The Next Big Story: My Journey Through the Land of Possibilities
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Ingrid remembers thinking that if her daughters had died she might as well surrender to the water, because the lives she valued had already ended. Then, in an instant, the wave pulled back out and left them all separated. Isabelle, injured, swam to an offshore boat. Ingrid, injured, found her way aboard a crowded rescue flight. Robin stayed until darkness searching for his family. The three of them ended up in different hospitals. As soon as the three were reunited they began looking for Dominique. Family members came in from Holland, along with a Dutch forensics team, to help in the search for her. They were hopeful that Dominique was lost, injured somewhere, unable to speak. The response from each country was that precise. I channel their desperation and report on them as a microcosm of everything that’s unfolding around us.
One day Dominique’s body is found lying in a Buddhist temple, identified by her dental records. There is no data on how she arrived there, just another soul recovered by the legion of desperate searchers gathering the loss after the storm. It is devastating, but a resolution for the family. I am becoming more unglued with all the individually painful stories. I am fine during the day, but I can’t get to sleep. I call Brad at 10:00 p.m., which is 10:00 a.m. his time. He tells me he can’t start his days with these stories, so I call a girlfriend every night instead. I feel as if I’m floating away from everything around me those last days in Thailand, released from my reality.
My return to the U.S. feels like an electric shock. I walk through the door of my home to a chaotic mess, Cecilia’s hair large and dirty, Brad haggard. Sofia races over screaming “Mommy” and we embrace. I am overcome by a sense that I lack gratitude for everything life has given me—I take that feeling and press on.
My show experiences some upheaval during the summer of 2005. The bosses want Bill to stop anchoring and offer him the job of White House correspondent. He wants to anchor and field major stories. He suddenly leaves for FOX News and the network brings in Miles O’Brien, who had been anchoring from CNN’s base in Atlanta during the day. He is this gentle man with thick dark hair and warm eyes. He is generous to a fault, smart and self-sufficient, a solid anchor and writer and human being. People look at us and say, “Oh, the O’Briens! Are you married?” And he says, “Yes, and so is she.” I smack him. “Oh, not to each other,” he adds with the silliness of my father. He calls me SOB, which becomes a joke around the newsroom, then adds that his wife Sandy is the other SOB. He understands the meaning of being on a team so much that he apologizes when he gets more airtime.
On Friday, August 26, Miles is sent to hunker down in Baton Rouge to wait on Hurricane Katrina while I stay behind to anchor the show. The storm makes its first landfall over the weekend and is devastating. There are predictions it will hit the Gulf even harder. Having him in New Orleans feels like we are really both there.
Kim Bondy, my producer at NBC, has preceded me to CNN. Her work on weekends at NBC has paid off, and she’s now Executive Producer of American Morning. We are working together again, and she is sitting in the control room at CNN on Monday, August 29, when the storm makes its second landfall in Louisiana. While I had been going up the ranks, she had become a vice president at CNN, and she has taken the reins of my struggling show. Between her and Miles, I feel like I’m doing a show with my family. Kim has become one of my closest friends. She really wants this to work. This story is both thrilling and frightening for her. Kim is New Orleans born and raised. She loves the place so much she bought a house there in May 2001. Her brother had evacuated to Texas with his wife and two small boys a few days before the storm hit.
By late August 2005 there have been ten storms, so we are up to K in the year’s storm alphabet. The rest of Kim’s family, like everyone, has storm fatigue. Her mom and stepfather decide to stay in New Orleans to ride out the storm. They live in Kim’s house. She’s told me a bunch of times how fabulous it is. She couldn’t buy a one-bedroom in New York for the price of that house. That’s the house where she’ll move home someday. Owning a home is a staple of American life; it grants you a future, plants a flagpole in the American dream. Kim’s is a mile from Lake Ponchartrain. She’s bought her parents a generator. They’re all set.
