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HOW TWO COPY DESKS
SURVIVED HURRICANE KATRINA(Reprinted from the November-December 2005 ACES newsletter)
Biloxi, Miss.
Delivering in Biloxi
By Tammy M. Smith
At the Sun Herald in Gulfport-Biloxi, Miss., I'm what you call a hybrid.
Our presentation desk is made up of designers, copy editors and hybrids. I edit copy, design pages and do some writing. Before Aug. 29, I designed the Marquee entertainment section in the first part of the week and did the Home and Garden section later.
I wasn't working on Aug. 28, when Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In fact, no copy editors were. A core group of Sun Herald people went to Columbus, Ga., to put out Monday's paper, and another core group stayed at our office on the Biloxi-Gulfport city line to report and maintain the Web blog.
I went to a reporter's house about 10 miles inland Sunday afternoon with a handful of other reporters, and that's where we stayed for the storm; we started feeling the first impact around 4:30 a.m. Monday. The house sustained roof damage, and there were leaks everywhere, but it remained sound.
Late Monday afternoon, we decided to go back. We got back to reporter Melissa Scallan's house just before dark, and it looked mostly OK, so that's where we stayed. No electricity, no running water, no phone service -- land or cell. But we had candles and flashlights, and shelf-stable food and bottled water. Melissa had a filled hot tub, so there was water for flushing the toilet. We opened the windows, since it was so hot, but with no lights, it was a little scary. I slept facing the window with my flashlight in hand.
The next day, we went to work as early as we could; we had learned there was a curfew, and we would have to be home by 6 p.m. The Sun Herald was on generator power. There was no running water. Phones were still out, but we had satellite phones that worked a little better outside the building. There were all sorts of people from Knight Ridder papers. One loaner editor realized I could give them guidance on information only a local would know. (For example, it's Tegarden Road, not Teagarden or Teegarden.) So my copy editing skills were put to use.
I had been doing pretty well emotionally. My house was mostly OK (the back was badly damaged by a pine tree, but I had no flooding), my car had some damage, but I still had a home, I still had a car, I still had a job, I still had my life. I felt almost guilty considering how so many of my co-workers had lost their homes and/or cars. And at that time we still had not heard from several employees.
On Aug. 31 I was on the old smoking porch outside the building, using a satellite phone to dictate stories to Knight Ridder Tribune in Washington. One file was vignettes from across the Coast, and I started reading them aloud. I got to one about a Biloxi woman who had gone out of the attic with her elderly uncle into the surge water, and she was trying to keep him above water. A legless man in a wheelchair floated past and pleaded for help, but she was unable to help because she was trying to save her uncle as well as herself. I just lost it. The woman in Washington to whom I was reading the copy was very sympathetic, which almost made it worse. But I got back to normal and started reading again.
For the first two weeks after the storm, our lives revolved around making sure we had enough food and water, figuring out how and when to go to the bathroom (this ranked as highly as acquiring food and water), conserving gasoline, protecting our tires and staying safe at night.
Knight Ridder sent in huge shipments of food, water and supplies, and we eventually got portable toilets. The KRT folks from Miami even had cookouts for us some evenings. There were rumors about looting and violence and how many people were dead, and where bodies were found. In the total darkness at night, in sweltering temperatures, I would look out the window at Melissa's house and listen for the military helicopters; they were soothing, a symbol of safety at an otherwise frightening time.
Melissa's house became a bed and breakfast for visiting reporters, co-workers and former co-workers who had been sent down to cover the story. The visitors brought food and gasoline, as well as news from the "outside." We had no access to the wires or the Internet or to TV. We were so wrapped up in the daily effort to just get by that we didn't think about much else.
In the meantime, several presentation desk co-workers had been sent to Columbus to help the core group get the paper out. At first, the papers were shipped from Columbus to the Coast each day, and they were prized. I would get an armful and take them to neighbors, especially those who had helped me secure my house. As I walked around, people would run out of their houses begging for papers. They were about the only source of information. Strangers would come up to me and just start talking. They wanted to tell their stories, and many of them were heartbreaking. They didn't necessarily want their stories in the paper. They just wanted to talk with somebody.
Very slowly, we started getting back into a routine at work. The paper was produced partially here, and then totally. Our folks came back from Columbus. All employees were located. The electricity and the water came back; eventually, we were even able to drink it. The phone service returned. Stores reopened and we didn't have to rely on Spam, peanut butter, tuna and energy bars. I went back to my regular job of designing and copy editing, but my responsibilities have changed, at least for the time being.
Our lives are still not what you would call normal. I still don't have a real refrigerator, washer or dryer, or cable. Many co-workers are living in FEMA trailers because their homes are concrete slabs or gutted structures that creak in the breeze. One reporter learned her apartment was gone; two days later, I heard a shriek - she had just learned that her sister and brother-in-law had drowned. In Gulfport, my neighborhood is pretty much the last stretch of civilization going toward the beach. Once you cross the tracks - devastation. It's hard to explain without seeing it.
They say hybrids are tough. I'm one of them, and we’re making it at the Sun Herald. It's day by day. But I remember those people begging for news. We'll keep giving it to them.
