Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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trymaine lee
09:22
Appearances
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john mcardle
cspan02:14
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Early Signs of Disaster00:06:49
unidentified
DC's police department and deployment of National Guard troops with political commentator, author, and talk show host Armstrong Williams.
And Lauren Leader of All In Together talks about Women's Equality Day, the anniversary of the certification of the 19th Amendment and civic engagement among women.
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You know, it's hard to imagine that it's actually been 20 years.
And thinking back to those early days, I was just, you know, a young reporter finding my way through the city.
I'd only been a journalist for maybe two and a half, three years.
And at the time, I was a police reporter for the Times-Picayune, which is the local daily newspaper.
And I remember that day before, not being from the South, being from the East Coast, had no sense of what hurricane season was like.
And I remember having lunch with a colleague, and we were in a little restaurant, and I looked in the corner of the room and saw the TV.
And you could see the hurricane approaching.
And it was as wide from like Florida to Texas.
And I had never seen anything like that.
And it was kind of just a foreshadowing of the enormity of what this event would be.
And so being a police reporter, I worked a Sunday shift.
And the Times-Picayune building had actually been a shelter for staff and employees.
So that Sunday, I worked the shift, and then I stayed overnight, you know, like so many other of my colleagues as a shelter.
And I remember going into Monday morning, really early before the sun rose.
You could hear the wind whipping up and roaring.
And I remember a moment when I heard this huge crash, and it was a 100-year-old tree right in front of the building that had come crashing into one of the windows in the front of the building.
And then soon after that, the levees broke.
We were on higher ground, like closer to downtown, so we didn't get a bunch of flooding, but the water started to rise around us.
And that was just a foreshadowing of, you know, the city literally swamped, flooded.
80% of the city would soon be underwater.
And we'd go about the business of trying to tell the story of this city struggling to survive.
At what point did you realize that this was real bad, that this was a major historic natural disaster, still the third highest death toll from a hurricane in recorded U.S. history?
And so Monday morning, I was, as reporters started to descend out into the city and get a sense of just how bad the flooding was, I was sent out to City Hall to stay close to the mayor, the police chief, and the emergency preparedness folks with the idea that someone from the paper would come back and get me the next morning.
And so I loaded up into a delivery van, got down to City Hall, and for the next several hours was reporting on the news conferences and updates that would happen once every hour or so.
That night I slept on the floor in City Hall in an office.
And then the next morning, you know, the City Hall started taking on water downtown.
And so we left City Hall and went across the street to a hotel, the Hyatt, which had these blown-out windows.
And I got inside and I felt this warmth.
And you see the orange glow of the backup lighting going off.
And there was a woman who was crying in tears.
And she had her arms wrapped around an emergency worker.
And she was thanking him profusely.
And he said, you know, it's our job to save lives.
And she's crying.
And as soon as they split, I go over to her and I say, you know, what's going on?
And she told me this story of her family escaping the lower ninth ward.
Her family had a family reunion in town.
And so there were dozens of family members.
And a bunch of them went to her house as the water is rising.
They go up to the second floor where her apartment was, and the water kept rising and rising until they got to the attic.
And they were fearing for their lives.
And a few of the men were able to break through a hole in the roof of the apartment, into the trestle of the building.
And they heard boats in the distance.
They heard the hum and the motors.
And so they took their shirts off and they started waving them to try to get their attention.
And she's telling me this story.
And she says they load it into the boats.
And the part that got me, when I realized how bad it really was, she said they could see bodies of people who hadn't survived the flooding.
And she said there was this little baby.
And the way she said that the baby wasn't bloated or anything, this baby was perfect.
It just brought tears to my eyes.
So she's crying.
I have kind of tears welling in my eyes as I'm taking notes.
And that was the first moment I realized that the human toll was going to be much more than we could have ever imagined.
This one woman's story, and this is early, so this is still as people are streaming downtown from all parts of the city.
She went to the Superdome first and said the conditions were so deplorable and the way folks were being treated was so bad that she had to find somewhere else to stay.
And that's where she ended up in the Hyatt.
And we had this chance encounter.
And that moment crystallized and solidified for me just how bad it was.
But that would also change the trajectory of my career in so many ways because that was one of the defining moments for me in my reporting career.
My early career, but also 20 years later, it still stands out as an important moment for me.
I wouldn't say it's limping forward into that recovery.
It's moving, but really slowly.
