a world removed

Since arriving in Auckland, I've meant to update this blog, but every time I get online I spend all my time looking at the news reports from the hurricane. I have a love for New Orleans, a more familiar relation with its streets, bars and sights than any other city. I held a fondness for New Orleans even before I got there, and spent just enough time there - one three-month stint, and countless weekends and three- and four-day trips - to have a passing knowledge of a few neighborhoods and a bare understanding of what it might be to be a local.
The past four years, I had been a local of Hattiesburg, Miss., a town that probably hasn't made the national (certainly the international) news in the fashion of New Orleans, Biloxi or the Gulf towns. It doesn't even deserve to mentioned, from what I understand. But in a normal situation, what Hattiesburg is going through would be bad enough. I got a call through to some former co-workers today, the first day they had phone service after the storm. About 20 of them have been sleeping in the newsroom, because there is no power in the rest of the town. There hadn't been running water until today, and it's still under a boil order.
The cell phone towers are knocked out, and travel is near impossible. Trees block most of the roads, and the gas stations don't have power, so no gas. A friend told me some stations came online today, but they limited people to $20 of gas, and ran out in about 20 minutes.
And that's 60 miles inland. The scene is obviously much worse in places that had to contend with the storm surge, and the flooding in New Orleans is near incomprehensible.
An aspect that hasn't been covered, and even I hadn't thought of until I talked to people in Hattiesburg, is that the past few days temperatures have hovered "around 100 degrees," they said. I haven't looked up exact temps, but even if they're 90 or so, with no power, air conditioning or water, that becomes unbearable even in the best of times.
As my former editor said, regarding the looting that appears to be widespread in the affected cities: with the heat and the destruction, "People have just snapped."

Kirsten asked me the other day if I wished I was there covering it. My first response was no. I realize, however, that a big part of me does wish I was there covering it. Despite the craziness of the situation. Despite the fact it means I'd have been sleeping on our newsroom floor the past four days or so, without a shower or decent food.
At least when you're covering a situation like this, you have access to the raw information. You know as much as anyone. You get to see what's going on, talk to people, hear scraps of information long before there's enough real knowledge to put the scraps in the paper.
And when you cover an event like this, it gives you some ability to put yourself outside the disaster. This one is likely much harder in that regard, because everyone covering it was also affected - a friend of mine at the paper currently has a tree in his living room. But going out and trying to find out information, going out and talking to people, means you're not just sitting around worrying, realizing, as someone I talked to put it, "I don't have any idea when we might return to normalcy."

I'm glad I'm in New Zealand. But being here, I do kind of wish I'd gone through Katrina. Gone through it to see just how I'd respond, as a journalist and as someone caught in a disaster few people ever actually experience.