“I had one friend who moved, she just couldn’t take it anymore. But the rest of us stayed. We have been through this so many times, I’m not afraid of a hurricane. I live three minutes away from where my old home was destroyed. You don’t just walk out on your family.”
—LAURA MIDDLETON, SURVIVOR
I tugged on the door of our rental SUV. Locked. Dammit. I checked my watch again and kept walking through the parking lot. I was alone, it was 3:30 in the morning, and I had already sent several texts to Mark Abrahams, the photographer who was supposed to be meeting me.
“I’m downstairs, are u coming?”
Two minutes later, I typed: “Hey, are u on your way??”
The hotel parking lot was completely dark, and I felt a rising sense of panic being out there by myself. My “newsmare” (news nightmare) that I had dreamed about dozens of times since I started working as a reporter was about to come true. We had a six a.m. live shot scheduled in Gulfport, Mississippi, and we were going to miss it.
The hotel we slept in that night had no power and no water. I was bunking with two women I had just met in a state I had never visited before in a room that did not even have a working toilet. The stifling hot hotel room was an upgrade from the night before, when Mark and I had napped for an hour or two in our seats in the rental SUV after driving hundreds of miles through the night from Atlanta, the closest flight we could get from New York. My checked luggage was lost after we narrowly missed our first flight, leaving me with nothing to wear. We pulled into the Kmart in Montgomery, Alabama, at two a.m. during our drive down to the Gulf Coast to try to find something—anything—that would suffice to report on a natural disaster. As I wandered through the empty aisles searching for a camera-ready shirt, waterproof shoes, and a toothbrush, I sensed that this would not be the only aspect of the trip that veered off the itinerary.
On August 29, 2005, Mark and I were sent to Mississippi’s Gulf Coast to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It was the most high-profile assignment I had ever received and I was determined not to squander it. As I considered my options that morning in the desolate parking lot, I decided I was not going to call the assignment desk and tell them we couldn’t deliver a live report. I remembered which room Mark was in and gingerly climbed the hotel’s wooden exterior stairs in the darkness to the second floor. I knocked on the door, gently at first so as not to wake the neighbors. When that didn’t work, I started pounding on the door, and eventually he answered.
“Mark! It’s 3:45! We have to go!” I explained, the frustration rising in my voice.
“What? No, it’s 2:45,” he answered groggily. He had set his cell phone back an hour, not realizing that the device would automatically revert to Central Time. His wake-up alarm went off as I was trying to explain why it was time to leave.
“How fast can you be ready?” I asked him over the beeping. “I’ll take the keys and wait downstairs in the truck.”
We filed our live reports that morning from a parking lot in downtown Gulfport. Once the sun came up, our Eyewitness News viewers could see a narrow sliver of the damage behind where I was standing. A restaurant with gaping holes in its walls, revealing debris lying incongruously on the griddle where decades of breakfasts had been prepared. An attorney’s office missing a ceiling where the family photos still sat on the desks, frozen in time and surrounded by shards of broken glass. Concrete rubble, toppled utility poles, and twisted steel building supports littering the city in every direction.
The extent of the destruction in Mississippi was massive. Everywhere we drove, no matter how far we went, the devastation continued. It seemed that no one had escaped and that every single person was suffering. The most basic needs of food and shelter were a struggle. More than two hundred people had been killed, one hundred thousand people were homeless, and entire communities had been wiped out by the twenty-eight-foot storm surge.
As we made our way farther east in the disaster zone, police waved us away from the entrance to the interstate highway. We followed a military transport vehicle down the backroads, hoping the debris would not puncture our tires. By the time we got to Biloxi, the commercial buildings were piles of rubble and the houses had been washed away. We passed a church that had its side torn off, the second-floor choir loft teetering precariously. Everything smelled dank, the humid air offering barely a hint of a breeze. Walking through the ruins of the community, the broken glass crunching under my shoes, I wondered if this was what it looked like after a nuclear bomb went off.
Unlike the other stories I will tell you, this was not my community. I had no local contacts, no sources to call. I was 1,200 miles from home reporting on a natural disaster on a scale I had never experienced before. At twenty-eight years old, I had been at ABC in New York for less than three years and had jumped at the opportunity to participate in a major national story. I packed my waterproof boots, clothes that wouldn’t wrinkle, and dozens of granola bars and headed south to tell the stories of people who would later remark how quickly the news media had descended on their towns, and how abruptly we had left.
The disconnect between the people experiencing the disaster and those of us who swooped in to cover it can be illustrated in one example: the fuel truck. By the second day of Hurricane Katrina coverage, we were running low on gasoline. The rental SUV was our only source of air-conditioning and the only place for us to charge our phones and laptops. We had been driving dozens of miles to interview home and business owners around Gulfport and Biloxi, and the fuel tank was close to empty.
