We got hotel rooms in Stuart, but the power was out, so there was no AC and it was super uncomfortable. Some of the guys stayed there anyway, but Don, my producer Gary, and I got cheap hotel rooms near Miami International Airport where they still had power, AC, and hot water. It was a nearly two-hour drive each way from Miami to Stuart, but the three of us felt it was worth it. To help pass the time and make the journey more enjoyable, each evening when our shift was over, we filled one of our coolers with beer and topped it off with some of the ice they were handing out at relief stations along with food and water for local residents in need.

  Then we’d head south, with Gary driving while Don and I hammered beers all the way, swapping stories until we got there. We’d get to our rooms and grab a few hours of sleep, then take care of the three S’s (shit, shower, and shave), grab some coffees, and hit the highway back north for another day of newsgathering and live shots.

  I remember one early evening on our way to a live location, we were speeding down a two-lane highway and all of a sudden reached a stretch of road with objects strewn all over it, and before we realized what they were, we heard and felt them cracking and crunching beneath our tires. It was some kind of mass migration of land crabs, hundreds if not thousands of them trying to cross the road.

  We barely slowed down, crushing the sea of crustaceans until we reached the other side of their wide path, continuing on to meet our truck for the last hit of the day.

  IVAN THE NOT-SO-TERRIBLE

  After we were done with Frances, we made our way down to Key West to wait for Ivan, which began forming in the Atlantic the day Frances hit and at one point reached Category 5 strength, pretty much freaking out everyone in the Sunshine State, now facing the third major hurricane in as many weeks. The Keys appeared especially vulnerable, a string of low-lying islands with few safe places to ride out a storm of that size and strength.

  Evacuation orders were issued, homes and businesses quickly boarded their doors and windows, and authorities refused to open shelters anywhere along the island chain, bussing people to the Miami area instead. Even the Boca Chica’s Naval Air Station was shuttered, with all personnel flown out on big lumbering C-9 military transport planes, and the rest of the aircraft and equipment stored in hangers or tied down.

  I’d spent lots of time in Key West and had been there for a bunch of storms, but I’d never seen this level of preparation, especially on Duval Street, typically filled with drunks and tourists, most of whom couldn’t care less about an approaching storm (especially the locals), but because of all the deaths and damages that Ivan was wreaking in the Caribbean and Jamaica and later Cuba, authorities were being overly cautious. I even found a quote in my notebook from Cuba’s former Communist dictator Fidel Castro, who told his people: “Whatever the hurricane does, we will all work together to rebuild.”

  In the tag to a live shot for Greta Van Susteren’s show that night, I said: “The people here, Greta, are independent and free spirited, and are enjoying the peace and quiet. Key West has dodged a lot of storms, they haven’t seen a CAT 4 here since 1919.”

  As it turned out, the jaded and carefree locals were right. As Ivan started jogging west into the Gulf, Emergency Management officials started saying they were “cautiously optimistic” but that “we’re not out of the woods yet,” and then, with Duval Street and the rest of the island almost completely deserted, Ivan went straight into the Gulf, completely sparing the Keys, giving those who evacuated more reasons not to do so the next time.

  This forced authorities with egg on their face to use some tried and true expressions like “better safe than sorry” and “this is an inexact science” and “it was a good drill” and “the last thing we want is to put people in harm’s way.”

  Ivan wasn’t done, of course, roaring into Gulf Shores, Alabama, as a CAT 3, close enough to Florida’s panhandle to directly impact that portion of the state, including causing severe damages to the I-10 bridges across Pensacola Bay, with support beams battered by ten- to fifteen-foot waves.

  But we missed that part because we were out of position and couldn’t fly over or get around the storm in time. I somehow avoided the next one, too, an unprecedented fourth major hurricane to hit one state in six weeks. Hurricane Jeanne was also a CAT 3 that made landfall just two miles from where Frances came ashore twenty-one days earlier. I honestly don’t remember if I was asked to go on that one, and if I was, I must’ve cried uncle to my bureau chief, meaning I’d had enough of getting soaked, and my colleagues would have to handle Jeanne without me.

