When Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, journalists in NPR were there to cover developments day after day. Greg Allen is reflected in covering the disaster and digging in the archive to remember the city’s feeling after the storm.
Scott Detro, host:
Twenty years ago this week, NPR reported one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in American history.
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Unlimited person 1: It is great. It’s sunny. It is difficult to believe that 12 hours from now, or 24 hours from now, I mean, anything will be nothing but what you just described.
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Unlimited correspondent: Hurricane 5 on New Orleans. Everything is considered from NPR news.
Detrow: Hurricane Katrina. As the storm approaches, the Gulf coast societies prepared for the worst.
Greg Allen, Byline: I was headquartered in Kansas City for NPR at that time and got a call from one of our administrative editor – Do you know, can you go? It was clear to all of us that this was great.
Detrow: The reporter Greg Allen was in New Orleans for NPR. He had previously reported storms, but this was clearly different.
Allen: I was never covering a hurricane as there was a lot of anticipation, as you know, the dread in advance.
Detro: Katrina was formed to be a storm monster. Many are concerned about the scale of destruction in New Orleans, a city on average at several sea levels.
Allen: The belief that the entire city was likely to be overwhelmed. As you know, there were a number of stories about how weak New Orleans of floods of a large hurricane like this.
Detro: Nevertheless, in the hours that followed the Katrina Palace directly, many officials and many news means, including NPR, believed that New Orleans may have survived the worst possible result. As for the report of this week, Greg asked what was the case in New Orleans in the days after the storm. We started our conversation by returning to the archives. In this part of August 29, 2005, Greg will hear reports on how to approve flood fears at first.
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Allen: A survey in the city center showed almost every building of Katrina’s winds. Nevertheless, the good news is that severe floods are afraid of increasing the storm that has not been achieved here. Before reaching the ground, Katrina turned to the east a little, a factor that may have reduced the damage to the city.
Detrow: The storm strikes, and people believe that New Orleans escapes from a bullet. Take me what happened after your memory, from your point of view.
Allen: Right. I mean, it’s really, of course, not our best moments because what happens is that the storm has deviated towards the Mississippi state and caused terrible damage to the Mississippi state – a 38 -foot storm there. We knew that Louisiana did not get this big storm. For this reason, you have a meaning, oh, we have escaped from the bullet. So we did not really understand at that stage how bad it is because we did not learn until the next morning when we woke up that there were dam breaches. I think …
Detrow: Yes.
Allen: … I think some people know. I mean, people are rescued from the roofs of the houses on that first day while hitting it, and we were not aware of that.
Detrow: Although the reason we played it, though, is that this was, to a large extent, the preliminary symptom of many people who cover it, right? This was not unique to us.
Allen: Right.
Detrow: It was just a feeling. This is also – it is difficult, as we talk, in the middle of the stories like this, it is difficult to get a full sense of the scope of things. But you are reporting more information, and it is clear that there are catastrophic floods that have broken dams. I want to play something of your report on August 30. This was in all the things that were considered.
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Allen: Arsino lives in the BW Cooper Housing project, which is a two -storey brick builder. One of the many of this morning was wiping the emerging flood water.
Albertin Arkino: Last night when I went to bed, I had no water in front of my door.
Unexual person No. 2: We did not have water last night …
The non -specific person No. 3: We did not have water here.
Unexual person #2: … at all. No water.
Arceneux: This morning, when I woke up, my house has water. I am in the next block, 3600 mass. I have water.
Muthoni Muturi: What is the floor you are?
Arceneux: I – my apartment has – like, this is the first and the second. I will have to spend the night on the second floor if it remains tonight. I don’t know how to swim.
Allen: This was the next day of the storm. We were able to go out. Once we came out, we could somewhat see the water came. I was there with the product, Methoni Motori, who could have heard there. And we stopped our car. We were talking to some of these people in this public housing complex, and then, we looked, and our car, which was on the dry sidewalk, was suddenly in a pond. The water came.
Thus we realized that we had only a limited time before we had to move actually because our car could be overwhelmed by itself. This is when I started getting a feeling that people were aware that the water would come and we did not know how high it was and the extent of the danger we might be.
Detrow: I feel that we are a kind of tracking of the story with clips of your reports. I want to play something from this moment when you describe the place where you talk about what you see complete chaos in New Orleans.
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Allen: All over New Orleans, the scene is almost one of the overall chaos. There is no power. Trees, debris, and emerging water make many roads improper. Police and emergency officials are sunk. On Irehart Street, not far from SuperDome, a man on the side of the road paints today is dead, and his body is covered with plastic panels. Residents said the police said they would deal with it later.
Detro: Katrina was a story about many things. It was about the widespread destruction of an American city. This is a very clear view of inequality in income in the country, and the lack of ethnic equality – the way black neighborhoods were subjected to much more damage than the white neighborhoods in New Orleans.
But it was also a story about the government’s lack of confidence on a large scale. And I feel that Katrina was one of those first moments, as it was clear that the government was not able to accomplish the mission, right? I have seen George W. Bush’s administration really a hole and not after that. I have seen many other things, just – Fema failed to be useful, the chaos I saw. I wonder about the government’s role in this and what is the legacy after many years, which I saw on that initial journey and in the follow -up reports.
Allen: Well, you know the course. The biggest surprise is how, as you know, is that this type of things happens like Katrina, and she wonders if people really remember. I think popular consciousness remembers people, but on the other hand, many of our public policy behaves as it did not happen. As you know, I mean, what happened with Katrina, as you know well, this was a time when the George W. Bush administration looked at the role of Fema. They said that the same thing we hear now is about the fact that it is really to countries to do so, to respond to disasters.
To some extent, it was the design of the federal government of dams that turned out to be somewhat defective, and which led to these failures in dams that led to the floods. So the failure of the federal government already created this situation. Thus, you can say that it was a lack of preparation. Then the responses. As we discussed, the response was not there.
Detrow: Katrina is the story of what happened this week, and it is the story of a long, slow reconstruction process. Is there a single story reports story for you about rebuilding?
Allen: Well, as you know, the problem is, as a reporter, that you sometimes go to places where the need is greater. There is a story that you tell. So I have spent a lot of time in the ninth wing over the past twenty years. I went there for several stories. As you know, in some respects, it does not indicate New Orleans as a whole because the lower ninth wing is a special case. It was always – I mean, it was a strong, middle -class middle -class community before Katrina.
Never no longer. It is, like, the quarter of the population it was at the time. But this – those are the stories that adhere to you “because I remember what it was before, then you go there, and after 20 years you think it may never return. And so, as you know, you are talking to people trying to do, and feel them because they live in a street where they used to have 20 neighbors, and now they have four, did you know? There is no of these things yet because the population is not present to preserve them.
Thus – when I go there, I see failure. I spoke, as you know, my colleague John Burnett, who covered her at the same time, is more positive. He spends more time returning there, and says the great food and great culture. And I think it is right. New Orleans returned in many ways. Unfortunately, there, for many people, it is not the same city that Katrina was on.
Detrow: Greg Allen of NPR, who covered Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago. Thank you for talking to us about what you really remember from this terrible week.
Allen: on spaciousness and capacity.
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Detrow: We are still learning lessons in that storm. To learn more about our coverage of the effect of Katrina at the time, and since then, you can go to NPR.org and search for a special series of Hurricane Katrina, after 20 years.
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