
Mistaking it for a command post and relief center, they charged
breezily into a massive and systematic looting spree. The police were not
there to stop it. They were there to participate. When somebody shouted out,
“The Times-Picayune’s taking pictures. Let’s go out back and take
care of business,” they knew first, that it was time to go, and
second, that the city was now completely out of control.
When police learned that we had set up a makeshift bureau in an
Uptown house, a SWAT team came by the house and dropped off guns
for our protection.
While working in the city one day, reporter Gordon Russell, along
with a photographer from the New York Times, got swept up in a police
dragnet for looters. Both were thrown violently against a wall,
police held automatic weapons to their heads and threatened them,
then threw Gordon’s notebook and the camera’s flash card across the
street. Eventually, they were released, badly shaken.
In another case, staff photographers Ted Jackson and David Grunfeld
got permission from an evacuated friend to break into her house
for food and shelter. Ted broke in a back window pane, gained entry
into the house, and went to the front door to let David in. When
he opened the door, he was looking down the barrel of a shotgun pointed
at his head by a very twitchy neighbor who demanded that he lie on the ground.
The neighbor had been advised by police to shoot looters on site.
Fortunately, he ignored that advice long enough to receive an explanation.
And another group of officers, mistaking our Times-Picayune truck
for a stolen vehicle on a looting mission one day, stopped the truck
and pointed rifles at Meeks as he was driving back to the makeshift
bureau. Later, when his colleague in the truck, Mike Montalbano,
said, “I don’t know what I would have done if they’d accidentally shot
you,” David told him, “Don’t worry about it. If that had happened, they’d
have shot you too.”
By the way, during evacuation of the parish prison, 15 prisoners
did in fact escape. Later in the first week after Katrina, members
of our team in New Orleans went back to the paper with a kayak to
retrieve equipment, and found several orange prison jumpsuits abandoned
on the edge of the Interstate in front of our building.
These were the conditions under which our team of reporters and
photographers did extraordinary and memorable journalism, siphoning
gasoline to run cars to recharge cellphones and laptops each night,
huddling in unairconditioned houses during the worst heat wave of
the year and risking their lives every day to get the story. As veterans
of their hometown paper, their knowledge of the city, their ability to go
everywhere and to understand the scope, and impact, and context
of what was happening, was why The Times-Picayune owned this story.
It was but one of many moments that defined what it means to be
a newspaper.
Meanwhile, the larger paper was stretched out along a line that
extended from New Orleans 80 miles west to Baton Rouge and 150 miles
east to Mobile, Alabama.
Throughout those first weeks, Times-Picayune staffers had to contend
with monumental personal stresses, not knowing the conditions of
their homes, or, worse, knowing full well that their homes were
destroyed. Many didn’t know the fate of loved ones for several days.
One of my assistant editors was missing for five days, when I learned that
she had been plucked from her roof by helicopter. And we all had to find
places to live while we worked endless days and nights.
My job was to oversee the creation from scratch of a fully functioning
newsroom and business operation in rented space at a technology
park in Baton Rouge. First order of business on Tuesday night: Send
the head of IT out to charge $22,000 in software and computers on
his American Express card. When he asked me, “Can you guarantee that
I’ll be reimbursed,” I told him, “Absolutely.” Using my supernumerary powers
as Features editor. I became a shopping fool, charging 30 rental
cars on Publisher’s Ashton Phelps’ American Express. I sent an assistant
sports editor to Wal-Mart with the General Manager’s Amex, and told
him to load up a newspaper truck with a generator, gas cans, food
and water for the New Orleans bureau. In less than 18 hours, we were a
fully functioning newsroom again.
Given the extraordinary pressures we operated under each day, there
was never a time where a high-functioning copy desk was more important.
The online paper that a small team produced Tuesday night at the
Houma Courier, while most of us continued on to Baton Rouge, is
a triumph of determination and improvisation. But it is also a copy editor’s
nightmare. You can look at it online and see for yourself.
By Wednesday evening, order and discipline had been restored and
the Thursday paper showed it. By Thursday night, we were back in
print, first in Houma about an hour south of New Orleans, and then
a week later in Mobile at our sister paper, the Press Register.
Meanwhile, our online presence had been transformed. Pages on NOLA.com that
averaged 80,000 page hits a day before the storm were now averaging 30 million
hits a day after Katrina. We had become not only the voice for our
readers, but for the world.
Now let me say a few words about our Public Service Pulitzer Prize.
All Public Service Pulitzers are awarded to the staff of a paper,
but in most instances we know how this works. I was an editor on
the special project that won the Public Service Pulitzer in 1997,
and the “staff” in that instance consisted of a handful of writers, a handful
of editors, one staff photographer, and the one copy editor who
had worked on the winning project.
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| One of two large photos that
The Times-Picayune donated to the ACES auction shows the flooding
from a levee break caused by Hurricane Katrina. |
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But Katrina was different. Copy editors produced papers on Sunday night
while the storm raged, and on Monday as the city filled up. They
boarded the trucks as we fled the building. They lost their homes
and their communities. They arrived in Baton Rouge without possessions
or a place to live. And they did whatever it took to keep us operating
as a newspaper. They achieved greatness, visible on our pages every day,
and they were among those who stood in the newsroom last Monday when the
Pulitzers were announced, and shed tears, as most of us did, remembering
what a terrible price we paid for this honor.