  KATRINA, 2005

  Mississippi Gulf Coast

  I’ve covered the impact and aftermath of dozens of storms and natural disasters, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen destruction to the extent I did after Hurricane Katrina hit the Mississippi Gulf Coast in late August 2005.

  Katrina first hit South Florida as a tropical storm, coming ashore near Hallandale Beach before crossing the state and re-forming and strengthening in the Gulf of Mexico. When I saw how big and bad Katrina was getting, I asked my bureau chief to send me to cover the story, but she said the assignments were already handed out, and I wasn’t on the list.

  This really upset me at the time, as I considered myself among the best and most qualified correspondents at the network to handle this type of event. I asked some other bosses about getting added to the coverage team, but it didn’t happen for a couple of days, and I was getting antsy as Katrina rapidly grew into a monster Cat 5.

  Finally, someone decided I could be useful as a backup to the teams already in position and sent me to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, to wait for and report on the storm when it moved inland.

  We did live shots that day, August 29, near the campus of the University of Alabama, while Katrina was destroying miles and miles of coastline a few hundred miles away.

  “The storm is headed this way,” I said, after reporting that Alabama’s governor had declared a state of emergency. “Schools are closed, including the University of Alabama, and authorities are expecting a lot of rain, trees down and widespread power outages, encouraging people to stay home and pay close attention to the weather.”

  “The county is urging high-profile vehicles like vans, buses, and tractor trailers to stay off the roads and encouraging people to implement their hurricane preparedness plans.”

  I did the best I could to include the most compelling headlines in my report, and just after our live shot at 6 p.m., we got a phone call from New York asking us to head toward New Orleans. The storm had done significant damage, and the network needed all hands on deck.

  “NOW they ask us?” I thought, since it would’ve been far easier to get there a day or two earlier, but we packed up and got in the car and started rolling south on I-59 for what would normally be about a four-hour drive. It was a straight shot from Tuscaloosa to Crescent City, but not on this night. We were in for one of the longest, strangest, and most ridiculous drives we’d ever made.

  PICKUPS AND CHAINSAWS

  The weather was still bad, though not horrible, but conditions on the roads were another story. The further south we drove, the worse the damages became. Trees were down everywhere, many of them blocking the Interstate. I’d never seen anything like it. Tall pine after tall pine, splintered at the base and laying across the lanes, partially or fully blocking the road. In some places we could pull onto the shoulders to get around the fallen timber, and in other places we’d use the U-turn cut-throughs where cops would typically hide to catch speeders, and we’d continue south in the northbound lanes until we could cut back over again.

  Eventually we wound up behind a caravan of guys in pickup trucks who I think were headed down to make money clearing trees and debris from people’s homes and property. They had chainsaws in the back of their vehicles, and when they rolled up on a tree blocking the highway they’d get out and cut a path through them, sawing through the trunks in lane-sized widths and pushing the logs to the side.

  I’d never seen anything like this in my life. It was a slow crawl, but at least we were making progress. There’s no way we could’ve gotten to the coast without those guys. I lost count of how many times they had to cut through another tree, but it was a lot. At some point we had to stop for fuel, and this became a whole other adventure because the power was out everywhere, and no gas stations were open. We started going through neighborhoods looking for homes that might be occupied, where residents hadn’t evacuated, and when I saw someone outside with a boat on a trailer in the driveway, I said, “Here! Stop here!”

  I got out and asked the guy if he could spare any gasoline, and he said sure, giving us the contents of a spare can in the garage. I think it was only five gallons, but it was enough to get us where we needed to go, and I think I gave him $50 in cash.

  We got back on the road and continued our long journey south, and at some point we got re-directed to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. There were reports of widespread destruction there, and it was closer for us than New Orleans. When we finally reached Biloxi, it was 2 p.m. the next day. It took us almost twenty hours to get there.

