They stood gathered in a circle in The Times-Picayune newsroom, photographers, reporters, editors and more, all survivors of the big storm, Hurricane Katrina, ready to stick it out together. Some of their shoes were wet and muddy; most were wearing the same clothes from two days earlier.
Now, it was Tuesday. They had just evacuated, by order of the publisher, from the city in huge newspaper delivery trucks. One truck was parked temporarily on the city’s West Bank when reporter Michael Perlstein and his buddy David Meeks stepped out. They looked back at a city mostly submerged under water.
Meeks, an editor at the paper, spoke up. “We’re not leaving!”
“This is a story, and we’ll cover this properly,” Perlstein chimed in.
By then Perlstein had been a news reporter at the paper for almost 20 years. He knew the city, its officials, its policies, its secrets. Now, the city needed him most, and he would tell its story.
Other hands flew up, volunteering to stay and work, uncertain as to how. A photographer. An art critic. An editorial page writer. About nine folks, some of whom barely saw one another in the newsroom, were ready to tackle the toughest assignment of their lives together.
With reluctant permission from their bosses, they climbed back into the truck, with Meeks behind the wheel, and headed back into the city that had given Perlstein, an Air Force kid born in Montgomery, Alabama, more stability than he had ever known.
Perlstein first joined the paper as a graduate student intern and made enough of an impression for editors to bring him back as a reporter after graduation. New Orleans, alive and bustling in the 1980s with its wild politics, colorful culture and robust readership, welcomed the young reporter back. Perlstein believed he’d hit the jackpot with his first job. The percentage of households that got the daily paper was among the highest in the country.
The paper’s readers had “tremendous loyalty,” Perlstein said.
He covered everything from crime to politics to hurricanes, following Hurricane Andrew to St. Mary’s Parish and Hurricane Chantal to Texas. So for him, leaving New Orleans was not an option.
On the crew’s first exit along their journey back into the city, they saw a relatively new Walmart with police cars, ambulances and fire trucks parked outside.
“We opened the doors of the Walmart, and that was the first moment when we realized, OK, this is gonna be different,” Perlstein recalled. “This is what happens when there are no societal controls, because it was wall-to-wall looting.”
Some people filled their carts with water and canned meals. Others took jewelry and electronics, including a police officer with a full basket of electronics.
“We can’t control this,” the officer said, responding to Perlstein’s questions. “It’s every man for himself.”
The journalists took a poll about whether they could take some much-needed food and water and figure out how to pay for them later. The decision was unanimous — no. They could not take anything; they could just report on what they saw.
With the electricity and phone lines down, Perlstein and the others had to figure out how to get their story to the rest of the team working in a temporary newsroom in Baton Rouge. Fortunately, Editorial Page Editor Terri Troncale’s Uptown apartment was on a sliver of dry land, so they ended up there. She made everyone peanut butter and jelly sandwiches when they arrived.
“It was kind of, in a weird way, almost normal,” Troncale said. “It was odd, but not super stressful.”
Troncale’s neighbors, an elderly couple, still had a landline phone that worked. So, Perlstein and his colleagues used it to call the team in Baton Rouge and dictate the looting story.
“It was just a crazy time,” Perlstein said. “It was hard to be organized because we just didn’t know the full scope of destruction and flooding.”
That night, in Troncale’s house, the team heard from other journalists that the mayor had said water was still flowing into the city and that the entire city might flood. Believing they were no longer safe, the group voted to move to the home of a colleague’s mother. The house sat on higher ground on the west bank of the Mississippi River in the Algiers neighborhood.
After that first night, Perlstein and the other reporters went back into the city, where they stayed, finding places to sleep after reporting all day. They reported on the harsh conditions for residents who had evacuated to the Superdome or at the last moment, the convention center.
“People who were getting fished out of the water had no place to go and started going to the convention center,” Perlstein said. About 25,000 to 30,000 evacuees ended up there with “no way to escape New Orleans or drive out of the city.”
The storm team saw people passing out on the sidewalks under the scorching August heat. They had no food, water or connection to the outside world.
“There was no organization of evacuation buses,” Perlstein said. “And so that became a huge story.”
The constant sound of helicopters overhead added “a war-like intensity,” Perstein added.
Perlstein and The Times-Picayune team would go on to win two Pulitzer Prizes for their work in the days, weeks and months after Hurricane Katrina. Slowly, the city that almost drowned came back to life. Perlstein’s wife and three children returned from Milwaukee, where they had evacuated. The damage to their home was repaired. Other residents trickled back and started fixing their homes, too. A few stores reopened.
“The spirit of New Orleans, you know, this sort of survival spirit of resilience, if you want to call it that, really kicked in,” Perlstein said.
Both he and his wife were offered jobs in Milwaukee, but they declined.
“The spirit of the people was so powerful that I think we just decided we can’t turn our backs on the city when it’s down,” Perlstein recalled. “You know, the city needs us. We have to be part of this rebuilding.”
Twenty years later, Perlstein remains in New Orleans. His career took a turn into teaching for a few years at Loyola University, and then he joined WWL-TV as an investigative reporter, jumping “over to the dark side, as I call it, to TV-land,” he said, laughing. He still loves his work. “I’ve always said to this day, all these years later, journalism beats working for a living.”
