“See? Right here. That’s where the levee broke.”

The photographer pointed to a shaded segment on the marked-up New Orleans map, then to the image on his glowing laptop screen. On the map, the breach looked like any other line on the regular suburban grid — an inch or so from the blue expanse of Lake Pontchartrain, right next to the colorfully named 17th Street Canal. On the laptop screen, however, it was a different view altogether — a huge gash in a retaining wall caused water to surge into the low-lying lakefront neighborhoods, looking like an uncomfortably urban version of Niagara Falls.

“It’s totally dry here,” he said, pointing to a square section of the Bucktown neighborhood. “And on the other side of the canal, it’s all under water. It’s like filling up an ice cube tray.”

The image was one of thousands the photographer shot that day — most from the jump seat of a chartered helicopter. He’d been up before dawn to meet a Texas-based chopper pilot and cruise the day-after detritus of Hurricane Katrina.

Crowded in tight around the screen, our little group of New Orleans refugees scanned every photo that flashed by, fixated on every mouse click. These weren’t the first images we’d seen of the city’s worsening post-storm predicament, but they were the first images to provide any kind of real context.

A group of about 15 friends — couples, singles and young families — had left New Orleans when the storm threatened and fled to St. Martinville, La., a tiny town in the rural Cajun country. In 2004, many of us evacuated to this small southwest Louisiana town as houseguests of mutual friends with a special knack for emergency hospitality.

When last year’s Hurricane Ivan threatened New Orleans, we laid low as the storm smacked the Florida panhandle, and waited for the “all clear” signal to return to New Orleans. Last year, it was a long weekend of near misses and easy relief. This year, we looked for any clue to tell us when and if we’d be able to return.

The pictures flashed by at 10-second intervals. Familiar landmarks like the arena-turned-refuge stood out in stark relief, while other neighborhoods — the poverty-stricken Ninth Ward, the historic Faubourg Treme — required time to decode from underneath 12-foot layers of liquid camouflage. In the hardest-hit parts of town, it was nearly impossible to make out the usual locators — street markers, architectural flourishes or business signs.

“Wait! If that’s Tulane Avenue, then what’s that?”

Chris Poche, one of the audience, tried to place the photo of a highway overpass rising briefly from the water with entry and exit ramps completely submerged. Elevated highways and cloverleaf onramps stood out against a uniform sheen of levee water.

Most of us had seen these scenes earlier in the day, pumped in a continuous feed through the various news channels. Katrina’s last-minute break to the east had spared most of southwest Louisiana’s vital infrastructure, so if you were lucky enough to make it out of the city, you could watch continuous video of the aftermath, with 12 minutes of commercial interruption for every 48 minutes of unfolding tragedy.

New Orleans residents are well acquainted with the perpetual media drone, especially during hurricane season. Predictions, comparisons, updates and warnings are all part of the June-to-November tropical storm season — as are the filler features spelling out the worst-case scenario that would wipe out the city for good. It’s the stuff that local TV stations trot out during July sweeps and CNN dusts off whenever a storm sneaks past Key West.

Over the years, we’ve learned which outlets to trust, which local weathercasters combine quirky screen presence with solid information, and to roll our eyes at the annual parade of slicker-clad Weather Channel strivers willing to risk their lives for a few minutes of screen time.

We are not, however, accustomed to evacuating New Orleans, only to find whole swaths of the low-lying city awash in lake water and hurricane runoff, with desperate residents waving desperately from their rooftops.

We watched the laptop screen slideshow with rapt attention as images of Coast Guard helicopters, flatboat rescue volunteers and flattened oak groves filled the screen. The photographer told stories for each frame, and the refugees sat rapt, crying quietly at the images of those not lucky enough to evacuate.

Over the course of an hour or so, we got to ask the photographer questions — to see if he saw anything that could give us hope for the city, even as news from the wire grew bleaker with every hour. There were two breaks in the levee by nightfall. After dodging Katrina’s deluge from above, New Orleans’ remaining population (many too poor to leave) faced a rapidly rising water from below.

Every once in a while, a gasp of recognition would come up from the group. “If that’s a ball park, then it must be Tulane. And if that’s Tulane, then that’s got to be Broadway. Can you zoom in here?”

A few clicks later, tiny pixels became larger squares, then recognizable shapes. “Wait! That’s our house,” screamed Kiki Houston, a denizen of the city’s Uptown neighborhood. “And the sycamore tree’s still standing!” For a few seconds, a sense of hope electrified the group as we saw a pixelated likeness of a familiar New Orleans scene: a fleeting image of home.

After days of dread and evacuation, after days of round-the-clock coverage and rumors, that little Photoshop zoom provided just a bit of hope, something to get us through the mind-numbing hours of disaster coverage, press conferences and a death toll that will only climb in the coming days.

As time passed, the audience thinned, but a few of us stayed around to look at more of the helicopter pics — images of highway bridges dismantled by waves, boats tossed inland like bath toys, submerged houses visible only by roof crests clad in rainbow-colored shingles.

