Twenty Years After Covering Hurricane Katrina

Twenty years after covering Hurricane Katrina, one seemingly harmless visit with family this past June brought back a flood of memories.. As much as I’d like to forget, each anniversary of Hurricane Katrina triggers some anxiety. Sad memories mostly, mixed in with a few frightful ones and a couple of good ones sprinkled in. This visit sent my mind spinning again. In an instant, everything about the storm was relived. Just setting foot in the hotel’s lobby gave me pause. Let me try to explain.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Buras, Louisiana a little after 6 a.m. on August 29, 2005. As a huge category 3 storm with maximum sustained winds of 125 miles (201.2 km) per hour, it didn’t take long for it to travel 60 miles northwest up the river and into the city of New Orleans. That’s where I was, wide awake, making photographs throughout the night of hundreds of people hunkered down, myself included, on the ballroom floor inside the Hyatt Regency New Orleans Hotel.

The morning before, hoping to avoid contraflow, I had driven down Interstate 10 to New Orleans from Baton Rouge. At the time, I worked as a staff photographer for The Advocate newspaper. I stocked my rental truck with extra gas cans strapped to the roof, food, a sleeping bag, a small jar of Vics VapoRub (which comes in handy for foul smells) and other supplies, most of which I never used.

I began making images beginning at noon on the 28th. Thousands of people were gathering in a 800-feet-long line alongside the Louisiana Superdome. They came because they heard the domed football arena – home to the New Orleans Saints – was a “shelter of last resort” for the impending storm. I watched as people, Black and white, patiently waited outside the stadium along Poydras Street. Some came with pillows, blankets, backpacks and babies in hand. Some came dragging their belongings in black garbage bags.

I sat for a time with Mid-City resident Marion Camp, 77-years-old at the time. She was trying to comfort her 17-year-old autistic grandson William who had recently underwent surgery. He was lying on the ground in the sun, his grandmother’s cradling hands saving his head from the baking concrete. It would take over two hours before Marion would get permission from Louisiana National Guard troops stationed nearby to enter the building ahead of everyone else.

If I thought that was sad, it was about to get much worse.

Uneasy Feelings in the Big Easy

Something about this ever-growing line, and the dire head-in-hand expressions people had while in it, gave me the uneasy feeling that this storm was not going to be like the other near misses New Orleans residents experienced in the past. There would be no “dodging a bullet,” as they say, this time.

Reviewing the time-stamped metadata from the digital images I shot this day, I can see there was a 10-hour gap between the time I finished shooting the crowd outside the dome and when I picked up my cameras again. I spent this time transmitting images back to Baton Rouge, and together with my fellow photojournalist Charlie Varley, we found a room inside the Hyatt. It was on the 19th floor. I don’t recall if we ever paid.

After some time, we heard an announcement over the hotel intercom (who knew there was one). The faceless person on the other end insisted that everyone evacuate their rooms. The fear being that the large glass exterior windows were going to implode from the hurricane-force winds. Of course we thought that scenario crazy. But we could tell the winds were picking up. Lights were flickering and the trees down below were swaying something fierce. So we obliged, taking the stairwell to join with the masses down to the lower ballrooms. Taking the elevator would be too risky. Remember that.

Now, it was midnight. I found myself in front of the lone television set that sat in the middle of the ballroom on a stand next to a pillar. Hotel guests, all sitting upright on the bedsheets and blankets they had taken from their rooms, surrounded it. Windows above us began to pop out and shatter to the ground. The ballroom ceiling tiles began to weep. Things were getting serious. No one was sleeping.

August 29, 2005, The Day the Storm Hit

Warning: Graphic Content

The TV was tuned to Fox 8 News, a local station. Bruce Dixon, a New Orleans resident, was watching the weather radar in earnest, his left hand leaning against the stand, his right, firmly planted against his face in an expression of hopelessness. The radar image, getting fuzzier every minute as the wind outside continued to increase, displayed a hurricane 250-miles across aiming straight toward us. In the photo I transmitted back to the paper, Dixon, overcome it would seem, holds his head down, dejected.

Myself, along with a handful of fellow journalists, stayed at the Hyatt for several days following landfall. It would be our little pressroom basecamp, so to speak, until the food ran out (the Hyatt graciously fed all its guests deli style once a day) and until they finally kicked us out. For reasons unknown, there was one small room above the ballrooms that still had ethernet internet access.