New OrleansEvacuation, then back to work
By Paula Devlin
Normally, a pre-hurricane copy desk in New Orleans is a well-oiled machine. Editors board up their houses and show up at the newspaper with sleeping bags, ice chests, food for a day or two. The paper is put to bed quickly so trucks can get on the road and back before the storm gets too intense. And everyone finds a spot in the newsroom to bunk down as the winds rage.
This time, it was different. The storm felt different; it smelled different.
The Times-Picayune lost power the night before the storm. A generator-powered interior section on the third floor became a mini-newsroom as editors blogged around the clock, taking reporters’ notes over cell phones. The copy desk swung into high gear, creating a newspaper that existed only online.
The storm raged. The storm passed. The sighs of relief began.
Then the features editor and the art critic, who had taken off on their bicycles to check on their houses, returned with stupefying news. The levees had broken. The city was filling up with water like a bowl.
A news meeting was in progress when they arrived with their stories -- stories of people trapped on rooftops, of people being ferried in boats to interstates on higher ground, of their own homes under water. The plan for that night’s online edition changed in an instant. The headline became: CATASTROPHIC.
Water that had been a couple of inches deep in the parking lot the night before was a couple of feet deep by 7 the next morning. By 8 it was rising toward the top step of the building. After consultation with editors, the publisher made the decision to evacuate the employees, and their families who had sought shelter in our raised, three-story concrete building, by the only means left to them: the newspaper’s blue delivery trucks.
Everyone was told to take only what he or she could easily carry and to gather at the loading docks. Eight trucks carrying 220 people forded the now-frighteningly high water around the plant and broke through onto the nearby interstate, still dry and now filling up with desperate refugees on foot. Several trucks headed to Houma, La., about 60 miles away, to continue with the online edition of the paper. One truck, loaded with a team of reporters and editors, headed back into the increasingly dangerous city to set up a bureau on high ground. The rest continued on to Baton Rouge, where The Advocate greased the wheels for entree into a technology center on the north side of town. The newsroom’s exile had begun.
Within 36 hours, a makeshift newsroom, complete with laptops, phones and a copying machine – the most basic tools of the trade – was humming amid the cubicles and fluorescent lights of the business park. In the weeks to come, as the waters in New Orleans began to recede, staffers made forays into the city to retrieve scanners, Macs and other equipment from our Howard Avenue building, now guarded by a private SWAT team.
As the days stretched into weeks, the copy desk settled into a routine. Editors worked from laptops networked together by the IT staff. As copy desk chief, I created a folder system on each desktop that mimicked the familiar copy flow system as closely as possible. In addition, each copy editor was assigned a handful of pages each night, and would work with those page designers to carefully proof the pages.
The copy desk worked from two rooms across the hall from each other. In one room were copy editors and the makeup editor, whose job was to send pages to The Courier in Houma at first, then to the Mobile Register in Alabama, and to work with a Times-Picayune staffer at the other end to make sure pages got in on time. Across the hall were the news editors, the copy desk chief and the page designers, sharing space with the photo desk. Reporters and line editors were down the hall in two other rooms.
Soon, a sports section, a features section and a few pages devoted to financial matters were added. In time, the library and the advertising and auditing departments gained their own space along the narrow hallway.
A kitchenette at the end of the hall became the space where people shared food, the many, many gifts from other newspapers, and the tears that flowed with their own stories of pain and loss. Many newspaper staffers had lost their homes, cars, possessions – everything they owned. Several staffers worried about pets left at home, with only a few days of food and water. One photo desk technician did not hear from his wife and son for two weeks after the storm. (They’re fine, having been evacuated by helicopter from a rooftop.)
Five weeks after the hurricane struck New Orleans, The Times-Picayune moved back into its downtown plant. Water had not entered the building. Two shattered windows, some soggy carpeting, two giant trees down and a parking lot full of flooded cars were the worst the plant suffered. Copy editors found their desks just as they left them.
So it was back to work. The copy desk today is smaller, as some staffers have been shifted to other positions in the building to cover for employees who never returned to their jobs. The paper has lost its St. Bernard Parish zoned edition, as there is little left of that parish. Deadlines are about an hour earlier to accommodate the curfew. The copy flow system has been tweaked to account for fewer people available to edit stories.
And as the city struggles to rebuild, copy editors have their own private struggles. Many lost their homes; some have found apartments, some are bunking with family or friends, some are commuting an hour or two each night. Days that once were filled with lunches, errands, appointments and volunteer work are now filled with paperwork, insurance adjustors and mucking out houses.
For most of the copy editors of The Times-Picayune, the aftermath of Katrina has been the most difficult personal challenge they have ever faced. But at work, the one overriding emotion has been pride — for surviving, for overcoming the obstacles, and for putting out great newspapers: Come hell and high water.
ACES Executive Board member Paula Devlin is copy desk chief of The Times-Picayune.
Scenes from the storm
How Katrina affected copy editors at The Times-Picayune, reported by Paula Devlin and Bruce Hamilton of the paper.