  What we saw when we reached the Gulf Coast was shocking. Katrina had spawned a killer storm surge in the Gulf, bringing a wall of water twenty-seven feet high to shore, where it kept pushing inland for miles, flattening nearly every home and business in its wide path. Other reporters kept saying it “looked like a war zone,” and I hated that analogy. I had been to plenty of war zones, and they didn’t look like this. Buildings weren’t bombed and left in piles of rubble, they were wiped clean off their cement pads and foundations.

  There weren’t craters in the ground or burned-out hulks of vehicles hit by enemy fire. The lawns and roads were covered with stuff that belonged somewhere else, and the vehicles were either gone or fully intact but upside down or tossed on top of each other like Tonka toys. Boats, too. One casino ship was sitting right in the middle of Highway 90 along the coast. Other watercraft were scattered everywhere—on the beach, on side streets, on front yards, or propped up on severely damaged structures.

  Many trees were down, too, including some that appeared to be hundreds of years old. All that was left of a McDonald’s near the beach were the poles that held the sign and some wires sticking out of the concrete pad where the building used to be. The beach and streets and lawns were littered with debris, including sections of brick walls and iron fencing, sinks, refrigerator doors, AC units, box springs and mattresses, bicycles, cinder blocks, roof frames, even a toilet. There was an overturned van and tanker truck in the road, two jet skis sitting on an abandoned trailer, windows blown out on every building still standing.

  Everywhere we looked, there was another scene of destruction we could talk about in a live shot, including a Hard Rock Hotel & Casino that had just been built on the Gulf. Its grand opening had been scheduled for that upcoming Wednesday. The first two floors suffered major damages, and the side door was open, so we actually did a walk-and-talk live shot with our wireless camera, taking viewers inside the hotel’s restaurant, where the guitars and other memorabilia had already been mounted on the walls and were still there, some of it a bit battered.

  This was how I summed it up in one of my live shots that first day:

  Casino row in Biloxi, battered and littered with debris. The Hard Rock is now the “Hard Luck” Casino and Hotel, supposed to open Wednesday at midnight. Now it could be months before this place and this city can recover.

  Up and down the Gulf Coast, entire apartment buildings have been leveled, churches smashed by waves and wind, roads buckled, flooded, or collapsed, and home after home seriously damaged or totaled. We watched stunned residents search for remnants, surveying their losses, and saw grown men reduced to tears, their dreams shattered, their memories washed away, their lives changed forever.

  Sixteen thousand casino workers are now out of a job, and many more people are homeless, without phones, power, hot water, and cold drinks. I asked one man if he’d rebuild his home and he said, “the whole city has to rebuild.”

  There were nine hundred thousand without power statewide. The governor said, “it took years to build the system and one day to wipe it out.” Officials estimated that 90 percent of the structures between the beach and railroad tracks in Biloxi, Gulfport, Long Beach, and Pass Christian were totally destroyed. “Not severely damaged,” they said, “they’re simply NOT THERE.”

  There were hundreds dead and hundreds more missing. Bodies were found in the streets, and residents who’d evacuated were told not to return home so that they wouldn’t get in the way of emergency vehicles and first responders carrying out search and rescue missions.

  Boil-water notices were in effect. Ice water and food distribution centers were set up, and long lines appeared almost immediately. The damages were catastrophic and widespread, and we spent the next few weeks doing our best to cover it all, moving from town to town along the coast, highlighting the worst damages and most compelling stories of survival.

  Spans on some of the major bridges were broken or washed away, including a big stretch of the Ocean Springs Bridge, adding hours to commute times for folks needing to go from one side to the other.

  I talked to one guy who’d ridden out eight hurricanes in his house over the past twenty-two years but lost everything in Katrina. I met another guy who worked as a blackjack dealer on a casino boat. The boat was ripped from its moorings and wound up right next to the man’s house, flattened by the storm surge.

