It was 4 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 27, 2005. Mark Schleifstein, one of the country’s few dedicated environmental reporters at the time, sat at his usual spot in The Times-Picayune newsroom with his desktop computer glowing in front of him. He looked out over the Broad Street overpass through bulletproof windows as editors spoke behind him.
He had argued with the paper’s publisher and editors earlier that day over a Louisiana State University professor’s map of potentially deadly storm surge damage from the incoming Hurricane Katrina being displayed on the front page. The editors were wary of panicking readers.
Schleifstein’s phone rattled at his desk. He picked up and recognized the voice of Max Mayfield, director of the National Hurricane Center, asking him, “How high is The Times-Picayune’s building and what winds could it withstand?”
“The building should be safe, maybe water at the bottom,” Schleifstein responded.
Schleifstein’s experience in environmental reporting gave him a unique sense of the danger coming. His push through the years for the newspaper to cover the topic fully had earned the trust of his peers, local residents, politicians and weather professionals like Mayfield.
Mayfield was calling that day to ensure the New Orleans mayor, who had not yet issued a mandatory evacuation order, understood the risks of Hurricane Katrina. The National Hurricane Center had just upgraded the storm in its 4 p.m. forecast to its highest intensity, Category 5, with top winds of 165 miles per hour and a potential for catastrophic damage and loss of life.
“We knew something was going to happen, and it was going to be bad,” Schleifstein recalled.
In an afternoon news conference, after talking to Louisiana’s governor and Mayfield, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin strongly urged residents to evacuate, even though state law did not allow him to order a mandatory evacuation. That early evacuation notice saved many lives, as about 1.2 million people with transportation access left the metropolitan area successfully, Schleifstein said, although bumper-to-bumper traffic caused delays of up to 10 hours. Some people suffered heart attacks from the stress.
The city opened the Superdome stadium as a shelter “of last resort,” and city buses transported people without an evacuation plan there. An estimated 20,000 people became stranded there in squalid conditions for days without adequate food or water. Another 20,000 to 30,000 people, many of whom had been rescued from flooded homes, wound up nearby at the convention center in similar conditions.
Schleifstein’s stories had warned of the city’s inadequate evacuation plans years before.
For years, the paper had restricted its coverage to a condensed delivery of preparedness information at the beginning of hurricane season and minor updates.
“I had been attempting to talk the editors into doing a broader view of what the potential was for storms,” Schleifstein explained.
In 2001, he proposed a series that would do just that. Schleifstein remembered one editor calling his interest in writing about storm damage “disaster porn,” but Schleifstein retorted that 100,000 people in the city had no transportation. “I don’t think that’s pornography,” he said. “I think it’s a real problem.”
With the aid of fellow reporter John McQuaid, then the paper’s Washington, D.C. correspondent, Schleifstein gained support to write the stories he’d proposed in a series called “Washing Away,” which ran in 2002. The series also highlighted the city’s inadequate evacuation plan and fraudulent abuses of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It explained that the earthen levees, a system built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, were too low because of yearslong erosion. As the earthen levees settled, they would be overtopped by major storms, leading to significant damage in the region, the series warned.
From 200 to 300 miles of levees were built on sinking ground, Schleifstein noted.
After Hurricane Katrina, forensic investigators found its designs were based on the strength of past storms. While Katrina’s top wind speed dropped to Category 3 strength as it went ashore, the surge created during several days of Category 5 strength offshore led to levees overtopping in St. Bernard Parish and along the Lake Pontchartrain lakefront.
He described Hurricane Katrina as the marriage between “horrible timing” and a “horrible storm” — creating the “perfect storm.”
Schleifstein and his wife, Diane, were among the nearly 250 staff members and relatives who were evacuated from the newsroom as flood waters rose around the building the day after the storm. Employees rode in separate trucks from their family members. Schleifstein’s wife was in a truck headed for Baton Rouge, while his truck headed west to Houma, Louisiana, where the local newspaper had offered the Times-Picayune staff a place to work.
The Schleifsteins were separated for three days without contact.
“I knew Diane was on her way to Baton Rouge and out of harm’s way,” Mark Schleifstein said. “We took care of ourselves.”
To Diane Schleifstein, the journey to Baton Rouge felt like the Israelites’ long journey through the wilderness after crossing the Red Sea. When her truck stopped for gas in Thibodaux, a town southwest of New Orleans, she befriended a woman who was pumping gas, learned the stranger was traveling to the Baton Rouge airport and hitched a ride with her. There, Diane Schleifstein bought a ticket and flew to Atlanta.
In Houma, Mark Schleifstein took dictation over the phone from reporters in the field, particularly those who had stayed in New Orleans. He worked many late nights with frequent calls to editors out of state to help the paper maintain its online presence.
“I was the guy inside the building, capturing information from others and putting it out there,” Mark Schleifstein said.
Diane Schleifstein also had much on her plate.
“He was dealing with work, but I was dealing with work, the house and the family,” she said.
The couple’s Lakeview home took in 15 feet of water, including two feet on the second floor. When the waters subsided, they burst open a door from the back yard, and the decorated reporter retrieved his awards, piece by piece. The waterline marked across a beloved cartoon, a gift award-winning editorial cartoonist Walt Handelsman had given him in 2000. It hung halfway up the staircase to the second floor.
“Schleify, hurricane season would be no fun without you,” Handelsman wrote on the last panel.
For Diane Schleifstein, dealing with the insurance agencies “was a very difficult process for smart people. The rules kept changing.”
It would take two years to resolve the insurance issues. The couple opted to sell the house and give the buyer all funds to restore the property. They relocated to a New Orleans suburb and hung the Handelsman cartoon in their new home.
Change has come in Katrina’s wake, as New Orleans boasts the greatest levee system “in the world,” Schleifstein said, but there is still progress to be made. He cited Bangladesh’s vertical evacuation methods and use of non-governmental organizations as a model of inspiration for Louisiana.
Now retired, Schleifstein does freelance reporting on environmental issues and advises The Times-Picayune’s environment reporting team. He also co-authored a book, “Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms.”
