| | FULLTEXT OF JAMES O'BYRNE'S SPEECH Keynoteaddress delivered to the ACES conference
Friday, April 21, 2006 in Cleveland, Ohio,
by James O’Byrne, Features editor for The Times-Picayune READ A STORY ABOUT THE SPEECH |
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 thepaper, Doug MacCash, stood on a railroad bridge over Canal Boulevard,a broad avenue that spans the city from the Mississippi River allthe way north to the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.
As we looked to the north, over the Lakeview neighborhood whereI and many of my colleagues lived, I lifted my digital camera andsnapped this picture. The Shell station where I bought my gas isvisible to the left. My coffee shop is just out of frame, to theright. 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, flowingrapidly 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 downthe abandoned interstate on our bikes, a symphony of national mediareports was trumpeting the fact that New Orleans had lucked outagain. Even as we stood on the railroad overpass, national newsprograms were broadcasting that the city had, quote, “dodged a bullet,” words that became a virtual media catchphrase for the rest of Monday andwell into Tuesday.
But these national media outlets had sent to town in most instancesa single reporter, and from where each of them stood, in their downtownand French Quarter hotels, on the high ground close to the MississippiRiver, 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-Picayunereporters, editors and photographers who fanned out across the cityand the suburbs as the winds subsided, which made us, the localnewspaper, the most fully informed, the most vital and the mostcomprehensive source of immediate information about what was happening inNew 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 itto the edge of Lakeview that day, and were the first reporters tograsp the extent of the catastrophe that would soon engulf us.
For New Orleans, the unfathomable was occurring. Over the next24 hours, most of the city went under water, and stayed that wayfor a very long time. Our urban landscape, our way of life, ourpeople, our commerce were buried by a black flood of water and mudand sewage and oil. Within a single day, our way of life disappeared.
In modern times no American city has been ravaged by disaster quitein the way that New Orleans was struck down by the flood that followedHurricane Katrina.
For the newspaper, it has been the most extraordinary story ofour 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 quandarythat, pre-Katrina, we were usually able to avoid. Among the 30 staffersin my department, for example, 13 had homes that suffered significant damageor total destruction in Katrina. They, like dozens of Times-Picayune employees, understand the stress, the despair, the frustration and the strugglethat is life in New Orleans these days.
Now, hurricane threats are a familiar way of life for anyone wholives in harm’s way. And it’s a dirty little secret of life alongthe Gulf Coast that whenever a hurricane gets into the Gulf, everyonestarts rooting for someone else to get slammed.
When Katrina got into the Gulf, it was pretty clear it was goingto 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 heartskip a beat. The call came on the Saturday before the storm fromMax Mayfield, the director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami,to our reporter, Mark Schleifstein. Now, Mark and Max knew eachother well, because of Schleifstein’s extensive reporting on the vulnerabilitiesof New Orleans to hurricanes. Indeed, Mark had been the harbinger ofdoom 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 ofthe National Hurricane Center was on the phone, and Mark had ourfull 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 inrelatively decent shape considering her wrath. The power grid wasdevastated, 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, whichsparked a fire far more devastating than the quake itself, it wasthe second catastrophe, after the worst of the storm was headednorth, that devastated New Orleans. This one, though, was man-made.
On the northern reaches of the city, hours after Katrina’s worsthad passed, key floodwalls designed and built by the federal governmentcollapsed one by one — an event that our reporting since the stormhas revealed to be one of the greatest engineering failures in ournation’s history.
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| The ovationcontinued for O'Byrne, his back to the camera, after he returnedto his table. | | The water rose in the city for two more days before it finally started tofall. The magnitude of the devastation caused by the flooding wasand is difficult to fathom if you have not seen it. Multiple failuresof the Corps of Engineers levee system inundated 80 percent of NewOrleans with at least three feet of water. That’s an area seventimes the size of Manhattan island.
