May 2006

ALUMNI PROFILE

Editor's note: When New Orleans-based newspaper reporter Jan Moller, SOC/BA ‘92, sent AU a class note several months ago saying he and his wife had escaped major Hurricane Katrina damage, Alumni Update thought the chances were high he had a bigger story to tell. Here's a glimpse of...

New Orleans Life Post Katrina

Raymond “Coach” Blanco is a famously gregarious man, a political junkie with a habit of greeting close friends and near-strangers alike with a grin and a bear hug. But when I ran into Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s husband outside the state homeland security office in Baton Rouge on the evening of Aug. 27, 2005, he looked as though he’d seen a ghost.

Hurricane Katrina was galloping through the Gulf of Mexico and heading toward New Orleans. I had gone to the emergency center to write a story about the evacuation, while the Blancos had just wrapped up a round of conference calls. What disturbed Raymond Blanco the most was the reports he was getting from state legislators in New Orleans. Rather than packing up and leaving town, many New Orleanians spent that warm summer Saturday picknicking or playing baseball in the park.

Knowing me through my job as a reporter for the (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, Blanco grabbed me by both shoulders and demanded: “You have to tell those people to leave.”

That’s the moment I knew this was serious. For even though my newspaper had probably written more than anyone else about the consequences of a storm hitting New Orleans, I was a little like the folks playing baseball: well aware of the dangers, but a bit complacent after dodging the big one for so many years.

The next few months would test my newspaper, its reporters and editors almost to the breaking point. It would expose us all to sights of poverty and desperation that none of us could have imagined in an American city.

But ultimately it would also reinforce my faith in newspapers, and the service we provide as reporters when people’s lives have lost their bearings and information becomes as necessary as food and water.

The days immediately after the storm are now almost a blur. Camping out almost around the clock at the state emergency center, I fought for scraps of information from state and federal officials who, it turned out, often knew far less about the situation in New Orleans than the skeleton crew of reporters that was reporting from the ground.

Reporting later from the field, there was the sheriff in St. Bernard Parish who described finding 34 residents in a nearby nursing home who had drowned in the flood - a tale so gruesome I hoped it wasn’t true. There was the exasperation of evacuees who had made their way to southwest Louisiana after Katrina only to be forced to evacuate again for Hurricane Rita.

There was the endless stream of people who wanted me to put their names in the paper so their grandmother or uncle would know they were still alive.

Nine months later, the Times-Picayune is back on its feet, and I’m back to covering the governor and state legislature in Baton Rouge. Other reporters are back to covering schools, cops, city councils, and the like – the beats that make up the lifeblood of a metropolitan daily.

But there remains a sense of urgency to the coverage that wasn’t there before, one that I hope doesn’t go away. The newspaper and its Web site, nola.com, have become indispensable tools for residents looking for news about their neighborhood and contemplating life-changing decisions of whether to rebuild or move on.

People in New Orleans are following the news with an intensity I’ve never seen in 15 years of covering the news professionally. Will the levees be rebuilt in time for hurricane season? Is there money in the state budget to keep my local hospital open? How much will I have to pay for homeowner’s insurance next year?

While the national media has, for the most part, done a wonderful job of covering the storm and its aftermath, there are hundreds of stories that simply don’t make the cut at CNN or the Washington Post. But they are often the ones that matter most to our readers. Katrina is likely to reverberate in Washington and beyond for several years. But down here, it remains a distinctly local story. And no one who covered it will ever be complacent again.

- Jan Moller, SOC/BA '92

Special thanks to Jan for sharing his story with fellow alumni. If you have a story you'd like to submit to Alumni Update for consideration, please contact Melissa Reichley at 800-270-ALUM (2586) or mreich@american.edu.

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