Abstracted to pure geometry, there was something oddly beautiful about some of the pictures. But the huddled families on the roofs, a single abandoned car on the broken roadbed brought the tragedy home.

Last week, Hurricane Fran ravaged the coastal Carolinas while her pals Gustav and Hortense milled around the Caribbean, politely waiting their turn to attack. Businesses closed, tourists fled, and news directors rejoiced.
For televised news media, what could be better than hurricane season? Neatly wedged between Hollywood’s summer blockbusters and the new fall television season, hurricanes provide an ideal diversion during the slow news period that traditionally follows Labor Day. The storms, given increasingly unthreatening names yet still qualifying as presenting “imminent danger,” give television news a seasonal string of perfectly formatted news events.
As the strongest oceanic storm systems, hurricanes occupy the top of the meteorological food chain and invoke imagery of focused elemental fury. From humble beginnings in tropical seas, these storms often take weeks to graduate from depression to tropical storm to hurricane, at which point they either dissipate, decimate Caribbean island chains, or attack the United States. From the perspective of a news organization, that means plenty of time to build drama, fill slow news days, and — if ratings warrant — send an entry-level weather reader directly into the storm’s path.
TV hurricane coverage is a quasi-morality play — a four-act love child of Greek tragedy and ’50s alien-invasion movies. The play runs on the same dynamics that fueled the popularity of this summer’s zillion-dollar “Independence Day” and last summer’s zillion-dollar OJ Trial — clearly defined characters and a predictable plot line. The only thing missing is the overacting.
The first act, “Rites of Passage,” calmly traces a storm’s incremental movements from depression to tropical storm to full hurricane status. Our antagonist gathers force, and the meticulous experts on the Weather Channel’s Weather Scope bring you a technical play-by-play expressed in precise barometric readings, detailed navigational coordinates and ominous phrases like “strike probability.” The stars of this act are career meteorologists rather than well-coifed weather mannequins, and Act I’s warroom atmosphere feels like a small-town theater production of “Dr. Strangelove” — only with better equipment.
Act II, “Put Up or Shut Up,” brings the storm to secondary headline status as the new hurricane ravages perennially-endangered former Dutch, Danish and French island colonies. By this time, we’re actually “tracking” the storm to determine if it’s to be a killer or a washout. The story breaks to national news stations for a short cameo following the mid-point commercial break. Violently suggestive teasers build suspense and encourage viewer retention (“After the break, Isidore pounds Puerto Plata…”). Local and network anchors practice stern expressions while using universally forceful verbs (“threaten,” “slam,” and “dump”) to describe the impending coastal invasion. In small markets across the nation, stately anchors and balding weathermen exchange earnest banter about the storm’s progress before wondering how this will affect the Dolphins game. They’ll have the latest on the storm’s progress at 10.
Sometime during Act II, the viewing public gets its first view of the hurricane’s new logo — the art department’s best attempt at making the storm’s moniker appear threatening, even if it’s being called “Hortense.” The graphic usually employs bold type set against traditional “high wind” symbolism (fluttering distress flags and straining palm trees) or, in the case of the Weather Channel, blood-red animated satellite shots of a aggressive hurricane in motion. This year’s names present a particular challenge to those artists, since names like Fran, Paloma and Vicky sound less like ruthless killers than members of a nursing home canasta league.
“Thar She Blows!” (Act III) brings live reports from the storm front mere hours before the hurricane’s destructive landfall. Legions of EyeWitness News correspondents clamor to interview retreating locals in between wind-swept descriptions of atmospheric mayhem. During Hurricane Fran, the CBS primetime news magazine “48 Hours” featured split-screen reports from three different crews on the coast — one on the leading edge, one in the eye, and a third in Fran’s wake. Having built his career developing “in the eye” journalism, elder statesman and host Dan Rather quizzed the gale-battered young reporters about relative wind speeds and amounts of flying debris. “That’s all from the strike zone of Killer Hurricane Fran. Back to you in the warm, dry studio, Dan.”
After the storm hits land and dissipates into a series of weakening squall lines, Act IV — “Aftermath” — takes to the air. Strong lead stories gradually break into a flurry of generic survivor’s tales, human interest stories, and multi-level “disaster area” declarations. Fran, the worst storm to hit the Carolinas since 1989′s Hugo, quickly lost her competitive advantage and dropped from the CNN’s lead story by Monday morning, relegated instead to brief guest appearances on Headline News’ sports sections (games canceled due to rain), economic news (possible effects on Southern crop futures) and human interest segments (the courageous schoolgirl who swam a raging flood to rescue a stranded possum family).
And as President Clinton flies over to survey the damage, the final act closes with insurance representatives singing a spirited rendition of their theme song — “What? (You Think We’re Made O’ Money?)”
The audience applauds as it revels in the lessons of blockbuster hurricane coverage: All’s well that ends well, It could have been worse, and natural disasters make great ratings. The curtain falls, credits roll and cleanup crews emerge to assess the damage.
But what do we do for an encore? There’s a sequel forming in the basin and we’ll have the latest satellite pictures at 10…