Filling up the tank from a local gas station was not an option. Without electricity, the pumps were not running. Out of desperation, families who needed to fill up their cars or their generators with gasoline had lined up for miles, just to be in position for when the power came back and they could access the fuel. We had interviewed some of the people waiting in their cars, one man telling us he had been there for more than twenty-four hours and was prepared to wait longer. Other people had abandoned their cars in line as placeholders. We stopped to get video one day when we saw a family pushing their car forward in line along Interstate I-10, the tank having run dry while they were waiting in the gas station line.
ABC had dozens of reporters and photographers from around the country in our same predicament. We could not keep telling the story about Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath if we could not drive our vehicles through it. All of us news crews were based around the same hotel, so management hired a tanker truck full of gasoline to come to the parking lot, the same one I had been wandering around the day before cursing Mark’s missed alarm. Our news vehicles were all fueled up directly from the truck. There was an armed guard with a rifle who oversaw the process, making sure that only authorized journalists would have access to the precious gasoline. Everyone else would have to wait.
They knew Hurricane Katrina was going to be a big one. But three generations of Ellis men decided they were not going to evacuate their homes. They all lived along Boney Avenue—grandparents, parents, children, aunts, uncles, and cousins. When the Ellis family members walked out of their front doors in the morning, it was almost a guarantee that they would run into another relative. The D’Iberville community they called home sat along Biloxi’s Back Bay, an area that had experienced hurricanes before. The one everyone still talked about was Camille, a Category 5 storm in 1969 that ranks as the secondmost intense hurricane to ever hit the continental United States and the fifteenth deadliest in American history.1 The National Weather Service believes it had winds of up to 175 miles an hour when it made landfall, but no one really knows because the ferocious gusts destroyed most of the weather-recording instruments.2
“We have been here many generations and weathered many storms. We had seen water come up before,” Glenn Ellis Jr. remembers. Glenn, his brothers, his father, and his grandfather all decided to ride out Hurricane Katrina at home on Sunday evening, August 28, 2005. Many other family members evacuated as instructed, and one of Glenn’s cousins gave him the keys to her house, as it was situated slightly higher than the one where he had grown up. His childhood home had already been destroyed once in a house fire in 1996. The Ellis family rebuilt it with care, and there was no way they were going to abandon it during a hurricane. They viewed the evacuation order as a suggestion, one they were going to ignore.
But by Monday morning, August 29, even the Ellis men knew it was time to go. The water on their block was rising fast, so they headed down Boney Avenue with whatever they could carry through the knee-deep water and waded their way to the Suburban Lodge Hotel, a four-story structure where they figured they could take shelter until the water receded.
“I didn’t think we were in danger,” Glenn recalls. “More like, ‘this can’t be happening.’”
The Ellis men secured a room on the second floor, and Glenn went out to survey the town from the balcony. His gaze traced the path of Rodriguez Street to where it went under Route 110, the highway that crossed over the Back Bay to Biloxi. This wasn’t a small country road; this was a regulation-size highway overpass designed to allow tractor trailers and other large vehicles to drive under it. The water had risen close to twenty feet and was practically lapping the underside of the highway. Glenn stared at the scene, imagining how bad the damage must have been along the coast if the water was two stories high.
“The magnitude was new; we were seeing water in places you would never see. I would never dream it would reach that height,” Glenn remembers.
Two days later, Mark and I were driving along Boney Avenue in D’Iberville, gaping at what was left of the homes and searching for the people who used to live in them. Our assignment was to cover the utter devastation of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, to show the viewers at home in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut how people who had lost their homes and businesses were coping and how they were determined to rebuild. Eyewitness News had sent another news crew to New Orleans to cover the flooding there and the second man-made disaster of the government’s utter failure to care for its own citizens in need.
By the time we arrived, the storm surge had receded and thousands of families had driven back from wherever they had evacuated to discover what was left of their homes. It was worse than they could have imagined. Many of the homes were reduced to piles of debris, the concrete foundations alone marking where they used to stand. Neighbors were rummaging through the rubble, finding their belongings scattered as far as three miles away where the force of the water and the wind had deposited them. Mark pulled our SUV to the side of the road and we approached people with care, apologizing for our interruption at such an awful and disorienting time.
The work that lay ahead for these families was unimaginable, but many were willing to take a break from the cleanup for a few minutes to speak with us. Even through the fog of their loss, there was a sense that what had happened to them was historic. By sharing their stories, Hurricane Katrina became more than wind speeds and a storm surge. It became a story about their community and how they would work together to survive. We interviewed Glenn Ellis’s brother Jeffery, who remarked that there was significance in the one item left untouched at his home.
“That’s a sign,” Jeffery said, pointing at the American flag, still waving in the breeze, safe atop the sturdy flagpole. “There’s a reason that’s still standing.”
