SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Twenty years ago this week, NPR reported on one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in American history.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: It is gorgeous. It's sunny. And it is hard to believe that 12 hours from now, or 24 hours from now, I mean, it will be anything but what I've just described.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: A Category 5 hurricane bears down on New Orleans. It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.
DETROW: Hurricane Katrina. As the storm approached, Gulf Coast communities prepared for the worst.
GREG ALLEN, BYLINE: I was based in Kansas City for NPR at that time and got the call from one of our managing editors - you know, can you go? And it was clear to all of us that this was the big one.
DETROW: Correspondent Greg Allen was in New Orleans for NPR. He had reported on storms before, but this one was clearly different.
ALLEN: I'd never covered a hurricane where there had been that much anticipation and, you know, dread beforehand.
DETROW: Katrina was shaping up to be a monster of a storm. And many worried about the scale of the destruction in New Orleans, a city that, on average, sits several feet below sea level.
ALLEN: The belief was that the entire city was likely to flood. You know, there'd been a number of stories about how vulnerable New Orleans was to flooding from a big hurricane like this.
DETROW: Though, in the hours immediately after Katrina's landfall, many officials and many news outlets, including NPR, thought New Orleans might have been spared from the worst possible outcome. For this week's Reporter's Notebook, I asked Greg about what it was like in New Orleans in the days after the storm. We started our conversation by returning to the archives. And in this segment from August 29, 2005, you will hear Greg reporting on how fears of the flooding passed at first.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
ALLEN: A survey downtown shows nearly every building sustained damage from Katrina's winds. Despite that, the good news is that the extreme flooding feared from a storm surge didn't materialize here. Just before she hit land, Katrina turned slightly east, a factor that may have eased the damage to the city.
DETROW: The storm hits, and people think New Orleans dodged a bullet. Take me through what happened next from your memory, from your point of view.
ALLEN: Right. I mean, it's really, of course, not our finest moment because what happens is that the storm had veered toward Mississippi and actually did terrible damage in Mississippi - a 38-foot storm surge there. We knew that Louisiana did not get that large storm surge. So because of that, you have the sense, oh, we've dodged the bullet. So we didn't really understand at that point how bad it was because it - we didn't learn until the next morning when we woke up that there had been levee breaches. And I think...
DETROW: Yeah.
ALLEN: ...I think some people knew. I mean, people were being rescued from rooftops on that first day as it hit, and we weren't aware of that.
DETROW: Though the reason we played that, though, is because that was, by and large, the initial view of a lot of people covering it, right? That wasn't unique to us.
ALLEN: Right.
DETROW: It was just a sense. And it's also - it's just hard, as we talk about, in the middle of stories like this it's hard to get a full sense of the scope of things. But you're reporting, more information's coming in, and it is clear that there's catastrophic flooding, that levees have broken. I want to play something from your reporting on August 30. This was on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
ALLEN: Albertine Arceneaux (ph) lives in the B.W. Cooper Housing Project, an aging complex of two-story brick buildings. She was one of many out this morning surveying the rising floodwaters.
ALBERTINE ARCENEAUX: Last night when I went to bed, I didn't have no water in front of my door.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: We didn't have no water last night...
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: We didn't have no water out here.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: ...At all. No water.
ARCENEAUX: This morning, when I woke up, my house has water in it. I'm in the next block, the 3600 block. I have water.
MUTHONI MUTURI: What floor are you on?
ARCENEAUX: I'm on the - my apartment has - like, that's the first and second. I'll have to spend the night on the second floor if I stay tonight. I don't know how to swim.
ALLEN: That was the day after the storm. We were able to go out. And as soon as we went out, we could kind of see that the water was coming in. And I was there with the producer, Muthoni Muturi, who you could hear there. And we parked our car. We were talking to some of these folks at this public housing complex, and then we - I looked over, and our car, which would've been on dry pavement, suddenly was in a puddle. The water was coming in.
And so we realized that we only had a limited amount of time before we had to actually move because our car could be flooded itself. And that's when you started to get a sense people were realizing the water was coming in and we didn't know how high it was going to get and how much in danger we might be.
DETROW: And I feel like we're kind of tracking the progress of the story through clips of your reporting. I want to play something from this moment you're describing where you talk about what you're seeing as total chaos in New Orleans.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR CONTENT)
ALLEN: Throughout New Orleans, the scene is one of almost total chaos. There's no power. Trees, debris and rising water make many roads impassable. Police and emergency officials are overwhelmed. On Earhart Boulevard, not far from the Superdome, a man lay on the side of the road today dead, his body covered by plastic sheeting. Residents said police said they'd handle it later.
DETROW: Katrina was a story that was about so many things. It was about the widespread devastation of an American city. It was this very clear look at income inequality in the country, and racial inequality - the way that Black neighborhoods sustained so much more damage than white neighborhoods in New Orleans.
But it was also a story about widespread distrust of government. And I feel like Katrina was one of those first moments where it was clear the government was not able to get the job done, right? You saw George W. Bush's administration really crater and never recover after this. You saw so many other things, just the - FEMA's failure to be helpful, the chaos that you saw. I'm wondering what you make of government's role in this and what the legacy is so many years later, from what you saw on that initial trip and in follow-up reporting.
ALLEN: Well, you know the course. The biggest surprise is how, you know, these kind of things happen like Katrina, and you wonder if people really remember. I think the popular consciousness, people do remember, but on the other hand, a lot of our public policy behaves like it never happened. You know, I mean, what happened with Katrina, as you well know, this was a time when the George W. Bush administration had looked to downgrade the role of FEMA. And they said much the same thing we're hearing now about that it's really up to states to do this, to respond to disasters.
And to a certain extent, it was the federal government's design of the levees that turned out to be somewhat faulty, and that led to these levee failures which led to the flooding. So the federal government's failure actually created this situation. And so you can say it was a lack of preparation. And then also the responses. As we've discussed, the response was just not there.
DETROW: Katrina is the story of what happened that week, and it's the story of the long, slow rebuilding process. Is there one story reporting trip that is most memorable to you about the rebuilding?
ALLEN: Well, you know, the problem is, as a reporter, is that sometimes you go to places where the need is greatest. There's a story to tell. So I've spent a lot of time in Lower Ninth Ward over the last 20 years. I've gone there for several stories. And, you know, in some ways, it's not indicative of New Orleans as a whole because Lower Ninth Ward is a special case. It was always - I mean, it was a strong African American, middle-class community before Katrina.
It has never come back. It's, like, a quarter of the population it had back then. But that's - those are the stories that stick with you 'cause I remember what it was like before, and then you go there and it's just, after 20 years you think it might never come back. And so, you know, you talk to people who are trying to make a go of it, and you feel for them because they're living in a - on a street where they used to have 20 neighbors, and now they have four, you know? And there used to be a bar down the corner, a church down the corner, a school down this other corner, and none of those things are there even now because the population is not there to sustain it.
And so I - when I go there, I see the failures. I've talked to, you know, my colleague John Burnett, who covered it at the same time, and he's much more positive I am. He spends more time going back there, and he says the food's great, the culture's great. And I think he's right. New Orleans has come back in so many ways. But unfortunately, there, for a lot of people, it's just not the same city as it was before Katrina.
DETROW: NPR's Greg Allen, who covered Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago. Thank you for talking to us about what you remember from that really terrible week.
ALLEN: You're welcome.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
DETROW: We are still learning lessons of that storm. For more on our coverage of the impact of Katrina then and since, you can go to npr.org and look up our special series Hurricane Katrina, 20 Years Later. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
