Katrina made editorial writer realize the power of his voice

Jarvis DeBerry bought his home in New Orleans the year before weather forecasters warned that a Category 5 hurricane was headed for the city. 

On Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005, DeBerry, an editorial writer, boarded up his house and joined colleagues at the Times-Picayune newspaper to wait out the storm together. 

The next morning, Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans, causing historic flooding,  loss of lives and property destruction. DeBerry’s neighborhood, Filmore, located in the center of the city, would experience significant flooding and his home would be among the storm’s casualties.

But he had a job to do, and before he knew for sure his home had been destroyed, DeBerry said he let the thought go. 

By the time Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in the early morning hours of Monday, Aug. 29, 2005, its power had lessened to a Category 3. When the winds died down enough later that afternoon, two groups of journalists, including Jarvis, boarded a couple of the paper’s newspaper delivery trucks and headed out into the city to survey the damage. 

One truck left a few minutes before DeBerry’s group.  But as DeBerry’s truck rounded the curve of Interstate 10 at the Superdome, he saw the other group already heading back toward the newspaper. With no other vehicles on the road, the trucks were traveling on the same side of the interstate and pulled up next to each other. 

DeBerry heard his driver ask the other why he was turning back. The first driver explained that the base of “the high rise,” the highest point of the interstate, was under water, and he couldn’t get through. DeBerry’s driver soon realized the same, turned back and stopped on an elevated section of the interstate near the Superdome. The journalists got out of the truck and looked down. DeBerry noticed the city was starting to flood. 

“The most enduring sight is this man who has his arms thrown over a water cooler, the type of water coolers that you see in the little league dugout, like the orange one that’s cylindrical, and that’s when I knew that people were in physical danger,” DeBerry said.

The group noticed a house where about 12 people, including a pregnant woman, were surrounded by water. In the distance, DeBerry saw buildings on fire. Standing there, he thought of his own home and uttered that it was probably gone. 

“I said it to try to free myself of the anguish of wondering what might have happened to my house and to try to remain laser-focused on the job ahead,” DeBerry recalled. 

It didn’t sink in until a few years ago, while he was being interviewed for a documentary, that DeBerry realized he may have been witnessing the final moments of the people he saw as he looked down at the flood waters that day. 

In the hours after the storm, the magnitude of the damage was still unclear. When DeBerry’s truck returned to the newspaper’s building, the streets around it were mostly dry and the area looked to him like the typical aftermath of a serious New Orleans thunderstorm, with trees down, branches everywhere and spotty flooding. 

DeBerry wrote a short blog update about a service station on Franklin Avenue that was completely underwater. He figured the station was a landmark for people who knew the area and might give them an understanding of the condition of their own houses.At that point, there was no loyalty to staff members’ previous roles at the newspaper, DeBerry said. Many staff members, like him, were writing blog posts for the first time, giving punchy updates, contributing in every way they could.

“I can tell you that the very first thing I wrote after the storm passed, perhaps seems rather unremarkable, but I think it’s telling to kind of redefine the role I was in at that time,” he said. 

As the staff was putting together the paper later that day, DeBerry saw the one-word headline: “Catastrophic.” The subhead mentioned that a levee breach “threatens to flood the entire city.” He believed this was an exaggeration at first.

Then, around 6 in the morning, Tuesday, Aug. 30, a staff member woke up her husband, a photographer, effectively waking everyone in the room. Hurry and grab the camera, she told him.

“So we all rushed to the windows, and as far as we could see, there’s water.  It’s now like we are sitting in the middle of a lake,” DeBerry said. 

Shortly after, Publisher Ashton Phelps decided the staff needed to evacuate the building. No one knew how high the water would rise. Staff members and some of their relatives loaded onto the trucks, headed to higher ground. DeBerry believed the trucks would stop once they crossed the Mississippi River to the city’s West Bank for editors to figure out a plan. He saw one truck stop there, but his driver kept going until it reached Baton Rouge. 

Once there, DeBerry wrote an angry editorial responding to then-Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert after he questioned if New Orleans should be rebuilt. DeBerry said Hastert’s remarks were made while people were still on their rooftops and in the water, drowning. There may have been no appropriate time to raise that idea, he said, but to do so while people were dying and waiting for rescue seemed especially callous. Hastert’s remarks reflected an attitude that seemed to be spreading across the country, that the people of New Orleans should have known better than to live in that city, which is mostly below sea level, and deserved what they got, DeBerry said. 

He also wrote the editorial, “An open letter to the President,” which was a plea for help in New Orleans. 

His editor at the time, Terri Troncale, proposed the idea. She had been on the truck that returned to the city when the staff was evacuated that Tuesday. And she stayed four days before heading to Baton Rouge. Troncale said she shared with DeBerry her frustration about the federal government’s lack of response and excuses. The two decided the editorial would be more impactful if it directly addressed the president. 

“That’s one of the editorials that I’m most proud that we ever did, of all the work we did, because it was such an important moment for so many people who were being, if not completely ignored, not fully supported by the government, and it was just wrong,” Troncale said. 

DeBerry rode back into New Orleans during the first week of September to help with reporting. By then, city officials were putting residents who had stayed in the city onto buses headed out of town without telling them where they were going. DeBerry encountered a man in the Tremé neighborhood who had refused to leave.  

“If I leave New Orleans, where the hell I’m going to be after that?” the man said.

DeBerry took his question existentially, as if he were questioning who he was outside this city. It felt like a rebuttal to those who said the city shouldn’t be rebuilt. It summarized what so many people in the city were feeling. 

DeBerry said Hurricane Katrina made him reconsider the notion of objectivity for the first time because most of the staff were victims of the storm as they reported on it. They couldn’t be unbiased and objective. All phone lines were down, so some staff members didn’t know where their loved ones were and feared they had drowned in their houses, he said. DeBerry’s parents and sister were in Mississippi, trying to reach him to no avail. 

“I think what was so remarkable about the coverage is that we were all doing it during perhaps the worst week of our lives,” he said. “So you can’t just look at the coverage like ‘oh those reporters are so great.’ If you situate the reporters and their own predicament, then it becomes even more remarkable.”  

The first paper The Times-Picayune printed after the hurricane was on Friday, Sept. 2, 2005, and editors decided to distribute it to people at the New Orleans Convention Center, which had become an impromptu shelter for people rescued from their homes. Everyone there had been in a news blackout for five days. 

DeBerry said he initially grumbled when he learned Mayor Ray Nagin had given a New York Times reporter access to City Hall. But after the storm, he realized that having access to city officials wasn’t what the paper’s readers most needed. This reshaped the way he thought about what readers needed and his responsibility to them. His job wasn’t to have access to a public official or write sterling prose — it was to get people the information they needed when they needed it. And he learned to appreciate the power of his own voice.

“I had been writing opinion pieces for several years, and I don’t want to suggest that I was unserious in all the years before Katrina struck,” DeBerry said, “but I will say that I did not truly appreciate the platform that I had, and I did not truly understand my role and my duty as opinion writer.”  

He wasn’t just writing for himself, but for the readers. Journalists will lose their way if they don’t focus on their readers, he said. It is important to remember Hurricane Katrina, not just as an historically bad hurricane, but as one that “shattered lives, destroyed families, destroyed possessions, destroyed futures.”

Covering Katrina made DeBarry take the profession a lot more seriously, he said, in that “this is not just a job, this is not just something I do for a check, but this is something that has great impact, and sometimes a life and death impact on the people who read the journalism.

“And if we did anything to help people understand that,” he said, “then I think we did our part.”