Inside The Times-Picayune newsroom, Paula O’Byrne, then the paper’s copy desk chief, was editing stories in the dark as Hurricane Katrina exited the city Aug. 29, 2005. She and a skeleton crew had ridden out the storm inside the building and prepared for another long hurricane shift. What she didn’t know was that the city was beginning to drown.
Outside, two journalists were mounting a mission that would reshape headlines and help the paper sound the alarm. Features Editor James O’Byrne, who nine years after the storm married Paula, and Art Critic Doug MacCash got on their bicycles and pedaled north. Their goal was to check on the lower-lying neighborhoods, near Lake Pontchartrain, including their own.
They rode onto Interstate 10, toward the Lakeview neighborhood with its framed cottages and ranch-style homes.
When they reached a deep dip in the highway, they stopped abruptly. It was under water. A firetruck pulled up. Two firefighters got out, cut a hole in the fence leading to the elevated railroad and went through to check out their own houses. James O’Byrne and MacCash pitched their bikes over the fence and went through, too. They walked the railroad with their bikes until they reached Lakeview and looked down.
The entire neighborhood was under about 12 feet of water and a heavy flow was headed toward downtown and the French Quarter.
“That’s kind of your ‘holy shit’ moment,” James O’Byrne said. “Lakeview is underwater. That means the walls or the levees are down somewhere. What it meant was the entire city was going to fill up.”
James O’Byrne, then 45, with more than two decades of hard news reporting and editing experience, became an on-the-ground reporter again. He and MacCash said they were two of the first journalists to find out that New Orleans was not in the clear of greater devastation.
“When everyone was reporting the core of the city had dodged a bullet, Doug and I knew most of the city would go under water,” said James O’Byrne, who lived in the Lakeview neighborhood. “The only other people who knew that were all the people in Lakeview who were trying to get out of their houses and get somewhere onto dry land.”
The two reporters learned that a similar scene was playing out in the Lower Ninth Ward — a seawall had been breached — and people were scrambling into attics and onto rooftops, or had been swept to their deaths in the water. They would soon discover how extensive the devastation was.
James O’Byrne’s family had evacuated to Shreveport, a city in northern Louisiana, while he stayed behind to help report on the storm. His first effort in that help was bringing his bike to work.
“I figured if the water got high, as it often did in New Orleans anyway, it would be easier to get around the city on a bicycle than it would be to get around the city in a car,” James O’Byrne said.
The two documented everything they could. James O’Byrne’s digital camera batteries died mid-reporting, but a local man offered to help. He swam back to his flooded house and returned minutes later with fresh AA batteries, enabling the first images of Lakeview’s destruction to be captured and shared.
“You’d be surprised how you have to convince yourself that you’re seeing what you’re seeing,” MacCash recalled.
Back in the newsroom, Paula O’Byrne and her team were tearing up the front page and starting over. “We destroyed the front page and started from scratch,” she said. Working on power from the paper’s generator, the team edited stories and posted updates online. The next day, the newsroom itself had to evacuate on the backs of delivery trucks with only moments to spare.
The Advocate in Baton Rouge offered temporary space in a former shopping mall with no equipment or supplies. James O’Byrne asked the IT technician if he had a credit card. He did, and O’Byrne sent him into the night to buy $30,000 worth of computers and software from Best Buy to rebuild a newsroom from the ground up.
Paula O’Byrne wasn’t just editing the biggest story of her career; she was living it. The flood destroyed the first floor of her Lakeview home. Her three cats had been left behind in hopes that the second floor would offer them safety. The guilt, she said, was overwhelming.
A week later, James O’Byrne and a colleague launched a rescue mission. They strapped a canoe to a rented Jeep and returned to Lakeview. Navigating the flooded neighborhood, James entered through a window. All three cats had survived. But during the chaotic rescue, one bit James’s finger; the injury developed into Compartment Syndrome and required surgery.
“This is easily the stupidest thing we’ve ever done,” James O’Byrne later said, recalling the downed power lines, debris and lack of cell service.
But to Paula O’Byrne, the gesture meant everything. “He did more than just save the cats,” she said. “He saved a part of me.”
The two were colleagues at the time, each married to someone else. The storm changed everything. Both lost their homes and, eventually, their marriages. “When I asked her to marry me,” James O’Byrne said, “she had to say yes because I rescued her cats.”
The O’Byrnes have now been married for 10 years. They are retired and live in a small village in the French countryside.
Both journalists look back on Katrina as the defining moment of their careers — and their lives. “We were just trying to do the job and survive,” Paula O’Byrne said. “But we were also recording history.”
For James O’Byrne, the lesson was lasting. He no longer chases material possessions. “A person can carry experiences forever,” he said.
There was some public debate nationally about whether New Orleans should be rebuilt, but the newspaper fought hard for the city with truthful stories that held public officials accountable.
“We had a lot of passion,” Paula O’Byrne recalled. “It was hard to keep your distance; we knew this city had a right to survive.”