We would venture out, do our reporting, come back, hang our water-soaked nasty-smelling clothing over stacked chairs and cardboard boxes, sit down under a single lamp and crank out stories and images. Photographing the dead, dying and displaced, day in and day out was a lot to handle. Being able to share those images with colleagues in that room and get their editorial feedback was so helpful. It was good to be with other journalists experiencing the same difficult situation. The camaraderie in that squalid little room was infectious. The fetid clothing probably was as well.

My Limited Scope of Coverage

For me, coverage included photographing people suffering inside and outside the Superdome and the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. For example, I shot people being evacuated from the 9th Ward into crowded Louisiana National Guard deuce and a half canvas-covered transport trucks. These would drive them through the high water to the Superdome and adjacent basketball arena. I watched as Black Hawk helicopters impressively made an impromptu but effective landing zone out of Interstate 10, picking up residents and dropping them down outside the Superdome. I made images of so-called looters who were, if you ask me, just trying to get something to drink and a bed to lay down upon.

My coverage was limited as my rental truck was stuck on the third floor of a swamped parking garage for the duration of the storm and several days past. Here, I thought it was a good place to park. I pretty much waded through murky water to get anywhere I wanted to go, being mindful of manholes that often times pop up or float off after a flood. In retrospect, being in such a small bubble was probably good for the work I produced, albeit at a cost to my well being.

August 30, 2005

August 31, 2005

September 1, 2005

On the morning of September 1, I photographed countless people loading onto charter buses. One desperate woman and her family made the cover of Newsweek magazine. This mass exodus was bittersweet. These buses were taking them away from their homes for months or sometimes years. Sometimes, forever.

September 2nd and 3rd, 2005, Outside the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center

Warning: Graphic Content

September 4, 2005

Floodwaters Recede

By September 15, 2005, floodwaters in New Orleans had largely receded, leaving brown organic horizontal stains wherever the water was highest. Evidence of that, for me, can be seen in the following images.

Oprah Winfrey showed up to the hotel one afternoon before going out to survey damage. My 10-minute brush with fame. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin would give a daily sweat-stained presser from inside the lobby after speaking with the huddled group of concerned guests. He was often flanked by a host of council members wanting to get in the photo as well. I can’t recall if he ever said anything of substance that we didn’t already know. One evening, out of the blue, Charlie produced a fifth of bourbon from a camera bag. That seemed to made everything better.

In total, I stayed at the Hyatt for seven days, changing rooms a couple of times. During a momentary lapse of judgment fueled by exhaustion and frustration, I found myself liberally pouring an industrial size bottle of orange-scented cleaner liberated from a supply closet all over the hotel room carpets. I did this in order to keep the nasty smells at bay. Think of the worse locker room you’ve ever been in and multiply it by 100. I knew they would be replacing the carpet eventually. Plus, this stuff smelled so much better than any of us did. In order to flush our toilet, Charlie and I would walk down several flights of stairs to the outdoor hotel pool. We would scoop up a bucket of glass-filled water, haul it back up the stairs and dump it down the toilet. Problem solved.

The man on the hotel intercom was 100-percent correct when he warned us to evacuate the rooms in case of flying glass. It was all over the place, on the beds all the way to the bedroom front door. We would have been cut to pieces had we stayed in that room.

Flashback to Katrina

All this brings me to the flashback I had when I entered a hotel lobby this spring. The Hyatt Regency in New Orleans had elevators that faced outside into the main atrium of the hotel. One afternoon during this whole ordeal, it probably was the first, I was in the hotel atrium and looked up to see a guy attempting to use one of the elevators. The electricity at that time was spotty at best. I remember him walking into it and thinking, oh man, that’s a stupid idea. He made it halfway up, the electricity went out, and he got stuck. I don’t recall how long he was trapped in there. I have no photos of it, I believe Charlie does. I’m not making it up. As each elevator had glass windows, everyone could see him, helplessly standing there in his glass coffin. I pitied the poor guy.

Fast forward to spring 2025. My wife and I walked into the Embassy Suites hotel in Independence, Ohio to visit with my nephew and his family who had come down to spend the day with us. Unexpectedly, I was confronted with a bank of three glassed-in elevators towering over its atrium. If you hadn’t lived through Katrina, and specifically spent your days at the Hyatt, that strikingly similar coincidence would mean nothing. To me, twenty years after covering Hurricane Katrina, it sort of freaked me out.

