Devastating flood no match for alumni journalists
Dan Shea ’81 and Laura Maggi ’95 helped the New Orleans Times-Picayune keep publishing when it was needed most
By Judith Jaeger Photos by Andrew Boyd
On Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2005—the day after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast and the levees in New Orleans failed—the New Orleans Times-Picayune used a one-word headline to describe the situation.
‘Catastrophic’
But even as the city sank into chaos and disaster, the Times-Picayune continued to publish. The flood waters, it turned out, were no match for this Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper, its Managing Editor for News, Dan Shea ’81, and the crew of reporters, photographers and editors who covered the event.
“For a hometown newspaper that has never stopped publishing, the thought of not publishing on my watch—it just wasn’t going to happen,” says Shea, who is responsible for all aspects of the production and presentation of the Times-Picayune. He has lived in New Orleans for 13 years and had weathered three major hurricanes before Katrina. The days leading up to the storm didn’t seem different from past hurricanes, Shea says, but by the end of the day on Friday, Aug. 26, the forecast took a turn for the worse.
“By Saturday, it was obvious that the city was going to be in serious trouble.”
‘The game was over’ Shea’s wife, Stephanie, who is also an editor at the Times-Picayune, and their two children evacuated the city to stay with Shea’s former Clark roommate, Jim Hamilton ’81, in Alabama. With his family out of harm’s way, Shea turned his attention to the newspaper. He and other editors put together a crew to work in the newspaper’s bunker, which has a generator, DSL lines and other equipment that would allow them to at least publish on the newspaper’s Web site, www.nola.com. The Times-Picayune published on Sunday, Aug. 28, and Monday, Aug. 29, although by then there was no way to deliver the Monday edition, Shea notes. Early Monday morning, just as the staff began to report on the storm’s arrival, the newspaper lost power. Shea remembers looking out the window.
“I’d never seen a storm that bad in the area, but it wasn’t a catastrophic storm.”
By noon, the storm was lifting, and by 2 p.m., four teams of photographers and reporters were dispatched in TP trucks to cover the story. They returned almost immediately, saying water was blocking their path. Shea thought the drivers just didn’t want to take the brand new trucks out, so he and Editor Jim Amoss decided to go themselves.
“We knew right away that something was very wrong in the city,” Shea says. From models developed by Louisiana State University, he says, they expected flooding in the eastern part of New Orleans. But there was too much water coming right up to the newspaper building, just outside of town.
“I knew at that point that the game was over,” Shea says.
Other photographers and reporters ventured out into the city and they all came back with the same conclusion: the levees breached, and nothing would stop all of Lake Pontchatrain from filling up the bowl of the city, which lies up to 15-feet below sea level. While national media were reporting from the dry French Quarter that the city had “dodged a bullet,” the Picayune prepared a harrowing front-page account of the inundation for the Tuesday edition.
Early Tuesday, with the water now lapping at the entrance to the building and knowing that they could be trapped for days or weeks, Shea and his colleagues ran through the building grabbing whatever laptops and equipment they could carry. Thirty-five minutes later, they were all on the 14 trucks, heading for higher ground. It took 45 minutes crawling through four feet of water to get to the interstate, which runs right in front of the building.
Out of danger, back in print “Once we got on the highway, I knew we had to publish a paper the next day,” Shea says. “It’s in the genetic code of journalists. This was the biggest story in the history of New Orleans. You want to be there.”
Twelve staff members went to a New York Times-owned newspaper in Houma, La., and 12 others volunteered to go back into the city to cover the story. They were able to get a text message to Newhouse News Service, which owns the Times-Picayune, and by 1 a.m. Tuesday, Aug. 30, reporters were updating the blog on nola.com.
Working with limited equipment and without the necessary production tools, Shea and his team pulled together a PDF of the Wednesday paper and posted it to the Web site. They moved to Baton Rouge the next day and published another PDF edition. On Friday, Sept. 2, the Times-Picayune was printed again, the copies taken to area shelters where they were snatched up.
“People were rushing to grab copies of the paper,” Shea says, noting the value of the hometown newspaper in times of crisis. New Orleans has its problems, he notes, and the Times-Picayune “tries to be a voice of sanity and reason and progress.”
From the capital bureau For six weeks after Hurricane Katrina, the Times-Picayune operated out of rented space in Baton Rouge, where Laura Maggi ’95 covers the capital for the newspaper. During and after the hurricane, she camped out at the state Office of Emergency Preparedness, trying to unravel the aftermath of the storm.
In the first few days after the hurricane and flooding, Maggi says the biggest challenge was trying to figure out the relationship between the state and federal government and “who was responsible for what.” She notes that the breakdown of the communication infrastructure due to the storm was a big hindrance. She also noted a “certain amount of spin coming from different groups” about what was or wasn’t happening to help victims, which only further complicated the issue as she witnessed the unfolding controversy surrounding former FEMA Director Michael Brown and Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff.
“There were people in despicable situations who needed real help in real time,” says Maggi, adding that the storm brought a new intensity to her work.
“Everything was heightened,” she says. “You had to act more quickly, and it was more important. There were people all over the South reading the Times-Picayune to learn about their loved ones.”
Maggi also gained a deeper understanding of the value of her work as a reporter.
“When I write an article that has to do with plans to get people back into their homes, I know that it matters to people,” Maggi says. “And holding officials accountable for their actions is a good thing to do.”
