By Donald R. Winslow, News Photographer magazine
AUSTIN, TX (September 1, 2005) – Newspapers and journalists in New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama are struggling against rising flood waters, no electricity, and the massive devastation left behind by Hurricane Katrina to cover the story of the deadly disaster and to publish their daily newspapers. Television stations in New Orleans had to move to other broadcast sites as the city was evacuated, and in Biloxi at the Sun Herald many newspaper employees are still unaccounted for today.
Journalists are facing the same overwhelming problems as the victims of the hurricane: rising flood waters, a growing refugee problem with people stranded everywhere, and a lack of transportation and basic public services.
As Associated Press photojournalist Susan Walsh rode on Air Force One with President Bush from Waco, TX, back to Washington, DC, on Wednesday she photographed him looking out the plane's windows at the devastation of a city wiped out by the deadly combination of hurricane winds and rising flood waters. Air Force One chief pilot Col. Mark Tillman brought the president's Boeing 747 down so low, the pool report says, that at points the massive jet was barely above the skyscrapers of New Orleans.
Tillman kept the plane at 2,500 feet or lower for a 35-minute flyover from New Orleans up the Gulf Coast over Sidwell, Gulfport, and Biloxi, MI, before climbing back to altitude as the president looked at entire cities that now look like matchsticks. The traveling pool of White House photojournalists (Walsh from AP, Jim Watson from AFP, and Mannie Garcia from Reuters) took advantage of the 747's big windows and low altitude to shoot scores of photographs of the damage, and they filed their aerial pictures to the wire services as quickly as possible. (Read the entire pool report from the flight written by Peter Baker of The Washington Post here.)
From the scene in New Orleans, New York Times photojournalist Vincent Laforet made one of the first flights over the city Tuesday morning on a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) helicopter and he filed a Blog report, along with a gallery of his live images, on the Web site SportsShooter.com where he’s a member. Laforet says in his post that he agreed to “pool” the images in order to get the aerial ride, and that the flight was at “military speed” and not a photo tour.
Television stations had to evacuate New Orleans as well. Reports on the Web site Southtvnews.com said that the CBS station WWL-TV moved operations to Baton Rouge, ABC's WGNO-TV was broadcasting from Baton Rouge, and NBC's WDSU-TV broadcast from sister station WAPT-TV in Jackson, MI. WVUE-TV, a Fox station, reportedly moved broadcasting operations to Mobile, AL, which was also hard-hit by the hurricane. Urgent messages posted on Southtvnews.com asks for WDSU-TV6, WGNO-TV, and WNOL-TV employees to please contact their stations.
Posts on the Web site B-Roll.net report seeing CNN photojournalist Mark Biello working with "a broken foot," injured since sometime Monday morning. Biello is known for, among other stories, his coverage of the opening hours of the Gulf War from a hotel window in Baghdad as Bernard Shaw provided live play-by-play. CNN also took a hit from Hurricane Katrina on Monday as a large piece of a wooden fence landed on the special satellite truck Hurricane One and totalled the vehicle while correspondent Gary Tuchman and three others were using the expensive SUV to cover the approaching storm in Gulfport, MI.
The Times-Picayune was only able to publish an electronic edition on Tuesday and Wednesday, as residents sat on rooftops screaming to be rescued and looting and shootings broke out across the city. Rising floodwaters forced the staff out of the newspaper’s main building and they published on the Web site and also made Acrobat .PDFs of the newspaper pages by working remotely from The Courier in Houma, LA, and from The Advocate in Baton Rouge. A story in the Los Angeles Times by staff writer James Rainey says that by 11 a.m. Tuesday the Times-Picayune's publisher, Ashton Phelps Jr., gathered the staff and told them it was time to move to safer ground. The journalists then rode in six of the newspaper's delivery trucks to Houma and Baton Rouge and went back to work producing the Internet editions and publishing bulletins.
Reports said that the storm blew out windows on the Picayune’s third floor executive offices on Monday and the building was taking in water that leaked down the walls into the newspaper’s café where people had taken shelter from the hurricane. After more damage, the building was evacuated and the staff reportedly headed for Houma, LA, northwest of New Orleans, to attempt to work from other newspapers or bureaus.
In Mississippi, the Biloxi Sun Herald "was hard hit” said Lee Ann Schlatter, director of corporate communications for Knight Ridder, in a message to Knight Ridder employees. “Helpers from around Knight Ridder are on the way, but many are locked in traffic on the few roads leading into the area. eMail has failed at The Sun Herald, and there is no phone service other than the few satellite telephones sent in earlier. Those are useful for outgoing calls, but we cannot call in on them.”
On their Web site the Sun Herald reports tonight that Knight Ridder chairman and CEO Tony Ridder, along with two Knight Ridder vice presidents, came to Biloxi on Monday afternoon to speak with Sun Herald employees after the hurricane passed. The paper says Ridder spoke with employees in “an impromptu session in the newsroom” and expressed sympathies for those who lost property and urged Sun Herald employees who are unaccounted for to contact the newspaper. Sun Herald publisher Ricky Mathews is quoted as saying that only about 25 percent of employees are accounted for after the storm, and many have suffered severe damage to their homes.
The Sun Herald printed 20,000 copies of a 12-page edition today at the Columbus Ledger Enquirer, and those are being trucked to Biloxi. Columbus is also sending relief supplies with each truckload. “We are working on setting up a Knight Ridder Fund to accept donations to help our colleagues,” Schlatter said.
“We have five Knight Ridder photographers down in the area now, and more to come,” reports Linda Epstein from the Knight Ridder Tribune News Service bureau in Washington, DC. “One photographer from Ft. Worth has been living in his car as he’s covering New Orleans and can’t go anywhere. It’s a mess and the photos that we’ve put out show it. A breathtaking mess.”
In Alabama at the Mobile Register, the staff is still working out of the newspaper’s office and the floodwater has receded tonight. “We just got power about two hours ago,” photography coordinator Michelle Rolls told News Photographer tonight. “Last night we put out two newspapers, one printed in Pensacola so we would have something to put out on the street, and our regular paper was printed in Birmingham but not delivered. We’ll deliver it on Wednesday morning along with the Tuesday and Wednesday editions.”
“We had early deadlines tonight and Birmingham was going to print us again tonight, but the power came back on and we made the decision to pull back pages and to print here. That’s what we’re doing now, sitting here waiting for the presses to roll, to make sure they will roll. We didn’t have to leave the office, the newspaper here is like a castle with a moat around it and the flood water went down pretty quick,” Rolls said.
The entire staff worked yesterday and today, and Rolls said they were all extremely lucky. “We have some folks with fences down and shingles missing, but no structural damage. Not like the folks in Mississippi and New Orleans, who’ve been hit really hard.”
Many of the world's top magazine and publications' picture editors are at the 17th International Festival of Photojournalism Visa Pour L'Image in Perpignan, France, this week as the disaster on the Gulf Coast unfolds. Digitaljournalist.org publisher Dirck Halstead in Perpignan tells News Photographer, "The New Orleans story has suddenly taken over here in Perpignan. Virtually every major photo editor is here, thinking they were going to be hob-knobbing - but suddenly they are all in crash mode, taking over the operations of their agencies from the Palais des Congress."
Read the next story, about the violence photojournalists are encountering trying to cover the hurricane's aftermath.