Post Katrina, I attended group counseling sessions hosted by the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. I am grateful my newspaper sent me. It was a good excuse to come down to New Orleans again and hang out at a hotel that didn’t have all its windows blown out. But more importantly, it taught me how to begin coping with the moments I experienced during and after the storm. I never would have thought that something as innocuous as a hotel’s elevators would trigger a feeling that would send me to the restroom with tiny tears as everyone else was eating breakfast, but they did. Strange how the mind works.

I never had it nearly as bad as the folks who actually lived in New Orleans, Buras or anywhere along Katrina’s path. I never needed to chop my way out of an attic with an axe that I kept there just in case. When the water receded, I drove my rental truck home, again, no worse for wear. I did loose a pair of eyeglasses when the rotor wash from a Chinook helicopter I got too close too blew them away. Here’s a lesson, don’t take your eyes away from the camera for one minute. I’ve invested in eyeglasses retaining cords since. And, I left a once-fine pair of hiking shoes behind in the growing piles of stinking New Orleans rubbish.

It would take another hurricane three years later, Gustav, putting two water oaks through our roof in Baton Rouge, to temporarily render us without a home. The Good Lord’s way of saying that I too needed to experience what I photographed happening to so many people less fortunate than myself.

Making a Difference

Every few years, I attempt to find out who it was I photographed lying dead in the arms of strangers outside the Superdome on September 1, 2005. Below is her photograph, left, on the inside of Newsweek magazine. If you can identify this young woman, or if you were with or beside her on that fateful morning outside the Superdome, please reach out in the comments section below. She may be only one of nearly 1,400 lives lost during the storm, but I believe her story should be told.

I wondered if the work I producing during the storm was making a difference, or effected some reader’s life for even an instant. I found out around a couple of months later, when I received the photo below in the mail. Honolulu, Hawaii resident Diane Enright Van Trees saw the Newsweek issue above and asked her priest if she could have a mass said for the woman who died. Van Trees went on to write that it was something they had never done before. I was touched beyond words.

One very small thing I was able to do to help on the ground, was connect victims with their distant relatives via The Advocate’s WATS line. Miraculously, pay phones still worked in New Orleans. I was more than happy to give out our 800 number to victims that asked or were at a pay phone with no change, and Miss Rhonda, the newspaper’s front receptionist at the time, would graciously patch them through.

Hurricane Katrina and Pets

I read an article on NPR’s iPhone app yesterday explaining how Hurricane Katrina was the storm that changed emergency management personnel minds on how to deal with evacuees and their pets. By and large during Katrina, evacuees on buses were not able to take their pets with them. I saw quite a few dogs and cats tied to posts around the Superdome.

Other photographers had it worse, documenting dogs picking at bodies. I’m glad I didn’t witness that. Scrolling through the comments section of that article, I saw many took issue with leaving pets behind, saying they’d never leave a pet behind and how dare those that did. Well, if it came down to being left behind yourself, and taken to safety, I know many of those same commenters would have a difficult decision to make. I would have liked to have taken every abandoned dog and cat home that I came in contact with. That’s just not feasible.

Continuing Hurricane Katrina Coverage

Off and on following the storm, I’d drive down to New Orleans, sometimes on my own time and sometimes for the newspaper, continuing to document the aftermath of the storm. It was heart-wrenching to see the physical destruction that Katrina brought upon the 9th Ward. Crushed cars buried beneath uprooted houses reminded me of that scene in the Wizard of Oz where the Wicked Witch of the East is crushed up to her ankles. In time, I’d visit less often, coming only for an anniversary march and wreath throwing ceremony. Baton Rouge became a temporary home for many displaced New Orleanians, and we had those stories to tell.

Collectively witnessing things falling apart often times brings those similarly affected closer together. I’d say Charlie and I were acquaintances at best prior to the storm. Without question, we’re good friends now, one that I’d do anything for if possible, even though we’re an ocean apart. Twenty years after covering Hurricane Katrina, I look at that image of the two of us trying to get some sleep on that uncomfortably hard hotel floor and think, oh my God, there’s no way in hell I’d want to do that now. Thanks mate for having my back.

If you are interested in any Advocate staff photo (refer to caption information) above, please contact the newspaper directly at 225-383-1111. Ask for the Photography Department.

See a portfolio of images on my website here.