The Monday show unfolds and all the reporters in the field tell me Katrina is a strong storm. A Red Cross spokeswoman confirms there are eight thousand to nine thousand people seeking shelter in the Louisiana Superdome. There is only generator power but it’s fine. The spokeswoman worries aloud about the levees being overwhelmed. But the consensus is that they are fine. Kim calls her mother, who says she is waiting out the storm at her house. She says, “It’s fine,” and asks if it’s over. The word “fine” is repeated a few more times. Our weather reporter, Chad Myers, tells Kim there should be another wave of rain; then it will be fine. This storm is driven by wind. The house is strong. It has never flooded. The whole thing feels like a near miss. Kim explains to her mother how to “text” so they can keep in touch.
We start reporting that NoLa has dodged a bullet. It feels like we have moved past the latest storm drama on TV. Then all of a sudden reality splits in two. For the next few hours, there is the official story and there is Kim’s story. Her brother calls from Texas. Their mother calls. She says the sunroom in the back of the house is flooding. She is moving furniture inside. The brother calls again to say Kim’s car is underwater. We call our reporters. It’s hard to reach anyone. Official reports say the storm is passing. We say it again. NoLa has dodged a bullet. Most of the city evacuated. Kim’s brother calls again. He is crying. He has heard his house is underwater.
I stay on air past the scheduled hour of my show. “Good morning. Welcome back, everybody. Welcome to a special extended edition of American Morning, August 29, 2005, where we are tracking Hurricane Katrina, which has made landfall about forty-five minutes ago.” I debrief Chad Myers, who draws a line with tape and shows how the storm took a last-minute turn. He repeats what he said to Kim about New Orleans having seen the worst. I push him. Chad says this storm didn’t overwhelm the levees. If it had, “those pumps would have been bogged down and water could have been in New Orleans for eight months before they could pump it out. And this is not that scenario,” he says. Kim insists we put people on air who are in the city. We talk to a local reporter. He says pieces of the Superdome are flying off. The rains can get inside. There are no lights. There are thousands of people in there seeking shelter. We talk to Governor Kathleen Blanco and Michael Brown, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Everyone says the same thing. Bad storm. We’ve got it under control.
The day before the storm hit, I had kept reading and rereading the research. The storm had grown to a category 5. It grew in size in the Gulf of Mexico. Today, warm waters have increased the wind speed until the size and strength of the storm is record breaking. The extended show winds down. This was such a big storm. It still feels as if New Orleans has dodged a bullet. It’s not that bad. But this isn’t over. Every one of Kim’s relatives and friends is calling. It is that bad. Something is wrong. There is so much water.
What no one yet realizes is that fifty drainage and navigational levees are breaching one after the other throughout the day. Water pours into 80 percent of the city. Mississippi’s beach-front towns go underwater. The rush of water undermines entire structures and unmoors boats. Waves carrying rafts of debris crash through neighborhoods. The whole thing is like something out of a science fiction movie. I just keep staring at the TV screen all day. There are no pictures. It’s like radio. I walk in and out of Kim’s office a dozen times. She is always on the phone. She rushes from her office to the CNN newsroom more than once. Every time a friend calls from New Orleans she transfers them into the control room and they are live on CNN. Kim’s brother calls again. He got through to their mom. She and her husband are on the second floor of Kim’s beautiful house and the water is rushing in. They say to send help. They are scared.
I don’t like danger. I don’t like the feeling of electricity curdling the air just be
fore a lightning storm. Rising waters make me want to run. When a crowd begins to swell with anger, I want to leave. This is one of the tough things about our business. We are initially propelled by the excitement of being at the center of a big story. But we are human beings. We get scared and overwhelmed by the cruelty of what’s around us. Some reporters thrive on danger. I am not that kind of reporter. I don’t find danger exhilarating or exciting. I will face it, headlong, with purpose. I will stick it out and do my job and tell people what’s going on. I will suck my fears deep into my gut until the danger passes. But I do not find it exhilarating. To me, when the trucks with the megaphones roll by asking people to get out of the way of the storm, the logical thing to do is pack it up. I don’t get the guy who hunkers down with his video camera and a six-pack of beer.