In many neighborhoods of every economic stripe, the water exceededeight feet, and stayed for three weeks. More than 1 million peoplewere displaced. More than 200,000 homes were heavily damaged ordestroyed.
Indeed, if you add up all the houses that were heavily damagedby Hurricanes Katrina, Rita and Wilma in 2005, in all of Texas,Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, they still don’t add up to thedestruction caused in Orleans Parish alone.
More than 1,200 people perished in Louisiana, almost all in theNew Orleans area, as a direct result of the storm, which doesn’tcount hundreds of elderly, sick or frail who died shortly afterevacuating 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 recoverycontinues to this day, nearly eight months after the storm. Threeweeks ago, the remains of an elderly man were found in his atticin my Lakeview neighborhood by cadaver dogs doing second searches of destroyedneighborhoods.
And on Monday, five days ago, in the Lower Ninth Ward, debris removalteams found the skeletal remains of two people underneath a shatteredhouse. Imagine a catastrophe so vast that body recovery is stillgoing on nearly eight months after the event, and you will startto understand what we now know: If you haven’t been to New Orleans, it’shard to fathom the magnitude of what happened there.
Now the flood, and the ineptitude of the government’s responseto it, made for reporting conditions that probably do not have ahistorical precedent in journalism on American soil.
The water that Doug and I had seen on Monday afternoon, and writtenabout on Monday night, arrived at our newspaper’s doorstep in forceearly on Tuesday morning. We awoke to water three feet deep at ourdoorstep, stretching in every direction, and continuing to rise.The only dry land visible was the interstate that was directly infront of us, but reachable only by traveling three-quarters of a mile ona flooded service road.
Then we received word that a SWAT team had been called to the OrleansParish Prison, directly across the Interstate from our building,and home to more than 1,000 felons. It, too, was flooded, and wordwas 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 newspapertrucks.
Now as we headed across the Mississippi River in about a dozentrucks, one small group of trucks ended up at our suburban WestBank bureau, about a 15-minute drive from downtown. Having seenon their trip across the river that the strip of New Orleans closestto the river was dry, our then-Sports Editor, now City Editor, David Meeks, a veteran newsman who had once run our suburban operation, determinedto come right back across the bridge with a team of volunteers andhead Uptown to keep reporting.
At the bureau, David convinced the editor to give him one of thetrucks, and he took a motley group back into a city rapidly devolvinginto chaos and danger. Among them were the music critic, the religionwriter and the art critic, my friend Doug MacCash, who I can onlyassume worked for five straight weeks in the city by treating it as somekind of performance art show from hell.
I can’t tell you how many battle-hardened correspondents from nationalnewspapers and television networks told us conditions were worsein New Orleans in the first week after the storm than they experiencedin most war zones. A CNN producer who arrived the Friday after thestorm realized how much trouble the city was in when she walkedinto the CNN trailer and saw Christiana Amanpour and the wartime camera crewsin the room, fresh from Iraq.
When our own reporting team crossed the river on that Tuesday morningto head back downtown, scarcely an hour after we had evacuated ourbuilding, they came upon police and citizens at a downtown Wal-Mart.Mistaking it for a command post and relief center, they chargedbreezily into a massive and systematic looting spree. The police were notthere to stop it. They were there to participate. When somebody shouted out, “The Times-Picayune’s taking pictures. Let’s go out back and takecare of business,” they knew first, that it was time to go, andsecond, that the city was now completely out of control.
When police learned that we had set up a makeshift bureau in anUptown house, a SWAT team came by the house and dropped off gunsfor our protection.
While working in the city one day, reporter Gordon Russell, alongwith a photographer from the New York Times, got swept up in a policedragnet 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 thestreet. Eventually, they were released, badly shaken.
