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. A few days after the hurricane hit, I went to the Nexstar NBC affiliate in Shreveport, La., KTAL, to help with its coverage. Thousands of […]
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.
A few days after the hurricane hit, I went to the Nexstar NBC affiliate in Shreveport, La., KTAL, to help with its coverage.
Thousands of evacuees had poured into the city from New Orleans. And Nexstar had sent reporters and photographers from its other stations to help as well.
Nexstar had a satellite truck parked on the Louisiana State Police grounds in Baton Rouge, a staging area for the press as well as the National Guard.
Eventually, that’s where many of the Nexstar anchors, reporters and photographers from various TV stations headed to cover what was happening in New Orleans.
The following is part of a diary I kept of what I observed.
(Click here to read Hurricane Katrina Diary, Part 1.)
Shreveport, La. Sunday, Sept. 4, 2005
My first duty when I got to KTAL today was to re-up the ice and fluids. Ice is at a premium so I had to drive around to find a store with ice.
Next came getting some hotel rooms for the various other people coming in from other Nexstar stations to help with the news coverage.
Tiffany Alaniz and Justin Haase arrived minutes ago from Joplin, were briefed, given some directions and sent out on a story. Welcome to hurricane coverage in Shreveport!
(I caught up with Tiffany Alaniz, currently in Tulsa, Okla., working as the morning news anchor at the Fox affiliate KOKI, a few days ago and asked what she remembered about her experiences. From a news coverage perspective, Alaniz says, “there was no address to send us to, just look for this angle and go find the story.”
The one story she remembers was about some little girls had a lemonade stand to make money to give to the evacuees. Alaniz says she was overwhelmed at the time by the outpouring of support that the people in Shreveport showed the evacuees.)
There are signs everywhere that demonstrate the extent of this story. Last night when I left the station, there were five big buses with a police escort lined up right outside the station. More buses were coming to join them up the road. In the hotel lobby, there’s a table full of information about insurance, schools, housing and jobs.
Everywhere there are signs with messages of encouragement and hope for the victims. One simply read, “We love you, New Orleans.”
When I ask how many more evacuees Shreveport has today since yesterday’s estimate of more than 20,000, I’m told nobody knows; they just keep arriving in shelters.
My job is to keep the news ticker up to date. The news ticker is the information that crawls along the bottom of the TV screen. What’s on the news ticker now is information about shelters, donations locations, Red Cross, FEMA, missing persons, names of churches taking in evacuees, etc.
A local woman called to say that a local donation center needed boxes — that went on the news ticker.
It’s a valuable, concise, quick, and constant source of real good information, and the viewers really like it. The station has been getting a flood of e-mail from viewers complimentary of its news coverage.
I just got word that I have to go down to Baton Rouge, about four hours by car, to help support Nexstar’s sat truck there.
Baton Rouge, Tuesday Sept. 6, 2005
I’m writing this from the Baton Rouge Public Library in downtown Baton Rouge. It’s the only place I know where I can get Internet access. There’s a long line of people who want to use the few computers here and an old librarian with a clipboard who makes sure the line keeps moving.
I drove down from Shreveport yesterday morning, a drive of about five hours. On the way down, traffic was light, with most of it being military convoys, tractor trailers and small groups of rescue convoys from all over the country; some with small boats and ATVs towed behind them. There were abandoned cars on either side of the highway — out of gas, or just wore out, I guess.
Nexstar’s satellite truck is parked on the grounds of the La. State Police headquarters, the same place where all of the emergency management people are.
When I arrived, President Bush’s Marine Corp helicopter sat surrounded by his escort of helicopters right behind the building. In front of the building is where the all of the press is parked. It’s a sea of sat trucks of all sizes and shapes — CNN, NBC, ABC, Fox and many more.
Accompanying them are lots of RVs providing much needed sleep. I’m envious. While the sat truck does have AC, it’s small and cramped, especially when you get a tech or two, a reporter and photog in there.
There’s not a hotel room to be had anywhere within 50-60 miles of the city, maybe more.
I’m scheduled to meet up with the reporters and photographers at the sat truck.
