Hurricane Katrina was five years ago this month, and like most of you, I was practically chained to my television set watching the disaster unfold in one tragic chapter after another. (One reason Kathy and I followed those events so closely and with such concern was because we had both been to New Orleans the previous summer, so these events were playing out in a city that we loved.) And since then, I have probably done five or six interviews on my Morning Show with various authors writing on the topic. So when a preview DVD showed up in the mail from the National Geographic Channel, touting a new documentary about the disaster, I was interested- but also wondered if there was anything new to say about the catastrophe or how compelling it would be to see all of those images from five years ago served up again. Nevertheless, I scheduled an interview with the documentary’s producer for this past Friday morning, and Thursday evening I dutifully loaded up the DVD and settled on the couch, but fully expecting my finger to be repeatedly pressing the Fast Forward button. (Sometimes all you can manage to do is some Heavy Skimming, especially if it’s a long book or lengthy documentary at hand and time is short.)
In fact, my finger never once pressed Fast Forward. Kathy and I were absolutely riveted by what we saw and heard- (and by the way, my wife is not exactly a die-hard documentary fan, so this is very high praise coming from her) and it’s because this documentary is in no way a tired, predictable regurgitation of footage you have already seen- nor a parade of experts weighing in on the disaster and arguing over blame- nor a progression of fancy graphics. This is essentially an array of amateur home videos, expertly edited and woven together, to give the viewer an absolutely harrowing sense of what it was like to experience Katrina first-hand. . . from the tense hours beforehand, to the savage fury of the storm itself, to the bewildering turn of the events when the water levels begin to rise when they should be receding, to the misery of survivors who felt all but abandoned in the aftermath. This program takes you through all that, but through the eyes and in the voices of those who actually lived through it…. and as they were living through these events at the time- not looking back five years later….. but through the video which they were shooting. And in that way, you will FEEL Katrina in a way you never have before. (Almost none of this footage has ever been seen before.)
There are so many things I love about this documentary, and one of them is that they do not rush things along – but instead take us through this chain of events in a way that almost feels like Real Time. I applaud the filmmakers for giving ample time to the hours before Katrina hit- giving us a glimpse into what motivated some people to choose to ride the storm out rather than evacuate. (There’s also a chilling shot of the bumper-to-bumper traffic leading out of the city, a brief reminder that Evacuation was a harrowing experience in and of itself.) One young man is filmed joking about how “Katrina” strikes him as an odd name for a ferocious storm. “Katrina” seems like a name for a storm that bounces in, flirts with you, and then unceremoniously dumps you. Shouldn’t a terrible storm have a more frightening name like “Boris”? He laughs- and so does the young man sitting next to him; they of course have no idea what is about to engulf their city. There’s also a poignant bit of footage shot by someone who lives in the St. Barnard Parish, right before he attempts to leave. His camera slowly pans 360 degrees, taking in all of the block on which he lives, as he narrates in a voice that is calm yet betrays the fear he feels, including the very real fear that all of this will soon be gone. And his words of course prove to be prophetic- St. Barnard Parish ends up being one of the most devastated neighborhoods of them all. And this young man, who hopes against hope of making it to Baton Rouge on half a tank of gas, ends up being stranded at the Super Dome. (We see some of his footage from there as well.) The build-up to the actual storm takes a little while, and part of me almost felt some impatience….I was ready to see torrential downpours and savage winds – but then I realized that it was important to the filmmakers that we as viewers experience some of the sense of foreboding and mounting dread which the citizens of that region felt. Again, this is about putting us in the shoes of those who lived through Katrina.
When the storm finally hits, we see it in a way that I’ve never seen before – and certainly didn’t see at the time. (Because there were almost no live pictures coming out of New Orleans during the storm.) These amateur videographers do an amazing job of showing us the unrelenting power of this storm- and we can hear in their voices how frightening it all is. It is especially fascinating to experience flooding from the inside-out rather than from the outside-looking-in, which is almost always how we see floods. The most remarkable footage from this program is taken by people within their own homes, utterly surrounded by the storm and eventually engulfed by it in some cases. The photo above is from footage taken by a woman who is looking out of her living room window at what should be her front yard. Instead, the house is entirely surrounded by flood waters with no sign of abating- and we hear call to her husband “It’s almost” (meaning that the waters are almost coming into the house) – “I’m just video-recording it for a few seconds” . . . you hear the anguish in her voice. . . “O God. . . O God, please let it stop!” Another heart-rending bit of footage is from inside a house where the entire ground floor is completely filled with flood waters, and we see their small dog trying in vain to scramble up on top of one of the bits of furniture floating in the living room.* There are also excerpts from two actual 9-1-1 phone calls of people desperate for rescue from their homes on the gulf coast- and the operator has to tell them that it is impossible for anyone to get to them and that they are entirely on their own. It’s hard to imagine the despair of those callers being given such news- or how hard it would be to be that emergency operator who had to deliver that crushing news.
And so it goes. To whatever extent one can be thrust into the midst of a hurricane, that’s what this program does. And it was only in the course of interviewing the producer of it that I came to realize what makes this documentary so remarkable: the combination of raw simplicity with careful, nuanced production. The raw material is all amateur home video, show by people who had no idea (or at best, no assurance) that their footage would ever be seen by the outside world (unlike the typical tornado chasers, who tend to be thrill- chasers with an eye towards getting themselves on the evening news.) These are people recording these events for the sake of their own families and friends- capturing these events very spontaneously- which gives this program a raw and poignant honesty. And we don’t hear them reflecting back on the events five years later- we are hearing them in the heat and heartache of the moment, as these events swirled around them. One could perhaps go on Youtube and see such snippets – hopping from file to file in search of what is most compelling. But that would yield a much lesser experience than this program does. What we get here is all of this raw, dramatic footage but edited and woven together to seamlessly recount the story – simple yet sophisticated, the best of both.
Incidentally, we see beyond the hurricane itself to the unexpected rise of flood waters- a turn of events which was wholly unanticipated and largely misunderstood until the levee breaches were detected. By then, of course, it was too late and the next chapter of this disaster unfolded with a quieter yet no less terrible force. Much of the footage captures the despair and bewilderment of survivors who have no idea where to go or what to do- while over and over again you see helicopters flying above their heads. The filmmaker told me that as they interviewed storm survivors, that was something which was mentioned again and again… all of the helicopters, which seemed to represent to those on the ground how out of touch the powers-that-be were with their misery. But this program is not about pontificating or assigning blame- that is for others to explore. This is about what ordinary people were thinking and feeling and experiencing in the wake of the worst natural disaster in American history.
Witness: Katrina airs Monday night on the National Geographic Channel, 8:00 central. Please watch it! You can also hear my interview with the producer via the Morning Show archive at wgtd.org. (It was part two of today’s program.) But above all, watch this documentary. I guarantee that you will go to sleep tonight with a newfound gratitude for your warm, dry bed and the roof over your head.
*Spoiler alert: The dog we see in the aforementioned footage, struggling to survive, did in fact survive. I appreciated that the closing credits of the documentary include updates on almost everyone whose footage we see in the course of the program.
Pictured above: A frame from one storm survivor’s footage- Her camera is pointed out of the living room window at what should be their yard. Instead, all you can see is flood waters which any moment will begin to enter the house.