Laura Middleton lived next door to the Ellis family. She and her family had evacuated to her grandfather’s house in Saucier, more than twenty miles north. They expected some water from Katrina to seep into their house, so before they left, they stacked whatever furniture they could move off the floor onto the kitchen counters and tables. The Middleton family had watched the weather reports on TV closely, but they also had their own forecasting method that had been passed down for generations. When a big storm was coming, put a five-gallon bucket in the yard. If the bucket fills up, it’s just rain. If the bucket starts floating, then the water is rising and it’s time to leave. “We aren’t evacuating until we see that bucket float,” Laura remembers her parents telling her. “You don’t just walk out. We had been through hurricanes so many times.”
When we met Laura and her husband, James, they had just returned home to Boney Avenue for the first time since Katrina and had located a school portrait of their son John lodged in the front grill of a neighbor’s Volkswagen. Laura held up the muddy image, telling us through tears that it was the only photo of her youngest child that the floodwater hadn’t swept away.
“Everything we had was washed away. All that was left was our mailbox and the six steps that led to the front door. We had nothing. But we survived,” Laura remembers.
After interviewing her in the ruins of her home in 2005, I found Laura again on Facebook fifteen years later, connected through that same son John who is now an adult who owns an HVAC company and lives in San Antonio, Texas. Laura told me after we left, she found other precious memories that floated away in the storm and were randomly deposited when the water receded. Her wedding dress in a palm tree. Her kitchen cabinet sitting upright in a lane of the southbound interstate highway, the dishes inside still intact.
The Middleton extended family of twelve camped out in tents in Saucier for more than a month before they got a FEMA trailer on their property in D’Iberville. No one had anticipated a long stay, and the family was sharing the home’s three towels among a dozen people. Laura remembers that all through that fall, her grandfather, George King, spent every single day, rain or shine, scouring the ground of her property and her street, returning at night with items the storm had carelessly tossed around. Her Harley-Davidson pin. Collectible porcelain angels. Disney dolls that belonged to her granddaughter.
“My Paw Paw saw his life’s work destroyed in the storm. He was a carpenter. He would drive along Highway 90 and look at all of the homes that he helped build that were washed away, just gone,” Laura says sadly. George King died five months after the storm at age eightythree. “He never got over it,” she says.
When we first spoke again on the phone, Laura remembered me and our interview immediately. We had spent no more than thirty minutes together on that day in 2005 before I moved on to the next family, my deadline and her cleanup looming large in the background. Our interaction was brief but meaningful. There was no practical reason to keep in touch after a meeting like that, and yet we both thought about the other through the years that followed. Our connection was a microcosm of the way a community works generally. People looking out for each other, caring for each other, and making sure that their neighbors are not forgotten.
I reconnected with Glenn Ellis after a Google search revealed he worked at a Gulf Coast fishing charter company. I sent an email to Goin’ Coastal that began, “Sorry this email has nothing to do with fishing,” and asked if Glenn was part of the same Ellis family I had interviewed in 2005. I had a DVD copy of the stories I had reported in Mississippi and I watched them over and over while researching this book, writing down the names of everyone we interviewed and the small details Mark captured on camera. I recounted to Glenn about reporting on the American flag left standing at his parents’ house and directed him to my personal website to add credibility, to avoid looking like a scam.
Glenn emailed me back and we spoke on the phone a few days later. I asked him if he even remembered being interviewed for the news while standing in the flooded remains of his childhood home. He chuckled and replied, “Honestly, it was a nonissue. We had so much else to worry about. But looking back, I am glad at least someone was here to report the story.”
Laura also noted that initially, people along Mississippi’s Gulf Coast felt ignored. “We felt like the media was publicizing New Orleans and we were left out,” she explained. “But once the media started coming this way, we got more attention and the help started flowing in.”
News crews traveled from all over the world to cover Hurricane Katrina. One day in Gulfport, I was surprised to run into a crew reporting for a TV news magazine show in the Netherlands. Together, we interviewed Officer Charles Bodie, who was organizing a bottled water distribution and ensuring it remained orderly after panicked people had cut the line at an earlier event. Officer Bodie had stayed behind in Gulfport while his wife and three children had evacuated to Georgia. Katrina had disrupted most mobile phone communication, and for days the Bodies had been trying to reach Charles to check on his safety. The Bodie family only learned that he was all right through a Google search for his name that pulled up his interview that aired on that TV news magazine show in the Netherlands, more than 4,500 miles away. The news wasn’t all local, but it helped the community in ways the international reporters could never have imagined.
Reporting on a widespread disaster like Katrina in Mississippi meant that at least for several days, we were living in the same conditions we were reporting on. The hotel had no power and no water. Our meals consisted mainly of what we had packed in our carry-on luggage and purchased at the Alabama Kmart on our way down: granola bars and those bright orange cheese cracker sandwiches with peanut butter on the inside. When our own supply ran out, we drank the bottled water the local emergency workers like Officer Bodie graciously shared with us. Despite the late-summer heat, I tried to limit my fluid intake so that I would not have to use the bathroom frequently. My restroom choices ranged from bad to worse—hold my breath and use the porta potties or revert to my Girl Scout camping days and go in the woods. Knowing that I probably had it better than most people who lived there, and that my situation was temporary, didn’t make it any more pleasant.