Far from normal While it has remained the focus of national attention and congressional investigations, the immediacy of Hurricane Katrina, the flood and the plight of its victims has faded over time for most of the country. But it hasn’t faded at all for those left living in New Orleans and the surrounding region. In Baton Rouge, Maggi says the city has shrunk slightly since the evacuation from New Orleans, but it’s still unclear how many people plan to stay permanently. In New Orleans, Shea sees a situation that is much more complicated than what the rest of the country sees on the news. Parts of the city were untouched by the flood, he says, and most of the suburban parishes are in “great shape.”
Other parts of the city, however, are devastated. Shea and his family live in Jefferson Parish, in the one neighborhood there that was flooded. The first floor of his house is gutted, and all the vegetation outside is dead. He and his family are back living on the second floor of their home, using the FEMA trailer in their yard as a kitchen and living room. Many people who were flooded out aren’t back yet, Shea adds, and about one third of the newspaper staff is still out of their homes. Shea praised Newhouse News for taking great care of the Times-Picayune staff. Not only has no one been laid off, Shea says, everyone received a raise in December.
Even though parts of New Orleans survived the flooding and rebuilding has begun, Shea says life is far from normal.
“In certain ways, it’s the 1950s again. You don’t go out casually to find some fast food, or gas or milk. Things close early. And there’s never a routine day at home.”
However, Shea stresses that the damage has little to do with the hurricane itself.
“Hurricane Katrina did not do this to the city,” he says. “It was the levees breaking as if they were made of papier maché.”
Thinking on your feet A Worcester native, Shea says Clark has been a source of moral support during this crisis. A Clarkie provided shelter to his family and many alumni have contacted him since the storm. Shea also credits his Clark education with helping him keep the Times-Picayune running when it was needed most.
“Clark encourages you to think on your feet, and we had to do a lot of that in the storm.”
IDCE graduate aids hurricane victims
Just minutes after Bryan Becker M.A. ’05 volunteered to serve in the Peace Corps’ Crisis Corps to aid in the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort, he learned he had cinched a dream job as a coastal restoration specialist for the American Littoral Society in New Jersey.
For Becker, who had spent three years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tanzania prior to coming to Clark’s International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE) Program, there was no doubt about what to do next.
“It was an opportunity to help people in the aftermath of Katrina,” Becker says. “Crisis Corps was the fastest way for me to go help people.”
Becker’s enthusiasm for making a difference in the world is characteristic of Clark students. Many IDCE graduate students are also Peace Corps alumni and often incorporate hands-on, participatory action and relief work into their research. Though Becker’s research for his master’s degree in environmental science and policy focused on environmental restoration, he was able to draw from his experience in IDCE’s Humanitarian Assistance class.
Two weeks after Katrina had decimated the Gulf Coast, Becker joined a group of 10 other Crisis Corps volunteers in Orlando, Fla. This was a first domestic deployment of the Crisis Corps in the 44 years of the Peace Corps. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) linked with Crisis Corps because so many Peace Corps alumni have experience working in conditions without electricity or water and because the United States had never suffered a humanitarian crisis of such magnitude. Becker and his team spent several days training for work in the government’s Disaster Recovery Centers, set up to help Katrina evacuees obtain social services. After their training, however, Becker’s team was sent to Arkansas to try to locate evacuees who had been transferred there and to compile census information from shelters.
“In addition to connecting evacuees with housing and unemployment benefits, we were also there to help reconcile problems with applications to FEMA and answer as many other questions as possible,” Becker says. “As we were considered ‘the face of FEMA,’ sometimes the job was to be yelled at and harassed, taking it all as graciously as possible and staying ever conscious of the evacuees’ frustration with a government system which had so far failed its citizens in their time of need.”
Eventually, Becker and his team were sent to Fort Chaffee, a National Guard base outside of Fort Smith, Ark., where approximately 1,200 Rita evacuees arrived also seeking help. The Crisis Corps members provided a multitude of services for the devastated and weary hurricane victims, including tracking down checks, finding missing family members and finding housing and employment opportunities.
Nearly one month after risking his dream job to volunteer with the Crisis Corps, Becker returned to New Jersey to begin work as a coastal restoration specialist for the American Littoral Society in Tuckerton, N.J.
“My new employer was very understanding of the need to help in the crisis,” Becker says. “I feel incredibly lucky to have been able to do one without sacrificing the other.”—Karen Sharpe
Students answer calls for help
Abigail Crowley ’06 and Julianne Siegfriedt ’06 answered the call for aid following Hurricane Katrina by volunteering for the Red Cross.
From Oct. 8 to 22, Crowley and Siegfriedt were deployed to Washington, D.C. They worked the night shift, from 11 p.m. to 7:30 a.m., as call agents for the Red Cross Info Line at the Hurricane Response Center in Falls Church, Va. They took calls from people affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, helping them make a case for aid and giving them additional resources based on their need.
By their fourth shift, Siegfriedt and Crowley were promoted to team leaders, responsible for supervising other call agents and helping with distressed or angry callers.
“It was an enlightening and unforgettable experience,” says Crowley, a government and sociology major. She is also a member of the varsity swim team, and works as a lifeguard and for the Clark Admissions Office. In addition, Crowley is president of Rotaract, a community-service club.
“This was the most life-changing experience for both of us, and we would not hesitate to do it again,” says Siegfriedt, who is a double major in psychology and sociology. Siegfriedt is involved with many organizations including Amnesty International, YOU, Inc. in Worcester and the Worcester County Food Bank.
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