An Interview with Adam Nossiter

This interview was conducted in New Orleans, Louisiana, on November 8, 2007, at a sidewalk café on the corner of Magazine and Washington Streets.

ROWELL: You were here in New Orleans writing and reporting the news during Hurricane Katrina. Will you describe the circumstances under which you worked during the violent winds and rain and the flooding.

NOSSITER: I was a part of the Associated Press New Orleans bureau at that time and I was one of two, perhaps three reporters asked to stay behind during the hurricane. The rest of the bureau essentially evacuated but two or three of us stayed behind. During that first week, a colleague and I stayed at a hotel downtown, we left our homes for the Staten Hotel downtown which was where we went through the storm, and we went out and reported every day. First day of the storm, it seemed as though New Orleans had dodged the bullet, as everyone was saying. There was a lot of wind and a lot of rain but we weren't aware the city was flooding until late that first day. We went down to City Hall and found the levees had been breached and the city was filling with water. That obviously changed the picture.

When we woke up the next morning, we stepped out of the hotel and within a few blocks we were up to our knees in water and so on it went throughout that day, we realized we were living in a flooded city. I went out on a boat actually. I think I was the first reporter to go out on a boat. That Tuesday, immediately after the storm, I reported on the rescue efforts from that boat. It was a Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries boat and cruising in downtown New Orleans was an extraordinary thing, picking up people off of roofs and balconies in the central city. It seemed quite unreal. Streets that one had driven down or bicycled down until quite recently were now essentially canals.

So the rest of the week was increasingly difficult I would say, in the sense that there was no electricity. It was very hot, it was very hard to get around, we were wading through filthy, chest high water to get anywhere. I developed an infection on my leg which required treatment. It was a very trying and difficult circumstance. We were reporting via cellphones but the cell phones didn't always work. Of course, it was difficult to keep them charged up and I'm trying to think of how we did that. The hotel where City Hall had moved to had emergency generators where we could charge up our equipment, our laptops, our cell phones, through emergency generators. There was tremendous confusion. People were trapped in the hotels, mobbed at the Superdome. There were lots and lots of very uncomfortable, fearful people trapped in the city. That was the first week.

Then I went up to Jackson to visit my family and to get treatment for my leg during that first weekend. Jackson, Mississippi, was where my family had evacuated to before the storm. After that weekend, I came back down here and I established myself in my house, which was just a few blocks from here, where I spent the rest of the month reporting on a city that had been devastated and knocked to the ground by Hurricane Katrina. That was a rather unusual circumstance in the sense that I was one of the only two or three people still living in this neighborhood. The city was completely deserted. This part of New Orleans had not flooded so one was able to drive in this neighborhood but not much further than one could drive downtown. For that month, I essentially lived on my back porch which was screened off but it was the only place where one had any hope of catching a breeze and not sweltering.

During the day, I wrote while on my front porch and I charged up my various pieces of equipment, my laptop, my cell phone, through my car. I...