In one of our first news writing classes this semester, I said
something to the affect that "news," at its simplest, is what you
didn't know -- and now you do.
What a hurricane could do in New Orleans may have been news to some when the Times Picayune titled a five-part series "Washingaway." The scary headlines included "Nature's Ultimate Weapon," "Last Line
of Defense," "In Harm's Way" and "Going Under."
Those aren't headlines from last week. That series was
published three years ago, June 23-27, 2002. Here's a clip from one story:
"If enough water from Lake
Pontchartrain
topped the levee system along its south shore, the result would be
apocalyptic... Whoever remained in the city would be at
grave risk.
"According to the American Red Cross, a likely death toll
would be between 25,000 and 100,000 people, dwarfing estimated death
tolls for other natural disasters and all but the most nightmarish
potential terrorist attacks.
"Tens of thousands more would be stranded
on rooftops and high ground, awaiting rescue that could take days or
longer. They would face thirst, hunger and exposure to toxic
chemicals."
The New York Times ran its own story from the "Big Easy" three months earlier, "Nothing's Easy for New Orleans Storm Control,"
The reporter interviewed experts including Joseph Suhayada of Louisiana
State University, who had developed a computer simulation of the
flooding from a direct hurricane hit on the city.
The story still wasn't "old news" to most of the nation that fall, when PBS's "NOW with Bill Moyers" picked up the
story of the levee system and New Orleans
as "Losing Ground" and "The City in a Bowl." The Sept. 20, 2002,
broadcast included interviews with Suhayda (the transcript
misspells his name) and others. Here's part of the transcript:
DANIEL ZWERDLING:
Do you expect this kind of hurricane and this kind of flooding to hit
New Orleans in our lifetime?
JOE SUHUYDA:
Well, there-- I would say the probability is yes. In terms of past
experience, we've had three storms that were near-misses that could've
done at least something close to this.
Later, Zwerdling talked to Walter Maestri, introducing him as
"basically the czar of public emergencies in Jefferson Parish. It's the
biggest suburb in the region." They discussed a hurricane disaster drill the area had conducted:
WALTER MAESTRI: Well, when the exercise was completed
it was
evident that we were going to lose a lot of people we changed the name
of the storm from Delaney to K-Y-A-G-B... kiss your ass goodbye...
because anybody who was here as that Category Five storm came across...
was gone.
DANIEL ZWERDLING: The American Red Cross
lists the
worst natural disasters that might strike America. They worry about
earthquakes in California, and tropical storms in Florida. But they say
the biggest catastrophe could be a hurricane hitting New Orleans.
That year, 2002, Louisiana State formed a Center for the Study of the Public Health Impact of Hurricanes). It already had the LSU Hurricane Center, where the staff has been collecting headline links to similar stories and teaching subjects like "hurricane engineering" since 2000. Here are Scientific American in 2001 on the same subject, the Houston Chronicle that year, and Civil Engineering magazine in 2003.
Here's a paragraph from that 2002 New York Times story, after a description of a plan to wall off part of the city as a "refuge for thousands of residents fleeing their homes":
"But obtaining the money on the scale needed is far
tougher than devising plans, especially if some skeptics dismiss the
worst-case predictions as scare tactics to help finance university
research or for further environmental intrusions on the coast."
The lesson for journalists? Reporting the news may not be enough,
but it looks like the reporters and scientists did their jobs. Some
things about New Orleans shouldn't have been news to anyone.
(Thanks to bloggers including Mark Bernstein and Dave Winer for pointers to the articles that got me started on this.)
3:38:56 PM 
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