Finding a suitable bathroom on a news story can be surprisingly difficult and a major distraction. People sometimes assume that our live trucks have bathrooms (they don’t). We rely on the kindness of strangers to allow us to use their facilities. I’ve experienced a wide range of reactions to my bathroom requests. I have been denied use of a bathroom by a security guard at a well-funded college when I was eight months pregnant. I have been offered the keys to a multimillion-dollar beachfront home by the owner who was leaving before a major storm but wanted to make sure my crew and I had a place to pee. Every journalist who has been on a long stakeout or covered a natural disaster knows exactly what I’m talking about. We share bathroom tips as judiciously as we share information, whispering to each other about diner owners who will welcome you in and store clerks who will tell you their toilet is “for employees only.” When we have the luxury of selecting a live shot location, it usually involves a calculation of where we can get decent coffee and be assured easy access to a restroom.
The hotel situation (and my wardrobe) greatly improved several days later when my missing luggage was located and Mark and I drove to pick it up at the Mobile Airport sixty miles away in Alabama. As we got farther away from Biloxi, the streetlights went on. There were functioning gas stations. And hotels with power! After retrieving my suitcase, Mark and I drove from one hotel to the next. I would hop out of the passenger seat filled with hope and emerge from the lobby dejectedly after hearing that they were at capacity, every room filled with displaced families and emergency workers from out of state.
Just before we were going to give up and drive back to Mississippi, a desk clerk at a national chain, two-star hotel said she could find us two rooms. I went back outside to tell Mark, and we rejoiced in our good fortune. I hadn’t showered in three days, and my on-air ponytail had taken on a greasy shine. My layers of deodorant were losing their battle with the southern heat and humidity. We parked the SUV, trudged into the busy hotel lobby with our bags, and were instantly energized by the blast of cool air-conditioned air. We walked to the front desk to finalize the details with the clerk who, after promising me the rooms, was my new best friend. She looked at Mark and me and then stared at her computer screen.
“I’m so sorry but we are fully booked. Overbooked actually. Everyone is coming here,” the clerk explained apologetically, motioning to the crowded lobby.
“But ten minutes ago, you said you could get us two rooms,” I said firmly. “We need those rooms.” There was no way I was going back to the hotel with no water and no power. I had felt the cool air and smelled the hot food at the hotel restaurant, and I wasn’t leaving. We had been working back-to-back fourteen-hour days and just wanted a chance to rest.
She tapped away at her keyboard. “I can give you one room; it has one king bed.”
“What?” I answered, taken aback. I pointed at Mark standing beside me and tried to explain. “He’s my colleague, not my husband! I can’t share a room with him, and I definitely can’t share a bed with him.”
I turned to Mark. “No offense,” I said with a smile. Mark has been married for decades and is a wonderful, devoted husband. No way he was comfortable with this arrangement either. He rolled his eyes and shrugged.
“If you only have one room, can we at least have two beds?” I asked, desperate to get upstairs and take a shower. My standards were lowering and I just didn’t want to have to get back in the rental SUV and eat another processed cracker sandwich.
The clerk looked past us at the line of other people behind us trying to check in. “One king bed,” she answered firmly. “It’s all we have.”
“It’s okay, I’ll sleep on the floor,” Mark said gallantly.
He was resigned, exhausted. I am sure the same weariness showed on my face. The unorthodox sleeping arrangement was our only choice. We took the plastic key cards and headed upstairs in the elevator—a working elevator! The hotel was so overwhelmed by the demand that the first set of keys they gave us opened the door to a room that was already occupied. A man was standing wearing only his underwear, ironing a shirt when we barged in. Awkward. We apologized and headed back to the clerk to get the proper key. I took the best shower of my life, changed into my pajamas in the bathroom, called my husband, Scott, to laugh about the sleeping arrangements, and fell into a deep sleep. We had another day of reporting in less than eight hours, and I didn’t have the energy to care that I was sharing a hotel room with a male colleague.
If it was not abundantly clear by now, TV news reporting is not a glamorous job. Yes, I need to pay some attention to my hair, makeup, and clothes. It doesn’t have to be perfect—it would be odd if it was, especially while covering severe weather events—but my philosophy is that I need to look presentable enough that my appearance doesn’t distract from the story I’m telling. If my hair is a mess or I’m not wearing makeup, I worry that the viewer will be questioning these details instead of paying attention to what’s important.
I recognize that TV is a visual medium and that the way I look is of interest to the viewers. On Earth Day 2002 I was working as a reporter at NewsChannel 9 in Syracuse, New York. President George W. Bush was traveling to Central New York to promote his conservation efforts, and I was assigned to cover the event. My first presidential visit! I studied his administration’s environmental policy in advance of the event, filed what I thought were three comprehensive stories on the evening news, and saved my press pass as a memento when the visit was complete. A few days later, a call from a viewer was patched in to my desk phone in the newsroom.
