Baton Rouge, La. – HDNet on Monday asked me to go with a camera crew to New Orleans. When I say “go to New Orleans,” I mean we flew to Houston, the nearest functioning airport, and drove overnight.
But if I moan and groan about how I’m suffering, shut me up. I only went a couple of nights without sleep. Maybe a million people are going to have to go months without a home. Right now they have no place to live, no place to work, no place to get food, no place to send their kids to school.
In my career, I have covered some of the major wars and natural disasters of the past few decades. This one, measured by the scope of its impact, is right near the top of the list. I have seen scene after scene that I can compare in my professional experience only to war zones. The only difference is, in other places people are fleeing the fighting; here they are fleeing the water.
Maybe two-thirds of the city is under water. In some places it’s only a foot or two, and that’s tough enough. In other places it’s 15 or 20 feet, and that’s impossible.
On Tuesday, my cameraman and I tied our star to a convoy of state fishery employees whose pickup trucks pulling boats we passed at about 3 a.m. on the road from Houston. We geared back, stuck with them, followed them to a staging area, got them to let us join in, and used them to get through the roadblocks meant to keep out anyone without life-saving business in the city. Most important, they helped us to get to the worst parts of the flooding, because their job was to put into the water and cruise at rooftop level looking for anyone who’d survived. This itself was amazing, because all the familiar landmarks for an urban neighborhood – corners, street signs, sidewalks, parked cars, front doors – all were somewhere below us. This part of the city was just a lake.
I spent as much time that day helping save lives as making notes for the two programs we’re doing.
People say reporters don’t or shouldn’t get involved. But in a case like this, all hands can help.
We went out on a flat-bottom boat literally pulling people off rooftops, the only parts of their homes left above the waterline. Typically, they got there by punching a hole in the roof, which they’d reached from their attics – until the water started rising even up to there. One guy, who I carried down from the top of his roof to the boat, was on his oxygen tank. In one case, we pulled a family of 14 – including seven little kids, two very frail elderly women, and a man almost as big as the house itself – through a single second-story window that would only open halfway. Like everyone else, they had only the soaking wet clothes on their backs – the water rose too fast for many of them to grab anything else, like photos, necessary medicines, even shoes.
At one point we joined a few other boats taking people off the roof of a two-story elementary school. Some had kids on their shoulders, shivering, whom they’d hand to us. Some were calm, some were frantic. All were still shaking from the fear of rising water and no rescue. All were hungry and dehydrated because temperatures are in the 90s, and humid. All were grateful to be going somewhere else.
Wednesday we spent moving around New Orleans, which wasn’t simple. There’s water everywhere. So you start somewhere in water you can negotiate in the high-off-the-road SUV we rented. Then you slowly drive into something deeper and deeper until it’s too dangerous to keep going. The engine comes close to getting flooded in the deep, fetid water. Twice, we started moving not on our wheels but on the current.
One place we got to Wednesday was the Superdome, where there were 20,000 refugees. But with power lines broken and hanging and off all over the area, it too had no electricity. The toilets were no longer flushing because the pumps don’t work, so they piled up with human waste, which made the whole place smell like a sewer, so everyone was outside on the exterior walkways in the broiling sun. But it’s 20 or 30 feet above street level, which is why they chose it.
To get there, we hitched a ride on an empty boat heading into deeper water to rescue some people stuck in an office building. To get out, we went down the Superdome’s ramp to the street, and waded – holding equipment above our heads – about five city blocks with the water up to our chests.
Wherever you go, you see people whom I can only liken to the walking dead. Yesterday, for instance, there was a guy maybe 30, pushing his father, maybe 60, in a wheelchair – through water 3 or 4 feet deep. We could have set off a firecracker next to them; they wouldn’t have flinched. I guess they’ve just seen too much tragedy and suffered too much loss of hope to react to two strangers with a TV camera pointed at them. But people like that are everywhere. They have no realistic hope for the foreseeable future. Their homes are under water; their places of work, their schools, their markets, their highways, their cars, their doctor’s offices, their checkbooks, their marriage licenses and birth certificates and computers and televisions and clothing and furniture – it’s all submerged and saturated. And even when and if people can finally come back, they’ll come back to a level of loss few Americans have ever suffered.
Yet most, when I ask how they’re coping with it all, graciously say they feel happy to have survived. And happy to have their families together.
As with stories I’ve covered in the past, this is one to make you grateful for everything you have. Personally, it’s also one where there’s some pride in providing information that people need – or at least want. As for safety, I can’t say everything we’re doing is perfectly safe, but we’re trying to approach it all as wisely as we can, making decisions about where to go and what to do based on our assessment of the risks.
I’m sending this from Baton Rouge, about 80 miles north. There’s exactly one route in and out of New Orleans, and we found it. We had to leave because there is no gas in New Orleans. And no food. And no fresh water. And certainly no place to sleep.I’m not sure how much longer we’ll be able to operate, because at about 9 last night [Wednesday], when we got back up to Baton Rouge, almost all the gas stations in town were out of gas and closed. They have too many people here now, and in fact also lost power for a couple of days because of the storm.
Gotta go now. Thought you might appreciate an inside look at this horrible disaster. If you helped tsunami victims, as many of you did last year, think about helping Gulf Coast victims the same way. They can use all the help they can get. That’s all that’ll give them any hope. They don’t have much else.
This letter was edited for Perspective. Greg Dobbs, who worked as a television reporter for ABC News for 23 years, wrote this letter to friends and family, while on assignment in New Orleans for HDNet, the high-definition TV network based in Denver.
