Katrina reporter reflects on institutional failure: ‘We were drowning in neglect’

Reporter Trymaine Lee had been living in New Orleans and working as a reporter at The Times-Picayune newspaper for just four months when Hurricane Katrina hit.

At 26 years old, he could not have imagined that one of the deadliest hurricanes in U.S. history was about to pull him into the center of a national crisis. 

Lee would soon see the impact of the storm on the city’s poorest residents, almost all of whom were Black, from the inside. His work would document their suffering and the government’s slow, uncoordinated response. And the tragedy of it all would push him to grow up as a journalist — fast. 

“I like to say that in New Orleans, through Katrina, I became a journalist,” Lee said. “I was a reporter before then, and going through the experience, I became a journalist. I started to understand the process, the machinery, I started to understand the role that politics plays, the role that the economics of the city plays, the role that race plays.”

Lee had volunteered to stay in New Orleans as part of the newspaper’s storm coverage. He was young and single and had no one to worry about but himself. 

He was initially assigned to work from City Hall and monitor city officials’ hurricane preparations and emergency response. But as conditions worsened on Aug. 29, 2005, the city’s phone system went down, and he couldn’t reach his editors. Suddenly, he was on his own in a city that was quickly flooding.

“Those first couple days I lost contact with the newsroom,” he said. “I didn’t know where anyone was, and so the only thing I could lean on was just telling the story.” 

Lee ventured beyond City Hall and just kept reporting, moving between borrowed houses and hotel floors, finding any way he could to document what was happening around him. He did not realize right away that The Times-Picayune’s publisher had decided to evacuate the newspaper’s building; Lee ran into a few of his colleagues while out reporting and teamed up with them, working from a colleague’s house.

“We would just leave there and descend into the city every single day and then come back there and report and write,” Lee said.

He became a witness to chaos. Families torn apart. Bodies floating in flood waters. Desperate people stuck in a desperate city.

“The police stations were all flooded out. The grocery stores were all flooded out in those initial days,” Lee said. “There were still people trapped in the city, right, and therefore trapped in their homes … folks who couldn’t get out.”

Lee began to recognize why so many of the people he was seeing at the Superdome and the Convention Center were poor and Black. 

“You have especially a large population of poor people who didn’t have the resources to get out of town, who couldn’t just afford to go somewhere with their credit card and stay in a hotel,” Lee said. 

Much of the poverty in the city was generational, he said, so there were no out-of-town relatives to welcome them.

“You know, this whole population was very vulnerable,” Lee said.

Downtown, Lee met Lucrece Phillips, a woman who had escaped the Lower Ninth Ward when rescuers picked her up in a boat. She told him a harrowing story about seeing many dead bodies, including a seemingly perfect baby who had drowned. Lee’s voice cracked as he remembered her words. Phillips’ story was cited in the newspaper’s winning entry for the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news; the paper also won a Pulitzer for public service that year.

Phillips’ story wasn’t just tragic, Lee said, but also symbolic of everything the government failed to protect.

“The neglect was as loud as the sirens,” Lee said. “We weren’t just drowning in water. We were drowning in neglect, in policy failure, in a system that had already written us off long before the levees broke.”

Entire neighborhoods were underwater. People waited days in attics, on rooftops and on the second floors of their flooded homes with little or no food or water. 

“There were families with small children who hadn’t eaten,” Lee said. “Folks who talked about bodies that they were seeing of their neighbors, the treatment that they got, describing how they were being treated by the National Guard, as if they were animals, as if they were criminals.”

The federal government’s response was slow and unorganized. For many of the city’s Black residents, Lee said, the message was clear: help wasn’t coming for them anytime soon.

The media at the time labeled Black residents seen taking items from flooded stores as looters, not survivors, he said. Law enforcement officers in a neighboring town fired warning shots over the heads of a group of Black residents just trying to escape the city. Lee said he also heard stories of vigilantes patrolling neighborhoods, shooting at anyone they didn’t recognize. 

“America has never truly cared about poor Black people,” he said bluntly.

Lee, who grew up in New Jersey, said the absence of personal connections created its own burden as he navigated the tragedy without local support systems for the trauma he was experiencing. 

Hurricane Katrina became a turning point for him. His career took off, and he went on to become a reporter for The New York Times. He now works as a journalist at MSNBC, where he hosts the “Into America” podcast. The show delves into the Black experience in America, exploring how politics, policy and history intersect with everyday lives. Since its launch in February 2020, “Into America” has tackled a range of topics from environmental justice in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley to the ongoing fight for reparations.

Lee talks about his time in New Orleans in a new book, “A Thousand Ways to Die: The True Cost of Violence on Black Life in America,” set for release in September. He said covering Hurricane Katrina deepened his commitment to telling stories at the intersection of race, injustice and resilience. 

“We are people of great fortitude,” Lee said of African Americans. “We are people who have survived the unsurvivable.”