You know, it was important for me coming back to New Orleans, having experienced the worst of that disaster and watching people try to survive the worst moment in the city's history, certainly one of the worst, and certainly the worst moment in so many people's lives.
And we've seen the destruction.
We've seen the trauma that folks continue to carry.
We've seen every system in that city, the infrastructure torn asunder.
But I wanted to tell the story of what it means for a people's recovery.
You know, what happens when systems fail?
What happens when the promises of politicians fail?
What happens when the money for the recovery isn't fully established?
What does it mean for a community to heal itself in the wake of all that?
So 20 years later, I wanted to tell the story of people patching their city back together and healing themselves.
And so the recovery in this context means what does it look like when your school district is taken over by a charter, a charter system?
What does it mean for community members to stand up and help resource teachers and students and families?
What does it mean in a city where the life expectancy for black folks is much less than white folks?
And even bringing life into this world, into the city, from mothers is precarious at best.
What does it mean for organizations to help give black mothers in particular what they need to deliver healthy babies?
And then what does it mean for a community reeling under the weight of incessant gun violence?
What does it mean for people to stand up and try to put a barrier between a generation of young people and those bullets?
What does it mean to recover the land that you've lost from the encroachment of big industry, but also coastal erosion?
And so I take a look at this lens, kind of from cradle to grave, how people move through this city, move their lives, and heal 20 years later, even as the floodlines might have diminished, but they're still there.
Those lines are still there in so many communities, like in the lower 9th ward, where folks still haven't fully returned, where you still see across that neighborhood these concrete steps to nowhere, right?
And in the midst of all that, there is literal hunger.
So it's a barren, some parts of that neighborhood are still barren, but it's also a food desert.
And so what does it look like for people to literally grow food and teach a new generation to grow food so they can feed themselves?
That's what we're doing with Hope in High Water, that despite the high water, despite the losses, there still is hope.
And this is what I describe as a people's recovery in action.
How tough has it been for folks to hold on to their homes, especially in communities that were already struggling against so many other economic and social forces?
unidentified
If you had insurance, for instance, and you were able to rebuild quickly, but if you were underinsured, oftentimes we have what we call heirs property.
So when you have heirs property, it's like the home your grandmother lived in and then grandmom passes and someone or relative lives in that house generation after generation and then a disaster hits.
Well in order to get resources from FEMA, either local resources or federal resources, you have to have title in that property.
And if you don't, then you find yourself either uninsured or underinsured and unable to rebuild.
I think about what I experienced during Katrina, and it wasn't for me personally.
You know, I'm from New Jersey.
My family was safe and sound.
I wasn't married and didn't have a child at that point.
I was just a young reporter.
But what I saw, my colleagues experience, but what I saw folks I got to know, communities that I got to know and love, the trauma that they continue to carry to this day.
And by proxy, what I've carried, the little pieces of the trauma that I've held on to, given that closeness to this community, it was a full circle moment.
And so it's recovery, it's healing.
It's also giving flowers to people and organizations who do tireless work every single day in New Orleans.
Folks who are without resources are feeding people and helping people find homes and helping to establish community organizations and groups that will help the city.
And so for me, it's part recovery, but it's really an opportunity.
Despite everything else we will see around this anniversary, certainly the destruction, certainly the abuses of power, certainly the political failings, certainly the brutality that folks had long been accustomed to in New Orleans, exacerbated and amplified by the storm.
But to go and tell the story of not resilience, but deep resolve, right?
The deep humanity, the love for community and love for self-that for me was certainly healing.
And I hope that it offers some degree of healing for those who may still be triggered and traumatized by what they experienced.
Coming up on 9:30 on the East Coast, Tremaine Lee, our guest, until the top of the hour, 10 a.m. Eastern.
That's the end of our program this morning.
So plenty of time for your phone calls.
Kathy's waiting in Cleveland, Ohio.
You're up first with Mr. Lee.
unidentified
Hello, thank you.
I just wanted to quickly comment that Katrina was a signpost of sorts.
I think the American people came to realize, unfortunately, that they cannot rely on their government to help them as people used to think.
I am especially disgusted with the response of former President George W. Bush, who sat on his ranch on vacation for nearly a month while this was happening.
That was just utterly disgusting.
And that's part of his legacy.
And they seem to, you know, put it under the rug, but I think it should be recognized that he was an abject failure in his response to this tragedy.
I think that when we think about this in terms of being a natural disaster, right, we think about the wind and the storm surge and the toppling of the levees.
But if anything, there are many people who see this as a man-made disaster.