So the members of The Times-Picayune copy desk who worked through
Katrina’s aftermath, including two in this room, Paula Devlin and
Carol Carpenter, are Pulitzer Prize winners in every sense of the
term.
Of course, to me the other extremely important function that the
copy desk brought to our Baton Rouge operation is that they set
up the food table. That is why I made sure the Features department
was in the same room as the Rim. I’m still trying to lose those
Katrina pounds.
Today, the suburbs of New Orleans have been quick to recover. But
New Orleans itself, for now, is two cities: The streets of the French
Quarter and Uptown New Orleans, spared the flooding, are again buzzing
with traffic. More and more restaurants and coffee shops have reopened.
And the Real Estate market in these unflooded neighborhoods is robust.
But there is a shadow city, stretching toward Lake Pontchartrain
and for many miles to the east. You can easily drive through city
and suburban streets for three hours and never see a habitable house.
Nearly eight months after the floodwalls collapsed, these neighborhoods
are still powerless and comatose.
But we know something about newspapers that should be a lesson
for all of us. There exists in New Orleans now an extraordinary
and explicit bond between its citizens and the local paper. Here
are some of the ways we’ve seen it.
While Doug and I rode along the edge of Lakeview that Monday in
August, we came upon a bridge where firemen had pulled about 40
people off of their roofs and out of their second stories. And when
we, two scruffy reporters from the local newspaper, arrived on that
bridge, the people there were simply thrilled to see us. And I thought to
myself, how can they possibly be happy. They’re stranded, surrounded
by water, and have just lost everything. But what became apparent
was this: the local newspaper had arrived, and that was enough for
them. It meant their story was going to be told. And that made them
happy.
Likewise, when Ted Jackson and a group of photographers headed
to the Convention Center one day amid rumors — false, of course
— of rioting, they approached the building with tremendous caution
and even a little fear. When they turned the corner onto Convention
Center Boulevard, several people in the crowd rushed toward them — then grabbed
each gently by the arm and took them off to photograph the horrors of neglect
happening there. “Tell the truth,” they said, and sent them on their
way.
Our columnist, Chris Rose, who was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize
this year, spent weeks wandering his ruined city and writing deeply
personal accounts of his alternating states of anger, determination
and unspeakable grief. He received 10,000 e-mails of thanks in less
than four months.
I got an e-mail yesterday that is in some ways typical of e-mails
we get at The Times-Picayune all the time now. Here is what it said:
“There is just no way to say how very proud of the T-P I am. I
can well
remember sitting in Roswell GA (physically OK) reading every word
on NOLA.com trying to get the real picture of what had happened
to our city, our friends, and trying to get an idea of what was
left, if anything. I have ALWAYS been a newspaper reader (even as
a kid), but this story was so huge, so important, so critical and so essential
to my "mental health", that without the courageous efforts of all
the people at the Times-Picayune, we would not have made it. Thank
you.”
We hear it from our readers on a constant basis. They now understand
what a newspaper gives them that they can’t get anywhere else. Now
I believe Katrina did not create that connection. It merely brought
it into high relief for everyone, us and them. The challenge for
American newspapers is to figure out a way to rekindle that connection without
having to suffer major catastrophe. I’m not sure how you do that. But the
one thing I am sure of now is that newspapers matter. We do things
nobody else can do. And we’re vital to our communities. So that’s
one important message that I want to send you away with this evening.
Here is the other: We in New Orleans know that Katrina is a test
for us, a test that will determine whether we survive, whether we
once again become a viable city, or fade into third-class status
as a once grand backwater.
But I also believe that Katrina is a test for America, and for
America’s media. What the nation does may well determine our fate
as much as anything we in New Orleans might do for ourselves.
We hear much about the great “Katrina fatigue” overtaking the land.
But our version of Katrina fatigue is different. For us, Katrina
fatigue is still being exiled from your house nearly eight months
after the storm. Our fatigue is insurance companies pulling out
of the city, making it impossible for citizens to rebuild. Our fatigue is
more than 250,000 residents who want to come home but can’t, for lack of
housing, or schools, or money to rebuild their shattered lives.
On March 10, the Army Corps of Engineers claimed that the events
of Aug. 29 were so unusual that they were, quote, “unforeseeable.”
Four days later, we reported that the Corps of Engineers, in its
own laboratories, simulated the collapse of this exact type of seawall,
under the exact conditions faced in Hurricane Katrina, 20 years ago,
in 1986. Then the Corps proceeded to build those seawalls to protect New
Orleans, knowing from its own data that the design literally would
not hold water.
Just three weeks ago, seven months after the storm, in the face
of the overwhelming evidence revealed by our reporting, the Corps
finally admitted that its levee designs were flawed. More than 1,200
people are dead.
Today New Orleans lives in limbo, waiting for the federal government
that admits its role in our destruction to also fulfill its promise
to rebuild. If America allows that government to escape responsibility
for these failures, then you might ask yourselves: In which of your
cities can you feel safe, and assured that if you ever need help, it
will be there?
We understand why for so many, this story seems to be winding down.
But for us, the struggle is just beginning. So my request — you
can even call it a plea if you’d like — to you and to anyone who
works in the media, is very simple: Please, don’t forget about us.
Thank you.
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