“Jen? I watched your stories about President Bush’s visit on Earth Day,” the woman began. She sounded friendly enough, so I was hoping she had called to ask a question about the reports, or to suggest a follow-up environmental story.
“I was wondering, what color lipstick were you wearing?” she continued.
I sighed. This was not going to be a call about the issues.
“It’s Brown, by Bobbi Brown. My favorite. Thanks for watching!” I said and hung up. At least she wasn’t calling to complain.
Back on the Gulf Coast in 2005, the morning after we scored a hotel room with a functioning toilet, Mark and I drove almost an hour west back to Mississippi. We planned to cover a water and ice distribution in the parking lot of a Hood’s Home Improvement store in Gulfport, the same event that had signaled to Officer Charles Bodie’s family that he was safe when it was featured on TV in the Netherlands. Some people who gratefully accepted water from the back of the U-Haul truck told us they had barely eaten in four days.
Even more astonishing, the women who were helping the Gulfport police run the relief site were themselves hurricane survivors. Their own homes had been badly damaged, yet they were spending time putting bags of ice and bottled water into their grateful neighbors’ car trunks. Fred Rogers, host of the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood TV show, used to tell a story about when he was a child. “I would see scary things in the news, and my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”3 Spotlighting the people who represent the best in human nature helps our viewers see beyond the despair of the situation, and it gives us all hope. For everyone from the New York metropolitan area who watched our news stories and sent a donation or drove down to help, I would like to think they were reflecting the kindness and generosity of the people they watched on TV.
Officer Bodie has since retired from the Gulfport Police and is working as a court officer. He remembered that distribution at Hood’s as one of the highlights of the aftermath of Katrina, one of the few times he saw people work together. Our news stories may have focused on the positive, but there were some negatives he didn’t share with us as part of our feel-good report. He was responding to 911 calls from people who were carjacked for their recently filled gas cans. Houses were being robbed, homeowners shooting at people through doorframes. “We couldn’t arrest them. Our jail had no power and no water,” Bodie explained. “The system didn’t exist at that point.”
The veteran officer, patrolling the community where he grew up, instead started giving this advice to people trying to take advantage of the situation: “Settle down. Go rake your yard. Go help the elderly lady next door. Go pick up some mess. You know the relief is going to be coming in; there’s no need to panic.”
The reality is that Officer Bodie’s experience wasn’t the only part of the story we missed in Mississippi. I was back home in New Jersey a week after the storm hit, back with air-conditioning and working showers and houses that had not been washed away into the sea. I left it all behind and was home in time for Labor Day barbecues where friends would ask me what it was really like to experience the aftermath of a storm that was among the deadliest and costliest in American history.
In D’Iberville, the initial shock over the extent of the devastation of the storm would give way to a seething anger that would last for years as homeowners fought with their insurance companies over settlements. At issue was whether it was Katrina’s storm surge that destroyed their homes or the hurricane’s ferocious winds. This was 2005, before people had Ring doorbell cameras, before you could buy inexpensive outdoor security cameras that you could watch live on your smartphone. There was not much video evidence for homeowners to prove what exactly ripped the houses off their foundations.
Some insurance companies initially offered the Ellis family and many of their neighbors absolutely nothing, arguing that they did not have flood coverage. “It had never flooded in our neighborhood before,” Glenn explains. “If it had been a tornado that destroyed our homes instead of a hurricane, we would have all been covered.”
Instead, Glenn’s parents lived in a FEMA trailer on their property for months as they fought the insurance company. Eventually, the adjustors relented and offered them a settlement. But they never rebuilt their home on Boney Avenue. A developer offered to buy the land in anticipation of building D’Iberville’s first casino. The Ellis family and dozens of their neighbors took the deal and moved away. The land still sits vacant, the casino approval process in flux.
The Middleton family is among those who still own their land but have chosen not to rebuild on it. The community that thrived in the neighborhood fanned out across the region. Laura lives just a few miles away and says she and her friends still talk about life pre-Katrina. “Do you remember the restaurant that used to be on the corner? The family who used to live there?”
Glenn says his most salient memories of Katrina are about how people helped each other out, sharing food and assisting with months of cleanup. A reminder that the community bonds were forged from something stronger than their physical spaces.
“I’m proud of the community, for how resilient people are,” Glenn says. In retrospect, “Katrina wasn’t the first and it won’t be the last storm. But the way we worked together is more important than bricks and mortar.”
Seven years later, I didn’t need to get on an airplane to cover the big storm. Hurricane Sandy—or Superstorm Sandy, as it was called by the time it reached New Jersey—was barreling up the coast, preparing to make a direct hit on my community. The October 29, 2012, storm would be one of the most destructive to ever hit New Jersey, killing dozens of people and decimating tens of thousands of homes along the Jersey Shore.