At CNN, I sometimes feel surrounded by heroic action figures. A natural disaster hits. A reporter throws an arm into a cherry red windbreaker emblazoned with “CNN.” Grab a bag. Jump on a plane. Find a position just close enough to not get killed by the oncoming storm. Wait until whatever it is hits—the missile, the hurricane, the oncoming plague. Bombs fall behind Christiane Amanpour’s head. A gust of rain and debris shoves Anderson Cooper to his knees. I am in awe. But that’s not me. I don’t feel triumphant when the storm slinks away and I’ve survived. I just feel lucky, in a professional sense—and a tad dumb for being there.
It’s probably the nerd in me. I was born with a deficit of bravado. I don’t crave excitement. I crave good conversation. I want to be there, in the aftermath, figuring out what went wrong. I don’t need to see the wind pick up a trailer full of children and toss them to their death. I feel no thrill at watching the last-minute rescue. In life, we are all passengers on a plane. You get to choose exit row, window, or the aisle. I like the aisle. Let the superhero with the cape make the call on when to wrench open the door. I’m just fine organizing the departure of the passengers.
CNN tries to get more reporting teams into the area the moment they appreciate the severity of Katrina. There are no planes, no cars, no power or water once you land, no safe place left to hide from the storm. We have reporters descending on every corner of the disaster the same day it hits. I start to make preparations to join Miles. I operate in a dazed slow motion. I don’t know when I’ll go, but I know I’ll go. Kim gets a text at nine p.m. from her mother. All it says is, “I’m okay.” It’s the last time she hears from her for days.
Then that evening, the first night after the storm has hit, the CNN reporter Jeanne Meserve goes on air and suddenly the two realities come together. Jeanne is in the thick of it. She is beleaguered and upset. Her photographer has broken his foot. They’ve boarded a small boat and gone out in the darkness. They can hear stranded and desperate people. They see dogs wrapped in electrical lines, still alive and being cooked. A boater pulls out a woman with a severed limb. Jeanne is reporting on air what Kim has been telling us all day. That an enormous human tragedy is unfolding and there is not enough help. Jeanne sounds as if she has been crying. She has just turned back from trying to go out to where people are trapped on rooftops. “You can hear people yelling for help. You can hear the dogs yelping, all of them stranded, all of them hoping someone will come.
“But for tonight, they’ve had to suspend the rescue efforts,” Jeanne reports. “It’s just too hazardous for them to be out on the boats. There are electrical lines that are still alive. There are gas lines that are still spewing gas. There are cars that are submerged. There are other large objects ... the people who had the boats couldn’t get to the boats to bring them to the scene to go out and rescue the people ... as the boats went around through the neighborhood, they yelled. And people yelled back.”
She talks into the night. The anchors barely interrupt her. At CNN, we all listen, riveted by what she is saying. Voices cry out from the darkened rooftops. There is no one out there to rescue them. We know this but somehow government doesn’t? We are broadcasting this on live TV. Where are the police and the firefighters, the military, the cavalry that is this country’s pride?
One of the lessons I’ve learned from being a journalist is to count on no one. I’m not a cynic. I’m a generally optimistic person. I trust in people, particularly friends and family. I even think that most of the government actually has the best of intentions most of the time. That said, there is nothing wrong with storing a few cans of tuna in case the world betrays you.
Here’s the thing. When people dial 911, help doesn’t always come. It’s just a fact. It’s at the heart of so many stories I’ve covered—the dashed expectation that some institution has your back. If you think otherwise, think again. I’m here to tell you that fire alarms sometimes go off and the fire trucks don’t always pull up minutes later carrying spotted dogs. I’ve seen it happen many times. America seems particularly disappointing when it fails you because the pile of promises is stacked so high. There is nowhere that you can escape the reality that help is not always on the way. The places hit by Hurricane Katrina couldn’t rely on regular services; they required a massive national response, a cavalry of forces only our country can muster. Yet the cavalry didn’t arrive. To survive, you had to be ready to help yourself. If that makes you angry, it should. It makes me angry, too. But anger doesn’t get you pulled off the roof of your house when the waters rise.
