One Year Ago: How the 'Times-Picayune' Escaped -- But Did Not Abandon -- New Orleans

By: E&P Staff As the flood waters surged one year ago, leaders at the 'Times-Picayune' decided to abandon ship downtown and carry on to the north. The escape through rising waters held high drama -- while coverage then and in days after, directed by Editor Jim Amoss, was a lifesaver for the city and eventually led to two Pulitzers.

For his efforts, and those of his staff, Amoss was named E&P's Editor of the Year in February. Here, from our profile of Amoss and the paper back then by Mark Fitzgerald, we reprise the story of that day in 2005.

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The Times-Picayune building was constructed with hurricanes is mind. That's why so many of the paper's employees gathered there on Sunday, Aug. 28, 2005 as Katrina was upgraded from a Category 3 the day before to a Category 4 at 2 a.m., to a Category 5 at dawn. That's also why some brought their spouses and children. "In many ways we were very prepared," Amoss says. "We had a very elaborate plan for the hurricane." Even if they lost power, they had generators to keep the computers going for at least a week.

And they'd been through this routine before. "This is where we'd go," Publisher Ashton Phelps Jr. says as he shows the places people would bed down so many hurricanes before, and then shows a conference room where Katrina burst the plate glass.

At first, all went according to plan. Katrina was fierce, but not, it seems, as fierce as advertised. The paper lost power Sunday night, the generators clicked on. "I thought this is great, we're OK," Amoss recalls. Across the nation, the word spread: New Orleans had, in the oft-repeated phrase, dodged a bullet.

Meanwhile, Features Editor James O'Byrne and art critic Doug MacCash had ventured outside. "We were on bikes because we figured -- correctly, as it turned out -- we'd probably get around better than in cars," O'Byrne recalls.

They headed toward Lakeview. Stopping a quarter-mile from the 17th Street levee with water rising, they were the first journalists to see that the levee had failed. The first to understand that Katrina wasn't done with New Orleans. That its destruction was just getting started.

They were the first, too, to experience how personal this story would get for everyone at the Times-Picayune. As O'Byrne gazed at the flood waters from the breach, he knew Lake Pontchartrain was advancing on his own house.

"It was dusk, and we were a long way from home, and we had to get back to tell everyone what happened, that no one knew about" O'Byrne recalls. Along the way, they passed three dozen people seeking a dry surface on a bridge, and genuinely happy that a couple of journalists were going to tell the story. "It's difficult to believe that they could be happy under those circumstances," he adds.

When O'Byrne and MacCash arrived back at the newsroom, the editors were debating what to tell the outside world in the next edition. Had New Orleans really dodged a bullet? Should they say something not quite so definitive? "Don't worry about spinning it," O'Byrne told them. "We're going under water."

Soon enough, that proved to be true even at the Times-Picayune. Water lapped onto the parking lot. "People would go out to measure it, and by mid-morning [Monday], it was rising an inch every seven minutes," Amoss says.

It was time to go, Amoss and Phelps decided. "If we stay here, we're trapped and not able to report, simple as that," Amoss remembers. There were 140 people in the building, including little kids. Even a three-month-old baby.

A dozen circulation trucks were rounded up. "The rule was, you could take only what fit on your lap," Amoss says. They squeezed in, sometimes 30 to a truck.

From the top floor of the Times-Picayune building, you can imagine reaching out and easily touching Interstate 10, perhaps 200 yards away. But as the circulation trucks rumbled off, the service road was flooded in three feet of rising water, and the ramp up to I-10 seemed an endless distance away.

Jim Amoss was in a front seat in a truck back a ways in the caravan, watching intently the red light on the dashboard. "It said, 'Water in fuel,' and I'm thinking, 'Oh, no,'" he says. "As soon as the first truck reached the dry highway, the people inside broke into applause. Amazingly, every truck made it up the ramp."

Amoss directed the caravan to the Times-Picayune's suburban bureau office on the protected West Bank of the Mississippi. The office had no power, so they couldn't put the newspaper out from there. "Mainly we went there," he says, "to figure out what the hell to do."

Taking the lead

Manager Amoss and the people surrounding him would have to figure out that Monday morning how to produce a daily newspaper under near-impossible conditions in the next 10 or 12 hours. "There was no question we were going to publish," Features Editor O'Byrne says. "That's what newspapers do, publish."

Logistics got complicated from the start. Managing Editor Dan Shea's truck arrived at the West Bank but saw no one there, so they took off for Houma, La., where The New York Times Co. publishes The Courier. Even in relatively unscathed Houma, they faced rolling blackouts as they began the first efforts to get the paper going while trying to figure out where people were. "It was a kind of 'day of days,' you know?" Shea says. "We still call ourselves the Houma Twelve."

Back at West Bank with his group of refugees catching their breath on dry land, Amoss determined they had to do two things right away. "We had to get to a working city -- and, perverse as it seems, we had to get people we'd just gotten out of there back into the city," he recalls. "Because we had to report."

The 15 who volunteered were an eclectic group including the paper's art critic, a sports reporter, the editorial page editor, the pop music critic, and a city reporter. Amoss gave them the keys to a circulation truck, and then the rest took off for Baton Rouge.

It took six hours to make the trip that's normally an hour, even with traffic. And it took 25 attempts on a balky phone for Amoss to contact his friend Jack Hamilton. The dean of Louisiana State University's journalism school had a simple message: Get here, and we'll take care of you.

That night, the Times-Picayune published a paper -- a PDF version with, as managing editor Shea notes, some odd fonts and a kind of homemade flag. But it was a newspaper that included electrifying reporting combined with chilling photos taken by Ted Jackson, the first to document the horrifying toll in the Lower 9th Ward. Jackson's images were the first of many shots the nation would see of people who chopped their way out of attics, hoping to escape the rising water on their roofs.

Empty office space in a Baton Rouge industrial park was opened for the paper. O'Byrne borrowed the American Express card of the paper's IT department and charged $21,000 to get computers and accessories at a Best Buy. There were no rental cars available in Baton Rouge or anywhere nearby because of the massive evacuation, but the Times-Picayune refugees managed to assemble a carpool within 24 hours.

Staffers reported and blogged around the clock on Nola.com. And so did hurricane victims, filling the forums with pleas for missing persons and exchanging family news. The site received 30 million page views a day or more in the coming weeks.

After three more days of PDF-only newspapers, the first printed editions -- a two-section broadsheet of 16 pages -- rolled off the Houma Courier presses.