THE UPROOTED FAMILY: Sunday, Aug. 28, was slot editor Cathy Hughes’ regular shift. She brought two teenage sons, bedrolls, an ice chest, snacks, and a paperback to work with her. When she locked the door to her home in the Lakeview section of New Orleans, she said a goodbye to her gardens and kitchen, but had no idea it would be weeks before she would be able to retrieve her cat. She and her two boys were among the 220 people who left The Times-Picayune on newspaper delivery trucks as the floodwater rose.
After 13 nights sleeping on a friend’s floor in Baton Rouge, she found an apartment and enrolled her boys in schools in Baton Rouge. Now that the paper is back in New Orleans, she is making the 90-minute commute each way as her sons finish out the semester. She plans to move into an apartment in Uptown New Orleans in December. And like most Lakeview residents, she waits to learn whether her home must be demolished or can be rebuilt. But her cat, Magic, has bounced back from dehydration and appears ready to return to his role as a fierce backyard lizard hunter.
NO REFUGE FROM THE FLOOD: When the water from the levee breach reached five feet in his home in East New Orleans, copy editor Van Borders headed for the stairs. He spent a night in the sweltering heat under the attic eaves and then climbed onto the roof, where he saw a helicopter airlifting some of his neighbors away. He waded to the interstate and walked about 15 miles to the Convention Center. He spent one night inside but then moved to the sidewalk, where he stayed for a couple of days, waiting for buses that never arrived.
He eventually jumped on a National Guard truck that was taking people to Jefferson Parish. He stayed in the muck near the interstate for about a day, then was taken by bus to Nacogdoches, Texas. From there, he caught a ride to Baton Rouge, where he heard The Times-Picayune had set up shop. He eventually settled with a friend in an apartment in Houma. He now makes the 60-mile twice-daily commute to New Orleans and doesn’t know when he will be able to come home. But he is determined to do so.
DOGGED DETERMINATION: Copy editor Jennifer Brown came equipped to spend a few nights, expecting to return to her home in Uptown and suffer a few weeks without electricity. Instead, she ended up fleeing first to Houma, where she worked through the night producing the online version of the paper, then to Baton Rouge, to join the rest of the staff for two months. Her home was a total loss. But while most people left their pets at home with a three-day supply of food and water, Brown had a premonition. She had carted her two basset hounds to a kennel just outside Baton Rouge, where they rode out the storm safely.
Several of her friends from across the country secretly covered the boarding costs for almost a month. She is now in a French Quarter apartment, the dogs are with her mother across Lake Pontchartrain, and she is searching for a rental with a yard so she can reclaim her dogs until she decides whether to rebuild or buy elsewhere.
THE FRACTURED FAMILY: Page One editor Terry Baquet arrived at the paper Sunday afternoon after sending his wife, two children, mother and brother off to relatives in Atlanta. It would be a month before he would see them again. Awakened Tuesday morning by the news that an evacuation was under way, he scrambled to pull together some personal items and get to the loading dock, where he was on one of the last delivery trucks to leave the building. In Baton Rouge, working every day, he bunked for three weeks in a Louisiana State University dormitory until students claimed the space.
He then moved to a house that he shared with two colleagues and their families. But not seeing his own family was wearing and he finally grabbed a plane to Atlanta for a week’s visit. His wife has found work there, his son and daughter are in school, and Baquet is back in New Orleans, living in an apartment behind a co-worker’s house, making occasional trips to see his family. They plan to return to New Orleans in May; it will be months before they can move back into their historic Creole cottage, which not only took on about two feet of water, but was looted.
HOME TO HOUMA: When a hand shook her awake and a voice told her “We’re leaving,” Mary Chauvin didn’t know that meant going home. She had worked the night before the hurricane hit, and she slept at the plant on Howard Avenue, where many of her coworkers and their relatives had also taken refuge. “While the storm was going on, it seemed almost festive,” she said. “We were working at night, but we had fun.” The wake-up call was jarring, and she hurriedly joined the evacuation caravan. When the truck arrived several hours later in Houma, her hometown, she quickly found her family. Assured of their safety, she then helped create an online edition at The Courier’s newsroom. She became the page one editor for that night. “I remember I wasn’t worried about my house and stuff because I knew people were dying,” she said. When she was asked to take the next day off, she refused. “I didn’t want to stop and think about what was going on. I just wanted to work.”
BORED IN BATON ROUGE: The day before the storm wasn’t Steve Kress’ regular shift, but he went to work for about three hours before evacuating to Baton Rouge. He left after 5 p.m., so much of the turtle-slow traffic had dissipated. The trip that normally takes about 70 minutes took him 20_ hours, in part because he got lost in the dark. “It was kind of creepy,” he said. The Times-Picayune had let its copy editors know that their jobs did not hinge on whether they remained in New Orleans to face Katrina’s onslaught. Employees who wanted to evacuate were encouraged to evacuate. But a week later, Kress was back on the copy desk in its newly adopted home in Baton Rouge. “I wanted to be part of everything. Obviously the city and the paper were in dire straits,” he said. “Not to mention, sitting on my hands in Baton Rouge was mind-numbingly awful.”