I admire the folks in New Orleans who kept an ax in their homes to break their way out of the attic. I applaud the parents of small kids who hightailed it to a hotel they couldn’t afford. To the folks who board up their windows and insist on taking their pets, I say good move. I opt for living life like the Boy Scout motto. Be Prepared. I don’t understand why more folks don’t. I’ve met so many people who carry an umbrella even if the local “meteorologist” says the chance of rain is just 30 percent. So why wouldn’t you get in the basement when they declare a 10 percent chance a tornado is going to slice you to pieces? I’m not for a moment suggesting I don’t feel for folks who refuse to live life preparing for the worst. I’m just saying I don’t refuse. I am ready. I don’t trust anyone to come when I call. That is one of the main things Katrina taught me, plus this: If you survive because of your own wits, you have the right to be angrier than you’ve ever been, to rage, to roar, and to demand accountability. That is where I come in.
Night pours into Baton Rouge like ink into a glass. I am fuming. CNN doesn’t want us to go anywhere without security. It’s September 2, the Friday after the storm has hit, but they insist security guards need to come from New Orleans to get me. Kim says people are looting, there are carjackings, the highway is eerie and dark. I eat. I wait. I reposition my gear several times. I want to get into the city already. It’s remarkable that conditions are so bad four-plus days after the storm. It’s bad in Baton Rouge, and this is what people are fleeing toward! Kim says no, to wait.
I had interviewed her brother just that morning from my anchor desk in New York. He had been roaming around the Astrodome in Houston hoping their mother had been evacuated there. That wasn’t the case. When the water rose, her stepfather had jumped in and brought them out in a little boat. They had camped out at a college. Kim was fearful they would end up at the Superdome in New Orleans. The place had swelled with evacuees. Water had penetrated holes in the roof. There was not enough food. It was hot and awful and dangerous and the images of people in wheelchairs slumped in the heat frightened everyone. As it turns out, that’s exactly where her mother was headed. She got off a line for buses to the Superdome when she saw reporters and waved down an NBC crew. She told them she was Kim Bondy’s mother. They took her to CNN. Kim’s mother had narrowly escaped the worst. After that near miss, Kim was not taking chances with anyone else.
Four security guys finally arrive. We drive to the NoLa airport. The sixty-mile drive takes hours. Buses blow by us. There aren’t a lot of people on them. There are tens of thousands of people trying to get out, but the buses seem half full and there is no one organizing the evacuation. The city is shut
down when we arrive. We talk our way through six police checkpoints to get in. It is strangely quiet until I take my place at the New Orleans airport. It’s dark. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has turned it into a field hospital. The Delta Airlines terminal is a triage center. Old people sit in wheelchairs, waiting. People sleep anywhere they can. Entire families sleep on the baggage claim carousel.
I talk to an ambulance driver who is resting from a day of rescues. “Here’s the lesson,” he tells me. “Keep supplies in your own home. Now you know no one’s coming for you.” No one has come. I’m arriving six days in and I feel like a first responder. I make a mental list of what everyone needs. It gets so long my head begins to shut down. I tell myself I’ll stockpile things at my house for the rest of my life. Water, granola bars, canned food, cash. Everyone is rushing to nowhere. FEMA is bringing more people in, folks who were camped all over Louisiana. This will be their “hospital.” They say they’ve set up as many as five of these in past hurricanes. Here, they set up forty. There are FedEx trucks coming in as rolling pharmacies. No one here seems to have any relationship to the actual airport. The counters are closed. The tarmac is empty. Nothing is working. The quiet in some places is disturbing. The place is uncomfortable, smelly, crowded, and awful. I’m on TV by morning: