Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [44]
I’m on a boat with friends off the coast of Croatia, sailing in the crisp blue waters of the Adriatic. This is my second attempt this year to have a vacation, after cutting short my trip to Rwanda in July to go to Niger. I’ve resisted checking my e-mails for several days, but my BlackBerry is on and when it begins to ring, I know it’s not good.
“Sorry, buddy, but you need to come back,” David Doss, my executive producer, tells me.
Katrina becomes a hurricane on Thursday, August 25, and that evening it hits southern Florida. Twelve people die. Over land, the storm weakens, but once it returns over water, this time the Gulf of Mexico, it begins to re-form.
Saturday morning, I fly out of Dubrovnik, bound for Houston. In Louisiana, New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Governor Kathleen Blanco hold a press conference, asking city residents to leave. Nagin and Blanco don’t, however, make the evacuation mandatory. That evening, Max Mayfield of the National Hurricane Center calls the mayor to warn him personally of the seriousness of the storm. It’s only the second time he’s called a politician to do that.
New Orleans’ emergency plan requires authorities to provide buses to evacuate the one hundred thousand residents without access to transportation. No buses, though, are organized to get people out of the city. On Sunday, over the central Gulf of Mexico, Katrina turns northwest as expected, becoming a monstrous category 5 hurricane. Sustained winds 175 miles per hour. The mayor and governor finally declare a mandatory evacuation.
I arrive in Houston late Sunday and drive to Baton Rouge. I get there around 1:00 A.M. on Monday, just as the outer bands of rain are beginning to hit. It’s another hour-and-a-half drive to New Orleans, but when I call into my office, they tell me that the roads are closed. I am furious with myself for getting there late, but it turns out that CNN has pulled its satellite trucks from New Orleans because they anticipate flooding. Even if I were able to get there, I couldn’t broadcast during the storm, so I decide to ride it out in Baton Rouge, then head to New Orleans as soon as it’s over.
Katrina is the sixth major hurricane I’ve covered in the last fifteen months, the second one this year. I never used to understand people’s fascination with the weather. One of the great joys of living in New York is that I’m able to ignore what little bit of sky I ever see. Since covering Hurricane Charley in 2004, however, I’ve continually volunteered to report on hurricanes. It’s not just the storm itself that I find compelling, but also the hours before and after. There is a stillness, quietness. Stores are shut, homes boarded up. In many ways it feels like a war zone.
A few hours before Hurricane Charley made landfall, I checked into a waterfront hotel in Tampa, Florida. The manager, a large woman with a small parrot perched on her head, agreed to let me stay if I signed a waiver absolving the hotel of any responsibility for my safety. As I signed the paper, the parrot defecated on the woman’s shoulder.
“She’s just a little nervous about the s-t-o-r-m,” the woman said, spelling the word out, worried the parrot would hear.
Reporting on a hurricane, you depend on your skills for survival; it’s all in your hands. You rent an SUV, load it up with water, food, whatever supplies you can buy; gas cans, coolers, and ice are always the hardest to find. In a war, you head to the front; in a hurricane you head to water. You pick your location as if you’re planning an ambush. You want a spot near the water, so you can see the storm surge, but you need to be on high ground so you don’t get flooded when the water rises. You don’t want too many trees or signposts near you, because they can become airborne and turn into flying missiles