Hurricane Katrina claimed hundreds of lives, destroyed homes and changed how emergency response is dealt with forever.
In this episode of “The Story Behind the AP Story,” retired Associated Press journalist Chevel Johnson Rodrigue recalls the eerie calm before the storm and AP photographer Alex Brandon shares his experience working with the New Orleans Police SWAT team during the hurricane.
Related: 20 Years Later, Hurricane Katrina’s Impact Echoes in Models, Mitigation and Reforms
Alex Brandon, AP photographer: New Orleans, the city, Louisiana, the state, and I believe the United States, the whole United States — what happened to that city during Katrina will forever change, I hope, the response of the federal and state governments to something of this magnitude.
Haya Panjwani, host: Hurricane Katrina was a major natural disaster that made its landfall near New Orleans in August 2005 as a Category 3 storm. It claimed more than 1,400 lives, destroyed entire neighborhoods and changed emergency response in the United States forever. I’m Haya Panjwani. On this episode of “The Story Behind the AP Story,” we go back 20 years to Hurricane Katrina. We’ll hear about the atmosphere in the city leading up to the storm, how current and former AP journalists covered it and how the disaster affected them personally.
Chevel Johnson Rodrigue, retired AP journalist: My name is Chevel Johnson Rodrigue. I am a retired AP journalist. I’ve lived in New Orleans my whole life. My parents were in the military, so we moved around a lot when I was younger, but their home base was always New Orleans.
BRANDON: Hi. My name is Alex Brandon. I’m a staff photographer with The Associated Press based in Washington, D.C. And I was in New Orleans at the time of Hurricane Katrina.
PANJWANI: During Katrina, Brandon worked with the Times-Picayune in New Orleans. He joined The Associated Press in 2006.
JOHNSON RODRIGUE: When Katrina was in the Gulf, it was really eerily quiet in the city. The skies were blue. It was like a perfect summer day. You never would have expected anything.
BRANDON: When you live in the Louisiana Gulf Coast, you really have to pay attention to the hurricanes. When it begins to think about crossing into the Gulf, I’m paying attention. I boarded up my house, as I always do, three days before my neighbors did. Because — and my neighbors would always say, “Why are you boarding up now? Do you know something we don’t?” I said, “No. Because when you’re boarding up your house, I’m working taking a picture of you boarding up your house.”
JOHNSON RODRIGUE: And then when Katrina hit it was like we were just expecting a normal pack a bag for a three-day kind of thing and then come back to your house. But when the storm actually hit, it was a lot worse than that, obviously. I’m not sure if it was the storm or if it was the aftereffects of the storm which really made Katrina devastating. It was the levees breaking that caused a lot of catastrophe in New Orleans. If the levees had withstood whatever damage the storm brought, I think we’d be talking, we’d be having a different conversation.
BRANDON: Every drop of water that falls in New Orleans has to be pumped out. The majority of the city is below sea level. So if a heavy rain comes, instead of flowing down a storm drain and flowing down to the Potomac like we are here in Washington, that flows to a canal, which then pumps the water out into a larger canal and then out into Lake Pontchartrain. For the storm, I was offered the opportunity to go with the New Orleans Police SWAT team during Katrina. I had made contacts with those officers many times and covered them many times, and they allowed me to essentially embed with them and stay at where they were, knowing that they would be some of the first of the first responders during the storm. The boat I was in rescued over a hundred people.