It's hard to describe exactly why, but my schedule in New Orleans made each day like Groundhog Day, and each day I failed to take the time to post in this space. I was moving every second -- I had news functions and official functions and places to go and people to meet and interviews to conduct and stories to cover. My apologies.
Thanks to JetBlue, we're back -- and now we're all about preparing our hurricane coverage. Perhaps I'll make up for lost time and post an entry on what we experienced there, or how the City is doing. If I wrote 10,000 words I could not express the way the people there have made me feel, simply for doing my job. They mean the world to me, and to us.
Please pardon the raw footage -- it's really hard to hold still in the middle of one of these. (Note the Make it Right houses in the background, plus the bridge over the now-infamous Industrial Canal): Sounds of a second line
Guy Fournier, resident of Uptown New Orleans: "I came to pay my respects"
Eight-year-old Mandy Birren came from Hernando Beach, Florida to mark the anniversary, but also to make a point (she helped decorate the FEMA trailer in the photo below).
Putting FEMA trailers to use in the Ninth Ward
The next generation of Mardi Gras Indians
Kathy Zeitoun was caught up in the chaos of Hurricane Katrina when her husband Abdulrahman was imprisoned as a suspected terrorist while canoeing through the flooded streets trying to save his neighbors. (Their story has since been chronicled in Dave Eggers' book, "Zeitoun").
Folks from all over came out despite the rain to join a second line held in Lower Ninth Ward early Sunday to commemorate the Katrina anniversary
On "Meet the Press" this morning, actor Wendell Pierce made an impassioned endorsement of his city and specifically of the Gentilly neighborhood where he's spearheading the Pontchartrain Park Community Development Project: "What's on display here is is the greatest demonstration of an American aesthetic in a generation, since we rebuilt Europe, because we're doing it from the grassroots up, and that's the story that has to be told."
The clarity of his reponse was all the more impressive given the quick recovery he had to make after watching a clip of himself from Spike Lee's "When the Levees Broke," when he saw his destroyed neighborhood for the first time:
A bumper-sticker sandwich at Butcher in New Orleans.
The clamor in New Orleans over the Gulf oil spill may have quieted down some this week because of all the Hurricane Katrina commemorations, but it's still everywhere you look:
An article in today's Times-Picayune made an interesting observation that, five years after Hurricane Katrina,  "New Orleans still is waiting for that first major Katrina movie."Â
There have been, however, some incredible documentaries, including "Trouble the Water,"Â which received an Oscar nod last year. Ninth Ward native and star of the documentary Kimberly Rivers Roberts was on hand at the TEDxNOLA conference on Friday to share her inspiring Katrina-survival story in what must have been the first-ever TED talk to include a treatise on how not to get shot.
This weekend in New Orleans, there's a lot of buzz building for Harry Shearer's "The Big Uneasy," which plays on Monday (rather than Sunday) night in a deliberate attempt to shift the spotlight away from The Storm itself and back onto the levee failures.
And there's also a new trailer for "The Whole Gritty City" (no release date yet) about the O.Perry Walker Marching Band and the people behind the Roots of Music program - watch the clip below to hear the band's crushing rendition of P. Diddy's "I'll be missing you," which after Katrina became a parade-route staple in honor of those who weren't able to come home:
Five years ago tonight I was part of an NBC News team hastily flown down to Louisiana to be in place for the anticipated early morning landfall of hurricane Katrina. We took off from a suburban New York airport that day bound for New Orleans, but as we flew south the pilot informed us the New Orleans airport had just closed. We ended up diverting to Baton Rouge. During the flight we chatted and speculated about whether this could be a false alarm, and whether the storm might veer away from land at the last minute, and we'd end up going right back to New York. As soon as we got on the ground however, our BlackBerrys came to life with urgent messages about the intensity and track of the storm and updated predictions about the "possible widespread loss of life," a storm of this magnitude could bring. It was heading straight toward New Orleans and the city was under mandatory evacuation. As our technical crews unloaded their gear from the plane, we got on the horn with New York to go over the coverage plan. My colleague Brian Williams and his team would head to New Orleans and try to reach the Superdome. Another group was to head to Houma, Louisiana. I was told to set up at the state command center in Baton Rouge. Other NBC personnel were already in place at various points along the Gulf coast. As we climbed into our rental cars we put on our game faces and exchange quick goodbyes and knowing glances. This was going to be a story for the ages.
