Keep Your Notebook Dry: What Times Reporters Learned From Covering Hurricanes

The storm has landed, the power has gone out, and now there’s nothing to do but nervously watch the water rise and wait out the wind and rain. Chances are, you’re going to huddle up and tell stories of storms past.

We asked editors and correspondents at The New York Times to do the same thing, sharing some of their most vivid memories of covering hurricanes. Here are their recollections of what it’s like to report on a major disaster and tell the important stories of the people in its path:

“That’s J.D.,” the guy told me, pointing at a pair of bare feet sticking out of the rubble. “And that’s Sue.” It was the morning after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, and everyone in Biloxi, Mississippi, was trying to absorb a scene of utter devastation.

From my slow-blinking tour of the coast, I made my way to an emergency management briefing, where officials initially said there had been no fatalities. I raised my hand and told them about J.D. and Sue. I asked, probably with more journalistic skepticism than diplomacy, if they were certain there was no death toll.

A spokeswoman grew angry. Why was the national media so interested in counting dead bodies, she wanted to know. Were we just vultures?

Her reaction brought me up short — this was, after all, their community. These corpses would be their corpses. How could I, as a New Yorker who reported from ground zero after 9/11, have forgotten this simple fact?

I sat and wrote her a letter, trying to express that I was a human, too. It was the longest thing I wrote that day.

When the water suddenly rose around my car, stalling the engine and seeping in over my feet on the pedals, I remember fixating, unwisely, on one worry: How to save my reporter’s notebook, which was filled with precious interviews from people contending with the storm. It sat on the passenger seat as the water swallowed my beloved black Honda Civic.

I worked in Florida then. I have slept on the floor of a hurricane shelter, spent a night in the National Hurricane Center, and sat with a man in Surf City, North Carolina, whose house had blown away in a hurricane named Fran. His next-door neighbor’s place was barely touched.

What I learned was that the storms that look tame can suddenly cause terrible damage and loss of life, and the ones that look devastating can abruptly change course and wobble away as life goes on.

Hurricanes don’t make way for arrogance.

The storm that swamped my car wasn’t even hurricane strength; it was a tropical storm with a sweet name, Josephine. The car, drowned by salt water in St. Pete Beach, Florida, was a total loss. My notebook made it.

The floodwaters were still receding, and the scale of ruin had not yet been fully revealed, when I spotted Larry Cade at a church in Houston, digging through a pile of worn clothes.

He and his wife, Suzette, had little left of their own. I followed the Cades to their house for an article about homeowners returning to the unknown.

The couple stood in front of the brick house holding hands. It was their first look since the storm had dumped 5 feet of water inside. They peered through a window and saw bits of their lives, now unsalvageable. He wanted a single item: a photo, more than a half-century old, of Larry Cade with his mother. He had placed it on a shelf 7 feet high, believing it was safe.

There was no trace of the photo.

Cade began to cry. In that moment, it also became a story about helplessness and what hurricanes take from us. “I feel so sad and empty,” Cade said.

The headline in El Norte in Monterrey, Mexico, read “Es El Peor Desastre!” — “It Is the Worst Disaster!”

Covering hurricanes is always a mix of navigating the catastrophes faced by others and trying to find some modicum of comfort and safety for yourself. When Hurricane Gilbert stalked Texas long, long ago, I went to Brownsville. But the real tragedy was over the border, where perhaps 200 people died in buses trapped in the floodwaters.

Photographer Alan Weiner and I drove through the night until we somehow arrived — I really don’t know how — at an atrium-style hotel. The beds were unmade. There was water in the lobby. There was no food.

The next day, officials arrived with stacks of death certificates. Families came to look at the torn carcasses of the doomed buses. Police officers began to remove baggage from the wreckage. The first had a package of lollipops and Brut cologne, two brightly colored children’s school notebooks, a can of Original Ginseng Rush, a Mexican passport.

It was issued to Ivan Aguirre Armendariz, 22, of Saltillo, Mexico. There was no official word of his fate.

