Hurricane Katrina hit the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast on Monday, Aug. 29, 2005. At the time, I was the VP of Marketing for Nexstar Broadcasting, headquartered in Irving, Texas. I had worked at two stations in New Orleans in my career, WDSU and WWL, so I was keenly interested in watching the hurricane coverage. […]
Hurricane Katrina hit the Louisiana and Mississippi Gulf Coast on Monday, Aug. 29, 2005.
At the time, I was the VP of Marketing for Nexstar Broadcasting, headquartered in Irving, Texas. I had worked at two stations in New Orleans in my career, WDSU and WWL, so I was keenly interested in watching the hurricane coverage.
When I was living in New Orleans, the locals always used to wonder what would happen to the city, “when the big one hit.”
Katrina looked like it was going to be that “big one.”
At first, it appeared the city would be spared. Until the levees broke.
That Thursday, Sept. 1, Susana Schuler, Nexstar’s VP of News at the time, and currently VP of news for Raycom, was in the office next to mine.
Nexstar had arranged to get a satellite truck driven down from its station in Little Rock, Ark., KARK, to the Louisiana State Police grounds in Baton Rouge, a staging area for the press as well as the National Guard.
But Schuler had a problem. The technician with the satellite truck wanted to go home, back to Little Rock, for the upcoming Labor Day weekend, and there was nobody to take his place.
Although I didn’t know anything about operating a satellite truck, I volunteered to go.
“Do you know how to run a sat truck,” Schuler asked.
“No,” I said, “but how hard can it be?”
That afternoon, I rented an SUV, packed some clothes and headed to KTAL, Nexstar’s NBC affiliate in Shreveport, three hours east of Dallas and 350 miles north of New Orleans.
The following is part of a diary I kept of what I observed.
Shreveport, La., Saturday, Sept. 3, 2005
I knew I was back in Louisiana when I saw three bottles of hot sauce on the breakfast table this morning and some Cajun seasoning called, Slap Ya Mama.
I’m in Shreveport working at KTAL, Nexstar’s NBC affiliate here, answering phones, editing news packages, putting information on the website and news ticker, etc.
There are thousands of people here, the hotels are full and gas is hard to find. It’s like the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina has washed up these people from New Orleans like so much flotsam.
Many people staying in the hotel where I’m at have their pets with them. There’s a feeling of uncertainty, shock, desperation and panic in the air.
I see them at the hotel — little old ladies that ask me if I know about Mandeville, or a young couple with a dog who asked about the West Bank.
The hallways, the front desk and the dining area are filled with them, talking on cell phones, watching TV coverage. I overheard one young lady say, “Well, I never had to deal with snow, but I can.”
Obviously, she was contemplating a move up north. The only friend of mine from New Orleans I could reach was with his family visiting friends in Austin, Texas. He doesn’t know what happened to his house or when he can return. He said he’s enrolling his kids in school in Austin.
It’s estimated that there are in excess of 20,000 evacuees in shelters in Shreveport alone, and more arriving everyday.
I arrived on Thursday night, after driving in a rented SUV from our corporate office in Dallas. I spent Friday in a KTAL edit suite, editing two photo essay pieces for a special telethon that KTAL is airing tonight from 8-10.
The photo essays were songs covered with footage from the hurricane, rescue and evacuation — tunes to evoke emotion, offer comfort or hope, and hopefully, to spur a contribution to the Red Cross volunteers manning the phones.
KTAL had also held a donation drive that filled four tractor trailers for the Salvation Army in the first couple days after the disaster.
In addition to me, there are others here and on their way from other Nexstar markets — an editor from Amarillo, a photographer from Joplin, Mo., and four people (reporter, photographer, producer and technician) from Terre Haute, Ind.
In the newsroom, we’re all watching CNN, and to a lesser extent, Fox and MSNBC, monitoring everything that’s coming across on WWL-TV’s website.
Displaced people from New Orleans are using WWL’s website and WDSU’s as their primary source of information because not only you can see streaming live news coverage, but also go to discussion boards that have pictures and eyewitness accounts of the damage to specific neighborhoods and streets, an invaluable source of information for people who want to know what kind of damage their area sustained.
I volunteered to get the newsroom some food and drink this evening. They’ve been living off pizza for several days, so I went and got some Cajun food, a welcome change for me and the newsroom.
Everything is going well, the news product and coverage is excellent, and everyone is positive and accommodating, pulling together, wanting to help.
The news director, Sean Kennedy, was here all day (and the day before, and the day before that, etc.) manning the assignment desk, answering the phones, just being a steadying influence in the newsroom. You can tell that he knows everyone and they like and respect him.
Kennedy is currently the assistant news director for the Fox affiliate in San Diego, Tribune-owned KSBW. I spoke with him recently about what stands out in his memory of that time.
“The one thing that stands out from a coverage point of view is that you had to be aware of the fact that you were reporting not just for the locals, but for all the evacuees. So we had a greater responsibility,” he said.
Kennedy said he also remembers with pride how the young stqff, from KTAL, and other Nexstar stations that sent down reporters and photographers, “rose to the occasion with passion to get the job done.”)
Next, in Part 2, more observations from Shreveport, and eventually, down to Baton Rouge.
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