In another case, staff photographers Ted Jackson and David Grunfeldgot permission from an evacuated friend to break into her housefor food and shelter. Ted broke in a back window pane, gained entryinto the house, and went to the front door to let David in. Whenhe opened the door, he was looking down the barrel of a shotgun pointedat 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 truckfor a stolen vehicle on a looting mission one day, stopped the truckand pointed rifles at Meeks as he was driving back to the makeshiftbureau. Later, when his colleague in the truck, Mike Montalbano,said, “I don’t know what I would have done if they’d accidentally shotyou,” David told him, “Don’t worry about it. If that had happened, they’dhave shot you too.”
By the way, during evacuation of the parish prison, 15 prisonersdid in fact escape. Later in the first week after Katrina, membersof our team in New Orleans went back to the paper with a kayak toretrieve equipment, and found several orange prison jumpsuits abandonedon the edge of the Interstate in front of our building.
These were the conditions under which our team of reporters andphotographers did extraordinary and memorable journalism, siphoninggasoline to run cars to recharge cellphones and laptops each night,huddling in unairconditioned houses during the worst heat wave ofthe year and risking their lives every day to get the story. As veteransof their hometown paper, their knowledge of the city, their ability to go everywhere and to understand the scope, and impact, and contextof what was happening, was why The Times-Picayune owned this story.It was but one of many moments that defined what it means to bea newspaper.
Meanwhile, the larger paper was stretched out along a line thatextended from New Orleans 80 miles west to Baton Rouge and 150 mileseast to Mobile, Alabama.
Throughout those first weeks, Times-Picayune staffers had to contendwith monumental personal stresses, not knowing the conditions oftheir homes, or, worse, knowing full well that their homes weredestroyed. 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 thatshe had been plucked from her roof by helicopter. And we all had to findplaces to live while we worked endless days and nights.
My job was to oversee the creation from scratch of a fully functioningnewsroom and business operation in rented space at a technologypark in Baton Rouge. First order of business on Tuesday night: Sendthe head of IT out to charge $22,000 in software and computers onhis American Express card. When he asked me, “Can you guarantee thatI’ll be reimbursed,” I told him, “Absolutely.” Using my supernumerary powers as Features editor. I became a shopping fool, charging 30 rentalcars on Publisher’s Ashton Phelps’ American Express. I sent an assistantsports editor to Wal-Mart with the General Manager’s Amex, and toldhim to load up a newspaper truck with a generator, gas cans, foodand water for the New Orleans bureau. In less than 18 hours, we were afully functioning newsroom again.
Given the extraordinary pressures we operated under each day, therewas never a time where a high-functioning copy desk was more important.The online paper that a small team produced Tuesday night at theHouma Courier, while most of us continued on to Baton Rouge, isa triumph of determination and improvisation. But it is also a copy editor’snightmare. You can look at it online and see for yourself.
By Wednesday evening, order and discipline had been restored andthe Thursday paper showed it. By Thursday night, we were back inprint, first in Houma about an hour south of New Orleans, and thena week later in Mobile at our sister paper, the Press Register.Meanwhile, our online presence had been transformed. Pages on NOLA.com thataveraged 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 ourreaders, 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 onthe 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 whohad worked on the winning project.
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| One of two large photos thatThe Times-Picayune donated to the ACES auction shows the floodingfrom a levee break caused by Hurricane Katrina. | | But Katrina was different. Copy editors produced papers on Sunday nightwhile the storm raged, and on Monday as the city filled up. Theyboarded the trucks as we fled the building. They lost their homesand their communities. They arrived in Baton Rouge without possessionsor a place to live. And they did whatever it took to keep us operatingas a newspaper. They achieved greatness, visible on our pages every day,and they were among those who stood in the newsroom last Monday when thePulitzers were announced, and shed tears, as most of us did, rememberingwhat a terrible price we paid for this honor.
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.
Of course, to me the other extremely important function that thecopy desk brought to our Baton Rouge operation is that they setup the food table. That is why I made sure the Features departmentwas in the same room as the Rim. I’m still trying to lose thoseKatrina pounds.