I just spent the past week in New Orleans and along the Mississippi coast with many of those same colleagues assessing the impact of Katrina 5 years later, reliving those awful days and catching up with some of the memorable characters we met along the way. We're covering this grim anniversary all weekend long. On tonight's program you'll hear my interview with the man who became the symbol of the federal government's poor response, former FEMA head Michael Brown. He's taken a lot of blame, but as I discovered he's dishing out plenty of blame too. Also, Brian Williams is in New Orleans tonight and returns to the convention center, the scene of some of the disaster's most enduring images of suffering, with a famous son of New Orleans, singer Harry Connick, Jr.
I hope you can join us tonight for NBC Nightly News.
"The massive image-cleanup effort, which involved photography of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida Panhandle, required teams of graphic artists working 14-hour shifts, according to BP Chief Operations Officer Doug Suttles.
“Originally, our work involved basic cutting and pasting on Photoshop CS2. Our teams were sadly unprepared for a spill of this magnitude, and there was a period of delay while we ramped up capability,” Suttles said, adding that BP cleanup teams now use more sophisticated CS4-Extended installations on powerful Apple workstations..."Using a combination of stamp and healing brushes, we eventually developed the technology necessary to expunge every trace of oil from even the most sensitive images.”
Suttles demonstrated a photo of an oil-drenched pelican, followed by another photograph showing the same bird, free of oil and dressed in colorful Hawaiian garb. The image was captioned “I CAN HAZ MY HABITAT BACK?”
“I can even put a hat on him,” Suttles said. “I love this stuff.”
It's hard to talk about New Orleans' palpable sense of team spirit without sounding like a shameless civic booster, but if you lived here for the before-during-and-after of Hurricane Katrina (as I did) and have come back to see what the city is now compared with what it was just after its near-death experience (as I have), you can tell immediately that something unusual has taken hold. As I write this, I'm sitting in a high tech-centric coworking space called LaunchPad - it's one of three such spaces in the city -- and were it not for today's TEDxNOLA talks being held down in "The Quarters" (many of the LaunchPad members are participating -- more on that soon), this space would be filled with many of the same young professionals who were here yesterday, laboring away on laptops on social entrepreneurship projects with names like DropTheChalk.com, ClosingtheNolaGap.com, and 504ward, and GumboLabs.com.
While the prominence of gainfully self-employed young entrepreneurs wearing geek-chic glasses would be unremarkable in just about any other city of New Orleans' stature, here - in a place where many predicted just five short years ago that the city itself might cease to exist -- it's pretty extraordinary. And when you also consider the fact that the first few waves of feverish technology worship that washed over the country in the last 15 years had pretty much passed over this region -- making it to places as far south as Austin and Atlanta, but never sinking into the Deep South states -- it actually lends some credence to the often overstated claims made in those earlier eras that technology itself could, if not save your very soul, then at least catapult you out of economic stagnation. Local government here are trying to encourage that thinking as well, offering generous tax credits to tech startups.
It's still unclear what kind of real impact all this will have on New Orleans, and whether the city will be able to retain those recently drawn here and fulfill the long-held promise of becoming more like the more economically stable but still musically enriched Austin. But as Peter Bodenheimer--one of the TEDxNOLA organizers and a longtime techie who spent time in the dotcom trenches in Boston and San Francisco before returning home to the city he loves--put it: 'Now, when I go to a birthday party of some friend that I grew up with, I meet people that I don't already know, from all over, who have moved here to do the kind of work that I don't think they could have before. And I love that."
Anti-Death penalty lawyer Billy Sothern appeared on the Rachel Maddow Show last night (watch the clip below) to talk about Louisiana's public defense system, which laid off 80 percent of its staff after Hurricane Katrina, leaving 11 attorneys to handle more than 3,000 cases. That system has since been transformed, and attracts young attorneys from across the country who are committed to improving indigent defense in Louisiana. "After Katrina, we look for reasons for optimism," he said. "This is one of them." [There's also a detailed read on the subject in Friday's Times-Picayune, "Justice system creeps toward improvement after Hurricane Katrina."]
I asked Billy, who wrote "Down in New Orleans" about surviving the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, what was on his short list of Katrina-related reading--here's what he had to say:
"Definitely Paul Chan's "Waiting for Godot." Ethan Brown's "Shake the Devil Off." And "Zeitoun." Both of which get at the connections between New Orleans' Katrina crisis and other looming national struggles-- the Iraq war in "Shake the Devil Off" and "the war on terror" in "Zeitoun." And, maybe just as importantly, Kathy Zeitoun's nola.com blog post that brought Zeitoun's story to you, me, and eventually Dave Eggers, then the world. (Isn't that its own Katrina story?) Also, maybe Michael Lewis' New York Times piece,"Wading Towards Home." I always recall the little bit in that piece about Uptowners' fears of looters at Perlis when I pass their window display full of seersucker suits and crawfish logo polo shirts. There are other things that I have a personal connection to, like Jason Berry's essay in "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans." And Dave Olivier's blog entries about evacuating with his family and then returning to his destroyed home, where I had spent so many happy times. (Some excerpted here: http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/personal_essays/notes_from_the_storm.php)Something that I often go back to in my mind (and which appeared in my book) was the op-ed I wrote about Helen Hill's murder that appeared in the NY Times."