  The death toll rose with each passing day, as did the damage calculations. Bodies were being stored in refrigerated tractor trailers when the morgues ran out of room. Many of the corpses were too decomposed or damaged to identify. The Red Cross was collecting missing persons reports, getting thousands of calls an hour.

  We did flyovers of the devastated landscape in a helicopter and spoke with local, state, and federal officials and politicians, including Governor Haley Barbour and Senator Trent Lott. We followed President George W. Bush as he walked through some flattened neighborhoods, calling the devastation “worse than imaginable,” promising that help was on the way.

  ROUGHING IT

  There were no working toilets along the beach during our coverage of Katrina’s aftermath, and early one morning I really needed to take a dump and knew I had to improvise. I grabbed some paper and walked into the parking garage of the casino where we’d parked and set up for live shots and found a box spring in a back corner, just the exposed metal and springs, and used it as a place to plant my rear, with open holes beneath me. I was basically balancing my naked rear on metal wires. It was really uncomfortable, and it was also already really hot and humid, and, unfortunately for me, this particular poop did not want to leave my body. I was badly constipated and sat there straining to try and make it happen for ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes. I was past the point where I could just get up and take care of business later. I had no choice but to finish the job, and I was pouring sweat.

  I think it was at least forty-five minutes before I was able to return to the truck, drenched and exhausted.

  STINKY CHICKEN

  One day, we went to Gulfport to report on the damages there, which were just as bad as in every other town along that stretch of beach. A large warehouse-type facility there had stored tons of raw chicken, ready for distribution to area stores. But when Katrina swamped the place, it left the chicken strewn everywhere, on the street in front of us and all around us, apparently covering roads and yards in an eight-block radius, and that chicken quickly began rotting in the hot sun. When I tell you it STANK in Gulfport, I mean it really STANK. The smell was so bad, my cameraman and I wore face masks someone miraculously had in their kit, like the N-95s we were encouraged to wear during the coronavirus pandemic. The masks helped, but not much, so we collected video as quickly as possible and got the hell out of there.

  HOW TO DRIVE 75 MILES IN 45 MINUTES

  There were no good hotel options anywhere near Gulf Shores, Alabama. Everything was closed at the beach, and the few hotels off the highway that stayed open had running water but no power or AC. We got rooms in one of them, and I was so uncomfortable I got out of bed and slept in the car. No way I could do this for any stretch of time, definitely not for the two weeks I was there, so we somehow found rooms just past Mobile, Alabama, seventy-five miles away, on the other side of the I-10 bridge over Mobile Bay.

  Every night when we were done with our live shots, we’d get in our rental cars and head east to the hotel. It was a significant distance, especially after our long hard days in the sun, but there was minimal traffic, and I felt like the cops had far better things to do than worry about speeders in the days after they’d been completely upended by the most devastating hurricane to hit that area in modern history. I always drove fast, but on this trip, I drove faster. I’d rented a really nice Lexus SUV at the airport. It was really comfortable with a great stereo system and lots of power, and I made full use of it, drawing the ire of one of our young crew guys Mark Cubrilo. One of his jobs was to fill the tanks of the vehicles at one of the few open gas stations in the area, which fortunately had a set of pumps set aside for police, first responders, and media, so he didn’t have to wait in long lines, but it was still a pain for him to go there, and he reminded me that the faster I drove, the worse the gas mileage was, and I was burning through it faster than anyone else.

  The other person who got mad at me was one of our photographers, Tommy Chiu, who was following me back to Mobile one night after our shift ended and trying to keep up at speeds topping one hundred miles per hour when he got pulled over. When I saw him stopping behind me, I pulled over too and doubled back to vouch for him. The cop was pissed, telling us he had no choice but to pull Tommy over because of his excessive speed. I apologized on his behalf, explaining that he was following me, and it was my fault, and it was only because we were so exhausted after so many long days and nights of hurricane coverage. He took pity on us and let Tommy go with a warning. Tommy then warned me to slow down, but of course I didn’t.

 

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