Trymaine Lee
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPCOLLINS: Are you from New Orleans, originally?
LEE: No, I'm from New Jersey, originally . . . I was working in Philadelphia—well, I was living in Philadelphia—and working at a newspaper in Trenton, New Jersey. I came down for the work at the newspaper here, and I got here about four months before the storm.
COLLINS: Do you have a special beat as a reporter?
LEE: Police, cops.
COLLINS: What are the things that surprised you most about Katrina and its aftermath?
LEE: Well, I was here from day one, for the first three weeks I didn't leave. I was here, you know, the entire time they were evacuating, with a small group of reporters. I think just the level of despair when you realize on day two when these huddled masses of people were stranded out on the interstate, you know, slept overnight and, you know, people were trapped in their attics and on their rooftops. The sheer magnitude of the crisis, that's what astounded me because I wasn't prepared for that. You know I figured the storm would blow by and there would be some wind damage.
But once the levees broke and you realize that eighty percent of the city was underwater and that people in some sections of the city were unable to or didn't have the wherewithal to leave, or resources to leave. I realized that, O.K., this is serious, serious business. People are drowning and people are trapped in attics. Seeing that—the first body I saw in the street –I realized that this is serious.
COLLINS: Were you following the police officers or were you going all over the city according to your own plan?
LEE: Oh, no, there was no . . . there was no beat. Once Katrina hit, there was no beat, there was no editor. I was actually—I went to city hall the night of the storm. They were supposed to pick me up Tuesday, but the phone lines were down, communications were dead, and the paper actually evacuated, so I was the only one downtown. [End Page 1128]
COLLINS: You were the only one from the paper?
LEE: Right. Everybody else left. Then I hooked up with another reporter who came back into the city to look for his parents—to help relocate his parents, to get them to safety. Ran into him down in city hall. So I was just down there kind of alone for a while, not knowing what I was going to do. So there was no beat at this point. After that, everybody was general assignment. You didn't have any editor to assign stories. For the first two weeks, we just kind of went out in the street—and the stories were everywhere, so you just did your job and gathered whatever information you could.
COLLINS: So how did you survive, did you live in your car or something?
LEE: No. Monday night I stayed at City Hall. The next night, Tuesday, I was still down there and we had to evacuate. I went with a few National Guard and city folks across the street from City Hall to the Hyatt Hotel, where the windows had been blown out and everything. No electricity, no air conditioning. We just stayed in there for that night. Then I finally hooked up with the crew of team reporters. We eventually won the Pulitzer for breaking news. But I met up with them and the first night we went out to a paper in Houma and slept on the floor [of] a newspaper [office] about forty-five minutes away. They let us stay on the newsroom floor, so we just kind of commuted back and forth.
COLLINS: Earlier on in the hurricane there were—and I guess you would have seen it, as an eyewitness—there were all these stories in the national media about looting and lawlessness. And later people started to say that these stories were overblown. What...