Below are a few other suggestions, culled from an informal survey of local journalists and authors asking for their Katrina-related required reading list:
Editor's note: Cynthia Joyce (i.e., me) is a former resident of New Orleans – she'll be recording observations from New Orleans on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.
I hadn't been in New Orleans for more than 10 minutes when I heard the first reference to Hurricane Katrina on the radio station WWOZ, which was playing a live version of jazz vocalist John Boutte singing Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927." In it he alters the lyrics to reference the flood of 2005: "Bush flew over in his airplane with twelve fat men with martinis in their hand/Bush said, 'Fat man, great job...look what the river has done to this poor Creole's land.' " It might have struck me as tragic, except that the DJ, with typical New Orleans irreverence, kept playing over it samples of Bush's infamous "Heckuva job, Brownie" quote to then-FEMA head Mike Brown.
Which served as a good reminder of how much New Orleans is decidedly not wallowing in self-pity when it recalls Katrina--it's just claiming its own narrative of the event.
While the coming days will be all about remembering The Storm (as I write this, the owner of the coffee shop where I'm sitting just told one of her regulars, "God, I'm so sick of hearing about Katrina I could gag"...), people here were never trying to forget it – not that they could if they wanted to. They just have bigger fish to fry. Literally, in some cases. Not to mention a football season to gear up for. You can see the Superdome gleaming from just about every vantage point along I-10. It's being painted black and gold – in honor of the Saints, naturally – and though they're not finished yet, you can already see how spectacular it's going to be. I can't think of a better metaphor for the city's recovery.
One more broadcast from New York this week and we're off to New Orleans, for a few days of coverage of the 5th anniversary of Katrina. And here's what we're up against: The emails quoted below have come in just this week.
"New Orleans took hand outs and blew the money, whined and cried waiting for someone else to clean up their mess...five years later New Orleans still whinning (sic) away."
"I am 61 and don't care about the Gulf!"
"They cried and decried the government to have all their needs met, yet they did nothing to help themselves."
I've done the writers the favor of withholding their names and email addresses, but just so you know that sentiment is out there. We will continue to cover this story. I will be arriving in New Orleans this time with a bit of trepidation (only because memories are still very real, very vivid, brought back by today's story in the Times-Picayune) but mostly hoping and expecting to find an air of celebration. A friend of mine who is already there (and a better-than-average writer) reported to me this morning via email, "I feel like all the Katrina remembrances are serving to remind people of how much they've survived -- and there's evidence everywhere of how they're now thriving -- so there's more of a steely resolve to just see this damn oil thing through, whatever comes of it. In short, New Orleans seems ready for its closeup." That's the spirit.
I also spoke with Adm. Thad Allen by telephone today, who interestingly said he's ready to meet with Spike Lee and stop trading soundbites in the media! I watched Spike's new documentary and found it very impactful -- so much so, it was an emotional setback of sorts for many of us who were there. But tomorrow's another day -- that's the way they live in New Orleans, and its the truth.
Robert Bazell writes:Tonight we report on exciting, early results with an experimental drug for advanced melanoma. The drug is still only known by its experimental name PLX4032. It targets a genetic mutation called BRAF which is present in about 60 per cent of melanomas. That means that only people who have the BRAF mutation in their cancer could even possibly benefit. But in the latest results 80 per cent of those with the mutation and very advanced melanoma had their tumors shrink. Some are alive and well as long as two years after the treatment. You can read the research paper in the New England Journal of Medicine and editorial about it in the Journal.
These results come from the early stage trials called Phase I and II. Researchers are enrolling patients in a pivotal Phase III trial which will lead to FDA approval if the results continue to go well. The drug is made by a small biotechnology company called Plexxicon in Berkeley, California which is partnering with Roche to test and sell the drug. Click here to find out about enrolling in clinical trials
The hope is that ultimately doctors will be able to give this drug, not just to people with advanced melanoma, but in what is called adjuvant therapy immediately after surgery. That should keep the cancer from spreading in the first place and bring about many long-term cures
For years melanoma was easily treatable if found early and surgically removed, but if it spread the outlook was bleak. These results follow three months after a completely separate drug Ipilimimab was shown to cure 20 to 30 per cent of people with advanced melanoma. Ipilimimab works by stimulating the immune system to attack the melanoma. The FDA just received the results for that drug and granted it accelerated approval status which means it could be on the market within a year. There seems to be no correlation between which patients benefit from which drug. Some could benefit form both.