Leaving my own family to cover Sandy, I felt a mixture of guilt and anticipation. I worried about the safety of my loved ones at home: my husband and our two-, four-, and six-year-old children. We had set up mattresses and sleeping bags for them in the basement to mitigate the risk of trees falling on the roof of our house in Bergen County. We had stocked up on food and water and hoped that the power would stay on. But as I hugged my children and husband to say goodbye, I also felt a sense of pride and purpose. As it does whenever I cover a major news event, the adrenaline was flowing as I played out in my mind what aspects of the historic storm would be part of my report.
And as anxious as I may have felt leaving my family, there is a certain “news guilt” that kicks in when I stay home during a storm. While I was on maternity leave after having my third child, an enormous blizzard dumped nearly twenty inches of snow on northern New Jersey. I watched my station’s coverage of the January 2011 storm incessantly, admiring the grid of team coverage boxes and seeing my colleagues fan out to every imaginable corner of our viewing area, which encompasses parts of three states and more than twenty million people.
After I’d spent more than a decade of rushing in to cover every major snowstorm, it was surreal to not play any role in this one. I wasn’t due back at work for another few weeks, but I felt so guilty for not contributing to the team coverage that I emailed my news director and asked him if he wanted me to come back to work early. “I am available to cover the storm from New Jersey if you need me,” I wrote. He declined and told me to enjoy the rest of my leave. I still felt strangely unsettled as I drank hot cocoa with my kids in my toasty warm house instead of being outside freezing in the icy wind with a microphone in my hand.
The first day of Hurricane Sandy coverage, I was assigned to work as a team with photographer John Sprei. Before he even pulled the live truck out of the garage, John remembers being worried about our safety, since we were the only team at our station consisting of just two people. “Everyone else had three people at least. Had I known then what I know now, I would have spoken up more,” John says. He also recalls being disappointed that we were not sent to the worst of the storm along the Jersey Shore—another variety of news guilt.
John and I jammed every article of our weather gear into the back of the live truck: rain boots, rain pants, waterproof jackets with “Eyewitness News” emblazoned on the chest. I had packed food in anticipation of a long night, since we started the day around noon with no clear end time. Once the storm hit, the station would go into “rolling coverage” when all other shows are preempted in favor of nonstop weather coverage. Given the predictions of a historic and devastating storm, the coverage could go on for hours, even when many of our viewers would have lost the power to watch it.
The first day of Sandy coverage, John and I worked sixteen hours, from noon until four a.m. We drove all over Bergen County, New Jersey, witnessing the terrifying power of the storm. We reported live with transformers sparking over our heads on a residential street in Garfield. We broadcast from the village of Ridgewood, where mature trees on a suburban block were groaning, the endless wind tugging their tremendous trunks back and forth. We stood in the middle of the toll plaza of the George Washington Bridge and reported on a construction crane atop a skyscraper in Fort Lee that was spinning with every wind gust. How surreal, to stand at the entrance to the busiest bridge in the world, blocked to vehicle traffic with a fleet of dump trucks lined up end to end. “The wind was howling and the bridge was deserted. It felt apocalyptic, like it was the end of the world,” John recalls.
When John dropped me off after four a.m., my house was mercifully still intact. The tree branches heavy with their vibrant fall leaves had not pierced our roof. My family was safely ensconced in the basement. And the power was still on. I felt fortunate and exhausted as I climbed into bed. We had been spared.
Many of my neighbors were not as lucky. A friend on the next block had a tree branch crash onto her roof and had to move out of her house for almost a year. Dozens of streets in my town were blocked by downed trees and dangling power lines. Families in neighboring towns in northern New Jersey who’d had to rebuild after Hurricane Irene only a year earlier were confronted with even more flooding from the swollen rivers. More than two million households statewide were without power, and some would not get it back for more than a week.
The next day, I appreciated how fortunate I was to have gotten home safely myself. Mark Abrahams, the photographer I was working with in Hurricane Katrina, was almost killed during Sandy when the floodwater rose fast and his vehicle stalled in Coney Island, Brooklyn. He and reporter Darla Miles were stranded, so they abandoned the live truck and began wading through the current, Darla clutching a life vest and Mark hanging on to her arm. With every step through the deepening water, they worried that a power line would fall into the water and electrocute them.
Darla screamed over the roaring wind for help, and people in a nearby building heard her cries and waved them over. Mark remembers he and Darla took shelter with a group of three roommates in their apartment for hours, not immediately knowing the fate of the other photographer they were working with, whom they had been separated from in the chaos. Turns out, she had risked walking through the water to higher ground and was rescued by two nearby drivers. Until the station confirmed her safety, Mark remembers being racked with guilt, fearing his friend and colleague had drowned.
