Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [45]
In Baton Rouge, a team of CNN engineers has already found a riverfront location on a pier. There’s a big building several hundred yards away that can protect the satellite truck. As long as the satellite dish works, you can broadcast, so keeping it safe is essential. The problem is, the dish acts as a sail. It can get picked up by a strong wind, causing the truck it’s attached to to flip over. You have to find a spot where the satellite truck is protected by a building on at least two sides. That way even when the hurricane winds shift, the dish will not be directly hit.
After covering several hurricanes, you start to know what to expect. At first the winds just pick up gently. Then it starts to rain. Your fancy Gore-Tex clothing keeps you dry for about thirty minutes; then the water starts to seep in. Within an hour you’re completely wet. Your feet slosh around in your boots, and your hands are wrinkled and white. If you’ve ever wondered what your skin will look like when you’re eighty-five, try standing in a hurricane for a few hours.
Katrina comes ashore at 6:10 A.M., on Monday near Buras, Louisiana. The sustained winds are estimated to be 125 miles per hour, a category 3 hurricane. In Baton Rouge, conditions deteriorate rapidly. What seemed like high winds just a few hours ago now seem calm by comparison. The electricity goes out, transformers explode, lighting up the darkened sky with greenish blue flares. I can’t see any debris flying through the air; I can only hear it: the snap of tree branches, the twisting of signs, aluminum roofs ripping loose. You can’t tell where the noise is coming from or where the debris is headed.
Between live shots I sit inside my SUV, dripping in steamy darkness. As the storm intensifies, other reporters’ transmissions get knocked off the air, so the network starts coming back to me more and more—live shot after live shot. Chris Davis, my cameraman, can barely see through his viewfinder, but he keeps working, steadying himself against the railing of the pier. After a while I’m just repeating myself: “It’s really blowing now…and the rain, it’s torrential.” There’s really not much else to say. It’s water and it’s wind. How many ways are there to describe them?
You see weird stuff in a storm: floating Coke machines, boats washed up on roads. During Hurricane Frances, two guys in a brand-new Humvee with HURRICANE RESEARCH TEAM printed on the side pulled into the marina where we were working. From their matching yellow raincoats, I assumed they were scientists, but it turned out they were just two guys with a storm fetish. I last saw them around 1:00 A.M. They were hooting and hollering and videotaping each other getting tossed around by 110-mile-per-hour gusts of wind.
It’s easy to get caught up in all the excitement, easy to forget that while you are talking on TV, someone is cowering in a closet with their kids, or drowning in their own living room.
After Hurricane Charley, I drove around Punta Gorda, Florida, surveying the damage. There was aluminum siding wrapped around trees, shockingly silver in the morning sun; a family’s photo album lay in the street; a sofa sat on top of a car. A relief official mistakenly said that there were a dozen or more bodies at one trailer park, and all the morning-show reporters in mobile news vans crisscrossed the small town searching for the dead. They’d slow down and ask local residents if they knew of a nearby trailer park where “something” had happened. (No one wanted to come right out and ask, “Seen any dead people around here?”)
In the end, the real power of a hurricane isn’t found in its wind speed. It’s in what it leaves behind—the lives lost, the lives changed, the memories obliterated in a gust of wind. Anyone who does hurricane reporting for any length of time knows all too well that standing in the aftermath of a storm is much more difficult than standing in the storm itself, no matter how hard the winds