But sadly –even if both drugs end up being widely available, manyh patients will not be helped by either. This is how progress against cancer is beginning to take shape. Scientists and doctors have learned that even one type of cancer – such as melanoma – is not one disease, but several. And the still very distant goal is to find treatments for all forms of all cancers.
I can't get enough information about the mine rescue in Chile. The headline, the good news, is simple enough: 33 men found alive after 17 days, more than 2,000 feet down. There is a pipe the width of the average grapefruit down to the escape room where they remain. The problem is, the effort to get them out must now proceed gingerly. It may take until Christmas. Obviously, the physical and mental health of the miners now takes precedence.
For example—I was theorizing in our news meeting this morning: Will they set up a Telco line for them to Skype with family? Will they be sent iPods with broadcasts or movies or music they like? Will lighting be sent down to mimic day and night above ground to give them a living schedule, as is required during all shifts aboard a submarine at sea? How will waste be disposed of (think about that for a moment)? How does the group dynamic hold up under a sensory deprivation, how can tempers be held in check and "unit cohesion" be achieved and sustained?
It’s a dynamic not unlike that experienced by some POW's—for whom it gets tougher when things are taken away...or when other factors are added. I heard today they've approached NASA—the experts in sustaining life in a hostile, closed environment...and that's a good thing.
We will someday read the definitive book or see the definitive documentary about these brave men and their brave rescuers. Until then, I'll say what I said after the last domestic mining disaster: Our hunger for energy requires some among us to pursue a noble occupation: going deep underground for the raw materials we need. It requires so much of the miners and their families—as we're seeing play out in Chile right now.
I want to thank all of you who watched my Dateline hour—and all of you who have written about it. It was powerful to work on, and it is hard to watch at times—but I think the anger and sadness is important. We can't forget how it made us feel five years ago. It is re-airing this Friday night on MSNBC.
Late this week we'll take our broadcast on the road to New Orleans, where we will mark the 5th anniversary of Katrina next weekend. Please take a look at what today's paper there wants us all to know about the City and the recovery.
I'm enormously proud of the documentary that aired on Dateline last night, and proud to tell you it will re-air this coming Friday night on MSNBC at 10pm Eastern time (check your local listings, as they say). As I told Charlie Rose on Friday, it is powerful, and dredges up the sadness and anger we all felt during that awful week five years ago. Much work remains to be done.
We hope you can join us tonight as we begin a new week.
Good day. A quick note about tonight's broadcast. We'll have a report from the World Trade Center site here in New York where demonstrators on both sides of the Islamic Center controversy met today.
The end of U.S. combat operation has not meant an end to American casualties there as we painfully learned today. With more U.S. combat deaths reported in Afghanistan as well, NBC's Tom Aspell reports on the delicate and critical turning point the U.S. is navigating on both war fronts.
I'm also looking forward to sharing with you some of my interview with 3 American combat veterans from 3 different wars who lost their legs to battle. They have pulled off a pretty remarkable feat atop Africa's Mt. Kilimanjaro that sends a strong message to the rest of us about courage and determination.
I hope you'll join me for the Sunday edition of NBC Nightly News.
I was craving an omelet and there were 3 eggs left in the refrigerator this morning, but the carton they originally came in was nowhere to be seen. What to do? Toss 'em, or eat 'em? Thankfully my wife assured me they came from a farm here in the Northeast, which is not a source of the salmonella contaminated eggs identified in the widening egg recall. But no one should reach for an egg right now without first checking to see where it came from. The number of eggs recalled over possible salmonella contamination now tops half a billion, and over a thousand people have been sickened by tainted eggs. We've listed the brands in question here on the Nightly News website. We've also invited a government doctor from the FDA to come on with me the broadcast tonight to answer the questions many of you have about this outbreak.
We're also following the strange legal turn of events surrounding the man behind WikiLeaks, the web site that recently published secret U.S. government documents about the war in Afghanistan. He was accused of rape today by Swedish authorities, who quickly turned around and declared there was no basis for the charge. He's still not out of legal hot water, however, and there are questions about the timing of the legal scrutiny given his web site may be about to release more secret war documents. We'll have a lot more on this tonight.
The mention of bed bugs sparks a shudder among many of us, especially here in New York where the biting critters are showing up in more and more places. But we're not alone. NBC's Tom Costello takes a look at how bed bug outbreaks are popping up across the country.
Finally a note of thanks to my colleague Kate Snow for filling in for me last weekend while I enjoyed some vacation time with my family.
It's nice to be back. I'll look for you tonight on NBC Nightly News.
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