ABOUT THIS SERIES

In December 2005, a contingent of Poynter faculty and staff members, along with representatives from the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, traveled to the Gulf Coast to work with journalists who were dealing with the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. In anticipation of the three-day concurrent seminars in Biloxi, Miss., and New Orleans, Poynter faculty members asked each participant to write a short essay about his or her experience in the days that followed the storm. Those essays, published here for the first time, with the permission of the journalists who wrote them, will continue to appear on Poynter.org throughout our weeklong remembrance of the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Some of the participants agreed to go one step further and provide us with an update of their experiences, which you will find after some of the essays. Click here to see the compilation of essays, which we will add to throughout the week.

DECEMBER 2005:

I was covering Hurricane Katrina northwest of New Orleans as the storm made landfall.

In the mid-morning I called my editors at the newspaper and was told to head to New Orleans. When the reporter and I got to the area, we were blocked by floodwaters that had closed I-10.

While trying to find a way into the city, we ran into a caravan of Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries agents that were sent to rescue residents trapped by the flood. I made a few calls and got the OK to go with them.

The reporter and I thought, as did the agents, that rescues would start after they were escorted into one of the worst-hit areas, the Lower Ninth Ward.

The escort never showed, so the agents started sending out groups to find a way into the area. This took most of the day.

We arrived at the St. Claude bridge in the Lower Ninth Ward as the sun set. I got on a boat with two Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries agents, a medic and a state senator heading out to St. Bernard Parish.

We passed hundreds of residents calling for help, hoping to be rescued in the dark. The agents had to tell each of them help was on the way. We were unable to stop because more people were trapped farther south.

In St. Bernard, we checked on a shelter and a hospital -- and again there were hundreds of residents trapped by the floodwaters. The first night was spent taking gas to the hospital for a generator, oxygen to the shelter for a sick person and sheriff's deputies back to the hospital for security. No rescues took place that night and early morning but the work that the team did saved lives.

We returned to the St. Claude Bridge at about 3:30 a.m. alone and slept in our car next to the agents. After about one-and-a-half hours of sleep, the team woke up and headed out to rescue people. I spent the day on several boats with several teams as they went from house to house, pulling people off roofs, others out of windows and one man who rode out the storm in a tree. We found him lying on the edge of part of a floating roof; his foot had been crushed by a house that floated into him.

In all, I witnessed and helped rescue more people then I could count.

In the first day and a half, I saw the system work and work well. Boats were in the water and people were saved. They were safely brought to the bridge and taken to the Superdome, where we thought they were going to be taken care of. As I covered the aftermath of the storm for the next two weeks I witnessed many things that did not go right, but that first day and a half went as well as it could have gone.