Journalist’s home becomes refuge for colleagues with nowhere to work

The day before the big storm, Terri Troncale packed two small suitcases, one for her clothes and one for keepsakes that she didn’t want to lose, just in case the worst happened. 

“My mother had passed the year before, so I had taken some of her jewelry,” Troncale recalled. 

But Troncale was not leaving New Orleans. She was heading to The Times-Picayune headquarters, where she worked as the editorial page editor. As a journalist, she was expected to report to work, even during a hurricane.

The night before the storm, no one knew what to expect.

“We played cards. We just kind of killed time,” she said of the staff members and their relatives who joined her in the newsroom. “We all slept just on the floor. People brought air mattresses and sleeping bags. I slept in the library … between stacks because the publisher told us not to sleep by the windows in case the windows started blowing out.”

She woke up the next day around 5 in morning to Hurricane Katrina ravaging the city. “The storm was at full force at that point, or felt like it was, ” Troncale said. The power was out, but generators kept the lights low.

Katrina brought Category 3 winds, rain and then, when the levees breached, massive flooding. The storm rewrote the Crescent City’s history, and some of Troncale’s, too. 

It stirred within her a strong determination. When the publisher ordered an evacuation of the newsroom, she not only joined a cadre of journalists who stayed in the city — a stroke of good fortune also enabled her to provide them an impromptu base of operations. 

When the water across the city started rising, Troncale sought out to move her Volkswagen Beetle to higher ground, but like so many things in New Orleans after the storm, the car would be reduced to a mere memory, swamped by floodwaters that showed no mercy. 

When the paper’s publisher evacuated everyone later that morning, everyone left the last place they knew was safe, not knowing if their homes and possessions had been spared. Large news delivery trucks quickly filled with people from the newsroom.

“It was a really tricky moment because the water came up to the top of the wheels on these huge trucks,” said Troncale. “I was afraid that maybe the trucks were going to not be able to make it.” 

After clearing the floodwaters, some of the news trucks stopped when they made it across the Mississippi River to higher ground on the city’s west bank so editors could plan. Troncale, who joined the staff in 1996, and others decided to return. If she were going to write opinions about the devastation of the city that she had come to love, she wanted to see it for herself. 

“We didn’t know when we could get back in if we left,” Troncale said. “We didn’t know how we would cover the story if there was nobody in the city.” 

Troncale’s apartment sat on fairly high ground far from the levees, so she suggested the team try to make it there. As she guessed, her neighborhood was dry and her apartment untouched by flooding. 

Her group included Dante Ramos, deputy editorial page editor; David Meeks, sports editor; Keith Spera, music writer; Brian Thevenot, education reporter; Mike Perlstein, police reporter; Bruce Nolan, religion editor; and John McCusker, photographer. Another reporter, Trymaine Lee, who also had stayed in the city, later would join them.

With a bit of food from her pantry — peanut butter and jelly, tuna and whatever else they could find — they made the apartment work. With only notebooks and pens, they wrote stories by hand. They borrowed a landline phone that belonged to Troncale’s elderly neighbors to call in those stories to their colleagues, some of whom were also stationed in Houma, Louisiana. Unsure whether water would continue to pour into the city, the journalists moved again later that evening to the west bank home of a photographer’s parents. 

When they traveled into the city the next day, Wednesday, the streets were eerily bare with police officers nowhere in sight. 

“When we came in from the West Bank and came down Tchoupitoulas Street, which is a very long street that runs along the river and to my apartment, we didn’t see a single police officer or a police car,” Troncale said.

Without their usual channels of communication, the journalists tracked down leads by word of mouth. It was hard to decipher what was true. 

“We heard a rumor that Children’s Hospital was under attack, so we sent a reporter,” Troncale said. “That wasn’t true. There was a lot of anxiety, you know, that people were under such stress and everything, that I just wonder if they just started imagining all these bad things happening.” 

Stories surfaced about people on their rooftops, and others who never made it out of their homes, particularly the elderly. They haunted Troncale. 

“It’s just heartbreaking to think of people who are in their homes, water starts coming up. They go into the attic. They even go onto the rooftops, and they can’t escape it,” she said. “I’ll never forget that.” 

It angered her that the federal government was nowhere to be found. That the Federal Emergency Management Agency was claiming it couldn’t get into the city. That New Orleans had been left behind to drown in neglect, confusion and silence. 

“They were just completely inept,” Troncale said of FEMA. “I think that they were just completely lacking in understanding of what was needed.” 

After several days, Troncale left for Baton Rouge, where a larger group of her colleagues had set up shop. Filled with rage, she knew someone had to speak for the city. She turned to Editorial Writer Jarvis DeBerry and asked him to write the piece because she could not channel her anger into words.

The editorial “Dear Mr. President” was published the Sunday after Hurricane Katrina and quickly gained national attention. CNN read it on air, and the headline “Times-Picayune publishes angry editorial” appeared across its ticker.

Troncale recalled thinking, “Damn straight we were angry!” 

DeBerry’s goal was to get action. “I’m glad I wrote that editorial,” he said. “I think it needed to be written, but I think the most important thing is that it was an attempt to get help for people who needed it, and that that’s the real value of it.” 

At the same time, members of Congress began questioning whether New Orleans should be rebuilt. This made Troncale want to fight harder for the city to bounce back. 

“It was a man-made disaster,” she said. “The levees we thought would protect us did not protect us. If they had been maintained the way they should’ve been, we wouldn’t have had this massive disaster.”