Hurricane Isaac had steamrolled out of south Louisiana, and it was time to find out what was left behind. New Orleans checked out. But Plaquemines Parish, the muddy peninsula that escorts the Mississippi River out to sea, had been cut in half by flooding, leaving no clear path to its southern reaches.

Acy Cooper, a shrimp boat captain with a house way down in the parish, had ridden out the storm in a marina near the city. He was heading down to see the damage himself, taking the primal, and thus more reliable, route: the river.

A photographer and I met him near dusk at an empty ferry landing, and off we went, an eight-hour chug down a pitch-black and unnervingly quiet Mississippi. In the darkness behind the river levees, we knew there was ruin. Scores of Plaquemines homes were flooded in Isaac; two bodies were found floating in a kitchen.

I’ve reported on far more destructive hurricanes, those that killed hundreds and remapped cities. But I’ve never felt the weight of that uneasy interlude, between the blaring chaos of the storm itself and the slow but noisy grind of recovery, like I did that midnight on the Mississippi.

Hurricanes are noisy and scary, and you get to see rain blow sideways and then, after the eye passes, see it blow sideways in the other direction.

That’s all amazing, but some of my strongest hurricane memories are about what comes after, during the struggle to rebuild. Most vividly, I recall spending a stiflingly hot night with workers at New Orleans’ Pumping Station 6, which had been swamped in Katrina and was an essential part of getting the storm’s waters out of the flooded city.

The station staff was working with Chief Warrant Officer Thomas Black of the Army’s 249th Prime Power Battalion. The men who rode out the storm had been through hell, and they told me of their sleepless night on catwalks 30 feet above the plant’s floor during the storm.

They also delighted me with their low-tech way of judging whether a newly started pump was overheating: “Put your hand on it and count to 5,” the supervisor, Renauldo Robertson, told a worker. “If you can hold it that long, it’s fine.”

No one could get to Hatteras Village.

Hurricane Isabel had just ripped a new 1,000-yard inlet across N.C. 12, the only road through the southern end of the Outer Banks. We were hearing rumors that the village been hit bad by the 10-foot storm surge, but the only way in was by boat or helicopter.

So I got a couple of other local reporters to chip in, and we hired a charter boat to take us across Pamlico Sound. The marina was supposed to be off limits, but because our captain was a local, they let him in.

Once we got ashore, we found incredible stories of loss and survival. Motels had been cut in two, and entire homes were missing. You could see one house a couple hundred yards offshore, its rooftop peeking above the water of the sound.

Residents described how the raging surf had submerged the entire island in the middle of the night; many had climbed into attics or onto rooftops to survive. I talked to a couple who had scrambled up a tree outside of their house — and found themselves sharing the branches with a snake.

They said their goodbyes, sure they were going to die.

I heard half a dozen more harrowing stories like that — until the National Guard showed up and decided we shouldn’t be there. As they put us in the back of a pickup, I pulled out a satellite phone to call my editor. “I’m being detained,” I told him. “At gunpoint?” I remember him asking.

We got the whole thing sorted out, and on the boat back to the mainland, the wind almost whipped the notebook out of a colleague’s hand. He shouted over the roar: “I’d rather lose a body part” (he actually said something cruder) “than these notes.” I knew how he felt.

I came across Carolyn Foreman on Aug. 28, three days after Harvey made landfall. She had been stranded at a gas station in Houston for two days, sleeping in her car, alone.

The sign outside the station read: “We’re Open.” But the doors were locked; employees had fled long before.

Probably the scariest part of a hurricane is the sense of isolation that comes with being surrounded by water, cut off from family, friends, medication, food, clean water, unsure of when or if help will come. Reporters often discuss the trauma of a home lost in a hurricane. It is less frequent that we address this isolation and the shadow it leaves behind.

The gas station was at a high point in the city; all the highways around us were flooded out, making it impossible for Foreman to get home, or to a relative’s house.

The sky darkened, and a phone message alerted residents that a flash flood was coming. Before I left her, Foreman evoked God. “I feel like he is trying to tell us something.”