A few weeks after Sandy, Mark considered bringing a catered dinner back to the Coney Island apartment to thank the young men for giving them shelter from the storm. But he decided that returning to the block would not be in his best interest. “I didn’t want to revisit it because that was a traumatic scene,” Mark told me. Not everyone is craving a reunion. As I’ve learned researching this book, for some journalists, the healthier choice is to let it go and move on to the next story.
Five days after Sandy hit, many people who lived along the water in Staten Island still had no heat and no hot water. John Sprei and I were working together again on that Saturday night, assigned to cover one of New York City’s hardest-hit coastal areas. Midland Beach, Staten Island, was the epicenter of the damage in the borough, which had lost twenty-three people in the storm. Two of the people who died were brothers, ages two and four, tragically ripped from their mother’s arms as she tried to carry them through the rising water after their car stalled in the water as they attempted to evacuate.
As we exited the highway into residential Staten Island, the damage unfolded around us. It was exponentially worse than what we had witnessed in northern New Jersey. Household debris mixed with uprooted trees in people’s front yards. Houses that would later be condemned were spray-painted with messages like “FEMA Help Now.” People returning from relatives’ homes or evacuation shelters found tree branches in their dining rooms and the smell of sewage in their kitchens. The high-water marks imprinted on the walls effectively marked the end of their time in the sodden homes.
Our first stop was at a makeshift Red Cross relief site on Midland Avenue. Shortly after unloading the camera gear from the live truck, we connected with a man who called himself Johnny Bravo. During the day, Johnny volunteered to help distribute food, water, and cleaning supplies to people in his stricken neighborhood. At night, he would curl up under layers of blankets inside a tent at the site to get a few hours of rest. “There’s no way to escape the cold,” he explained, warming his hands over a portable heater, still smiling despite the hardship he and his neighbors were experiencing.
Just like the women in Gulfport after Hurricane Katrina helping with the water and ice distribution, Johnny Bravo exemplified the best of our community. Here was a man who had lost everything— his home, virtually all his possessions. Everything he could salvage fit inside a Red Cross tent. But instead of focusing on himself, he turned his attention outward to help his neighbors recover. Seeing this charismatic young man navigate the tragedy with such grace and pride for his hometown was even more striking after he took us to visit his basement apartment. It was uninhabitable and smelled like mold, the wires dangling from the unfinished wood-slat ceiling. Johnny told us he had tried sleeping there after the flood water receded, but it was so cold that his hands suffered frostbite. After we shot video and my on-camera stand-up, what I really wanted to do was offer Johnny a warm place to sleep that night. Instead, I asked him for a suggestion about another family we could include in our eleven p.m. news story.
“Go see Tom Borelli in Grant City; that area is terrible. He came here for help and he’s got a toddler at home with no heat. He’ll talk to you.” We thanked Johnny for his help and got back into the live truck, waving to him as we drove away.
I could see my breath inside their home. We kept our winter gloves and jackets on, the thermostat registering barely fifty degrees. And the little girl in Tom Borelli’s arms could not stop coughing.
“It seems colder inside than it is outside,” Tom told us. He tightened the blanket around his two-year-old daughter, Isabella, drawing her closer to him for warmth. The little girl rested her head on her father’s shoulder and closed her eyes. A pot of water warmed on the stove so he could give her a bath.
The Borelli family was already thinking about moving out of Staten Island before the storm. Tom had been working double shifts, as many as eighty hours a week at a local deli. He wanted to earn enough money to move with his wife, Bianca, to a home outside New York City where they could afford more space and a bigger backyard where Isabella could play. When Sandy came tearing through and knocked out their power and heat, it seemed to confirm the Borellis’ plan.
While John and I walked around inside the home and gathered video for our news story that Saturday night, the damp cold seeped through our jackets and gloves. “You wake up freezing, you go to sleep freezing,” Tom explained. “If I leave my room with the little heater in it, it’s even colder, it’s just horrible.” As Tom spoke on camera, Isabella touched his face and played with his ear. More than anything he spoke about, I wonder if it was that endearing moment that would later inspire so many people to come to their aid.
Bianca Perez Borelli, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with us. She lingered in the corner, begged us not to show her on camera, and let Tom do all the talking. Almost a decade later, she remembers wanting to disappear when John and I showed up at her door. “I was very upset; I was cold and tired,” she remembers. “I was ashamed of how we were living. But Tom knew we needed the help, and he knew that if we told our story, that people would understand what all of us were going through.”
Isabella’s bad cough was exacerbated by the cold air in the house. Tom showed us the two small space heaters they relied on for warmth and explained that the boiler had flooded and they couldn’t afford to fix it. In the live portion at the end of my story, I mentioned that a delivery of donated generators would be arriving in Staten Island the following week, as the forecast continued to call for freezing temperatures. I can still remember the sound of Isabella’s hacking cough and my own feeling of helplessness watching this child the same age as my own daughter suffer.
