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:  "Wake up. The levees have broken!"

These were the first words I heard as I was awakened on the floor of the Times-Picayune library Tuesday morning following Katrina. Everybody knew what this meant. The worst-case hurricane scenario was upon us. The city was filling like a bowl and there was no time to waste.

As publisher Ashton Phelps ordered the staff to evacuate our offices in the Picayune's circulation trucks, I noticed an abandoned flatboat on the building's back steps. I ran to it, hoping for a motor or at least a paddle. Instead, I found a broken broom.

"God has sent me a boat," I thought and with two cameras, my cell phone, my laptop and a small bag of food and water I shoved off and paddled away over co-workers' flooded cars.

I suddenly realized the moral and ethical dilemma I was facing. Everyone stranded by the flood would want my small boat and would do anything to take it. Scenes of the Titanic and overloaded lifeboats pulling away from floundering survivors filled my head. Would I let people drown when I had the only boat in sight? I decided if I came across people high and dry, I would have to leave them there. But if they were in the water, I'd rescue them. Then, almost on queue my fear became reality. I saw a head bobbing in the waters. I paddled quickly and yelled, "Are you OK?"

"Ted!" came the reply.

I paddled quickly to find fellow photographer Alex Brandon swimming toward me with a Ziploc of photo cards clenched in his teeth.

Brandon and I quickly parted company. I rowed westward through decimated neighborhoods filled with desperate people screaming for help. There was nothing I could do. I paddled under a bridge where a man shouted to others, "If we work together, we can take it from him." They ran toward me and I eluded them. After four hours of hard rowing, I found dry land in Metairie. I walked for a couple of miles, not knowing where I was going or what I would do when I got there. I fell, half-dazed and exhausted in the median of Interstate 10.

About half an hour later helicopters began landing around me with crews unloading elderly and crippled evacuees onto stretchers. I stared at them for a while without ever reaching for the cameras lying beside me in the dirt. Then my second wind kicked in.

"There's probably a picture here," I thought, and before I knew it I was working again. I hitched a ride on a Blackhawk helicopter and shot aerials over the flooded city. I hopped a boat with rescue teams taking people off rooftops.

As days passed, anarchy took over, lawlessness escalated and everyone's nerves frayed. One evening I was mistaken for a looter. A retired cop intent on protecting his neighborhood leveled a shotgun to my head.

"On the ground!" he demanded. Fellow photographer David Grunfeld and I quickly tried to explain that we had broken into his neighbor's house with permission from the owner to use it as a place to sleep. We weren't winning his confidence or calming his antsy trigger finger until David made the connection.

"Are you Al? Meg told us we might meet you," he said. Within seconds, Al was offering us food and drink, but few apologies. Later his wife confided with me that local deputies were telling residents to shoot looters without questions and dump them in the canals. I thanked Al for asking questions first.

As chaos reigned, despair took charge. You could see it everywhere: on cops' faces, inside the Superdome, in the eyes of refugees, at the Convention Center, in the mirror. Fellow shooter Brett Duke and I were photographing mobs of people desperate for food and water. Dead bodies lay in the medians of grand boulevards. A woman pleaded to the world through our lenses as she dropped to her knees and shrieked, "Help us, please!" A short time later, fighting back tears, Brett put his arm around my shoulder pulled me close. "Can we pray?"

I've covered tragedies all over the world, but it's different when it's your own town. Cataclysmic annihilation is starting to feel normal. This story is ours to cover, but it's more than that. This is now our life.