Each reporter (yesterday, we had two) has a photographer that works with them. They determine what story they intend to cover and are out of wherever they’re staying at 6am to start working on it. They come back late very in the afternoon to the sat truck to edit and feed their stories via satellite back to KTAL for a 5, 6 and 10 p.m. airing.
Often, the reporters do a live introduction. They usually do several different stories. It’s a very long day for them, roughly 6 a.m. to after 10 p.m., then get up and do it again. Well, here comes the librarian with her clipboard so I have to go.
If you wanted to get a glimpse of what some displaced Americans are going through thanks to Katrina, you only needed to spend a few minutes in the downtown Baton Rouge library, like I did this morning. When I walked up to the counter, I noticed the man next to me had the phone book open to the yellow pages, and, using the library phone, was calling all the businesses starting in the “A”s to ask if they had any job openings.
Next to me at the computer terminal I helped a certified Ford mechanic look for a job online because the New Orleans dealership where he worked was underwater. While we were online, there was a man and his family next to us. The man’s son found a website where they could examine satellite images of the flooding. Suddenly, I heard a gasp and sobbing; they found a picture of their neighborhood completely underwater.
Some have survived the flood only to be drowning on dry land. Americans, like us, with vacuous looks in their eyes, looking disconnected, lost, and powerless. While they may now be getting the necessities to sustain life — water, food, a roof over their heads, medical attention-their lives are in a state of suspended animation.
After I left the Baton Rouge library, I headed to the sat truck to meet up with some Nexstar anchors, reporters and photographers from stations around the country.
Some of them had driven all night, then went right into New Orleans, shot their story, and came back to use the sat truck to edit it.
It was very hot, and not all of us could fit in the sat truck. So I went out and bought a big umbrella and two folding chairs so we wouldn’t have to sit in the hot sun.
After the 6 p.m. satellite feed, I walked over the WWL’s sat truck. I used to work at WWL and was hoping to see some friends. When I got there, the engineer was on the phone with Chris Slaughter, WWL’s assistant news director. The engineer tells Chris that someone’s here to say “hi” and hands me the phone.
I knew Chris was busy and didn’t have much time to chat, so I just told him that everyone in the country was following WWL’s news coverage via streaming video from the website, and that their news coverage was exceptional.
Chris said, “That’s all I need to hear, I’ll tell everyone here what you said. Thanks, Paul.”
That night, sleeping arrangements were a bit rough.
In front of our sat truck is an old bus that had been converted to a radio studio for WWL-AM, the New Orleans all-news station.
I met one of the radio news guys and got him to leave the door to the bus open so some of us could sleep inside, albeit without any air conditioning.
One of the photographers slept on a dusty old couch, while I slept on the floor of the radio studio in a sleeping bag. That floor hadn’t been vacuumed in years.
Baton Rouge, La. Thursday, Sept. 8, 2005
This morning, I arranged for an anchor and photographer to meet up with an old New Orleans friend of mine who was temporarily living with his sister about two hours north of New Orleans. Glenn “GT” Taylor and I had worked together at the NBS affiliate in New Orleans, WDSU.
(These days, Taylor directs reality shows like Extreme Home Makeover and Bar Rescue, but then he was facing a nightmare version of a reality show himself.) He and his wife agreed to meet up with the reporter and photog and drive down to his house in New Orleans. His house and yard were flooded, ruined; the only thing he salvaged was an old baseball bat that belonged to his dad, a one-time pro ball-player.
Keep in mind that even though it’s been a full week since the levees failed, flooding the city, much of the city is still under water.
The video was touching; Glenn in hip boots, walking a little boat through his neighborhood while his wife, Jennifer, along with the reporter and photographer sat in the boat and recorded it all.
(I caught up with Taylor a few days ago to talk about Katrina. He says his wife is still traumatized by it and when the hurricane is mentioned on TV, she changes the channel. Taylor says the government declared his house uninhabitable and bulldozed it to the ground. Although his house was not officially in a flood zone and therefore he didn’t need flood insurance, he had it anyway.
When he asked the insurance company to pay for his house, they balked and refused. Taylor took them to court. In the end, the judge ruled that the flood was due to a man-made mistake, (the poor construction of the levees), and he got nothing. He continued paying his mortgage although no house was there for years until finally selling the lot to a neighbor.)
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