When I exited the Borelli home, and when I left Johnny back at his Red Cross tent earlier that night, I felt terrible. Johnny was enormously helpful to us, essentially field producing our news story by granting me an interview, letting John shoot video inside his apartment, and then directing us where to go next. The Borelli family welcomed us inside their home and shared personal details under the worst of circumstances. Later that night, I was going to sleep in my bed in my warm house. Johnny was going to sleep in a tent outside in thirty-six-degree weather, and the Borellis wouldn’t be much warmer inside. Should I give them food? Money?
All my instincts told me to give them something, but the station policy and journalism ethics are clear on this subject: you cannot pay people for interviews. We are not trading cash for information. The logic goes like this: if we pay people for stories, then it distorts the incentive to talk to us. People could make things up to get paid, and our stories would wind up inadvertently containing inaccuracies.
The rising popularity of GoFundMe in the years since Sandy has altered the equation. The fundraising platform has become an important research tool for journalists. If a person has died suddenly or suffered in an accident or natural disaster, there is a decent chance that a GoFundMe site exists to raise money for the family. The page will include photos and a description of the catastrophe, details that we confirm and include in our news stories. The fundraising efforts online give victims’ friends an incentive to talk to reporters, because they know that the exposure they get from our stories will result in more donations. Reporters are the middlemen in these transactions, brokering a tenuous deal: you give us an on-camera interview, and we mention the site that will lessen your financial burden.
I did eventually donate to various Hurricane Sandy relief efforts. I have no idea if any of those funds directly helped Johnny Bravo or the Borelli family. But while I was constrained by standards about donating directly to people we interview, our viewers are free to help out in any way they please. And in this case, one person went well beyond writing a check.
George Katrandjian was watching the Eyewitness News Sunday morning broadcast the next day when my story from Staten Island aired. The weekend morning shows run for two, sometimes three hours, and there is a lot of time to fill with limited reporter and photographer crews. Assuming not much has changed overnight, stations recycle news stories from the night before and run them again the next morning. George saw a hint of himself in Tom Borelli, a memory of the struggles he faced before he owned his own heating and air-conditioning company and lived in a beautiful New Jersey suburb.
“He was a twenty-five-year-old guy and he had a young kid. I remember when I was young, it was never easy,” George recalls. He turned to his wife in the kitchen after the story aired and said, “I have to do something.”
George knew he could not solve every problem Sandy created, but here was a family he could help in a concrete way. Not by donating money, but by giving them something that would alleviate their suffering right away. George called the Eyewitness News tip line and asked if we could provide the Borelli family address. After verifying that George did indeed own Katham Industries, and after asking Tom’s permission, I gave George their home address. The next morning, he drove more than an hour from Englewood, New Jersey, to deliver large kerosene space heaters to the Borellis on Greeley Avenue in Staten Island. “It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” George remembers. “They were surprised and they were very grateful.”
That Monday, I went back to Staten Island to report on the donations that were flowing in for the Borelli family. Our story had inspired dozens of people to step up to help. A woman named Eileen bought Isabella warm clothes from Target. Someone in Arizona organized a gift card drive with friends and sent the donations to Staten Island. Interviewed at his company office, George explained, “When I saw their little girl, I felt really terrible. It’s the holiday season and they’re sitting in there freezing.”
Our news story that day noted that the space heater had already warmed the apartment temperature up to sixty-one degrees. Isabella was still wearing a sweater and a jacket inside the home, but her eyes looked less glassy and her mother knew she was on the mend. Bianca, no longer camera shy, said on the news that night, “We want to thank everyone for helping us.”
Tom applied for FEMA aid and marveled at the assistance finally flowing in. “I didn’t know what to do myself, on my own,” he said.
Bianca recently told me that they were astonished when a check came in the mail for $2,000 from a woman who had seen their story on the news. The money allowed them to move to another house in Staten Island soon after Sandy. Two years later, they moved to a small town in Pennsylvania where Bianca couldn’t fall asleep at night because it was so quiet, the silence no longer punctuated with police and ambulance sirens. The Borellis have a baby boy now, and plenty of room for Isabella to play in the backyard. But they miss New York City.
I realize there were tens of thousands of other families like the Borellis who also needed heaters and clothes and checks in the mail but didn’t get them because they weren’t featured on the news. Local news reporters, with our tight deadlines and ninety-second scripts, can only show you a fraction of the damage and can only introduce you to a handful of people affected by it. What you see on TV after a natural disaster is a microcosm of the broader destruction. The photographer and I are a microcosm too, our news team a proxy for the viewer as we show you around the part of your community that you can’t see from outside your own window and ask your neighbors how they are holding up.
When I first drove into storm-battered Staten Island that night and the Mississippi Gulf Coast seven years before that, I thought that the headline of my stories would be the damage to the homes and businesses, the trail of devastation the wind and floodwater left behind. Instead, the biggest story of all was the triumph of the community, the caring and resilience that people exhibited long after the storms had passed.
“People were always checking on us,” Bianca says, remembering life post-Sandy. “We never felt like we were alone.”