Today, the suburbs of New Orleans have been quick to recover. ButNew Orleans itself, for now, is two cities: The streets of the FrenchQuarter and Uptown New Orleans, spared the flooding, are again buzzingwith 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 Pontchartrainand for many miles to the east. You can easily drive through cityand suburban streets for three hours and never see a habitable house.Nearly eight months after the floodwalls collapsed, these neighborhoodsare still powerless and comatose.
But we know something about newspapers that should be a lessonfor all of us. There exists in New Orleans now an extraordinaryand explicit bond between its citizens and the local paper. Hereare some of the ways we’ve seen it.
While Doug and I rode along the edge of Lakeview that Monday inAugust, we came upon a bridge where firemen had pulled about 40people off of their roofs and out of their second stories. And whenwe, two scruffy reporters from the local newspaper, arrived on thatbridge, the people there were simply thrilled to see us. And I thought to myself, how can they possibly be happy. They’re stranded, surroundedby water, and have just lost everything. But what became apparentwas this: the local newspaper had arrived, and that was enough forthem. It meant their story was going to be told. And that made themhappy.
Likewise, when Ted Jackson and a group of photographers headedto the Convention Center one day amid rumors — false, of course— of rioting, they approached the building with tremendous cautionand even a little fear. When they turned the corner onto ConventionCenter Boulevard, several people in the crowd rushed toward them — then grabbedeach 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 theirway.
Our columnist, Chris Rose, who was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prizethis year, spent weeks wandering his ruined city and writing deeplypersonal accounts of his alternating states of anger, determinationand unspeakable grief. He received 10,000 e-mails of thanks in lessthan four months.
I got an e-mail yesterday that is in some ways typical of e-mailswe 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. Ican well
remember sitting in Roswell GA (physically OK) reading every wordon NOLA.com trying to get the real picture of what had happenedto our city, our friends, and trying to get an idea of what wasleft, if anything. I have ALWAYS been a newspaper reader (even asa kid), but this story was so huge, so important, so critical and so essential to my "mental health", that without the courageous efforts of allthe people at the Times-Picayune, we would not have made it. Thankyou.”
We hear it from our readers on a constant basis. They now understandwhat a newspaper gives them that they can’t get anywhere else. NowI believe Katrina did not create that connection. It merely broughtit into high relief for everyone, us and them. The challenge forAmerican newspapers is to figure out a way to rekindle that connection withouthaving 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 thingsnobody else can do. And we’re vital to our communities. So that’sone 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 testfor us, a test that will determine whether we survive, whether weonce again become a viable city, or fade into third-class statusas a once grand backwater.
But I also believe that Katrina is a test for America, and forAmerica’s media. What the nation does may well determine our fateas 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, Katrinafatigue is still being exiled from your house nearly eight monthsafter the storm. Our fatigue is insurance companies pulling outof the city, making it impossible for citizens to rebuild. Our fatigue ismore than 250,000 residents who want to come home but can’t, for lack ofhousing, or schools, or money to rebuild their shattered lives.
On March 10, the Army Corps of Engineers claimed that the eventsof Aug. 29 were so unusual that they were, quote, “unforeseeable.”Four days later, we reported that the Corps of Engineers, in itsown 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 NewOrleans, knowing from its own data that the design literally wouldnot hold water.
Just three weeks ago, seven months after the storm, in the faceof the overwhelming evidence revealed by our reporting, the Corpsfinally admitted that its levee designs were flawed. More than 1,200people are dead.
Today New Orleans lives in limbo, waiting for the federal governmentthat admits its role in our destruction to also fulfill its promiseto rebuild. If America allows that government to escape responsibilityfor these failures, then you might ask yourselves: In which of yourcities can you feel safe, and assured that if you ever need help, itwill 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 — youcan even call it a plea if you’d like — to you and to anyone whoworks in the media, is very simple: Please, don’t forget about us.
Thank you. READ A STORY ABOUT THE SPEECH |
