Hurricanes: It's Personal
No reporter wants to cry over a story, much less, cry publicly. But I’ve done it, recently. Three hurricanes in less than a month have given me more than enough opportunity. I felt myself getting emotional when the top executive for Crowley shipping in Puerto Rico began crying in his interview with me, so incredibly frustrated over the logjam of life-saving supplies stuck at his terminal in the Port of San Juan, with no drivers, no diesel, a shortage of passable roads to move essential goods to the suffering families who needed them most. I felt incredible anxiety riding along with my photographer, Victor Calderin, as we drove across the length of the island and finally began to look for his sister. He didn’t know whether she was alive. No one in the family had heard from her. Hurricane Maria had devastated the landscape. Lush mountainsides were now barren and brown. Street signs no longer stood. We stopped four times for Victor to ask directions to his childhood home. Finally, he exclaimed, “There it is! I see it.” We’ll pulled the Jeep into the driveway, outside a locked gate, and Victor yelled for his sister. We waited. A few seconds of silence seemed to last agonizing minutes. And finally we heard her, “I’m coming.” I cried as she unlocked the gate and embraced her brother. But we left her and Puerto Rico with no power, little running water and disaster, though not insurmountable, a far cry from the situation in Houston or Irma. When I arrived in Houston- I was astonished at the flooding. It took my team hours to find a way past flooded highways into downtown. And my first day reporting was filled with stories that were hard to comprehend. Two minutes away from my live shot for CNBC, I waited, watching a stream of people crowd through the doors at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston. Three days after Hurricane Harvey made landfall, the resident population at the mega-shelter downtown was skyrocketing. Lines of volunteers made the chaos at the door seem even more overwhelming. My eye was drawn to two children, boys with bright-red curly hair, about seven years old. Twins. As the mom of twin boys myself, I always watch with curiosity the way other twins interact with each other. These children were accompanied by a woman, presumably their mother, carrying a big bag of clothing. I watched as one of the twins gazed around this noisy, crowded place and his face just crumpled and he began crying. So did I. My photographer watched and said, “Keep it together. Take a deep breath.” So I did. I kept the tears from spilling but felt only a tenuous grasp on my composure. Carl Quintanilla introduced me from the studio and I said only one sentence before my voice broke. I stepped to the side of the camera - directed my photographer to show the scene at the door and tried to explain what I’d seen, why I was reacting so emotionally. But I had to take long pauses, because my voice was quaking and the tears were close to spilling. I made it through the live shot but felt deep chagrin at succumbing to my feelings. My theory is that reporters are there to document reality- to capture stories at a certain moment in time and allow viewers to feel whatever the story sparks in them. But as standard practice, we ignore what the story sparks in us, in part, because our feelings are not the story. In part we ignore our inner turmoil because we have a job to do- more live shots, more interviews, more broll. And even at the end of the day, typically, there’s an early call the next day and fresh assignments. And yet - sometimes the story is so big, even veteran journalists become emotional. That morning, before the incident with the twins and the near-crying on tv, I met a family who had come into the convention center in the wee hours of the morning. They’d been rescued from their home in the outer suburbs of Houston, ridden several hours in the back of a box truck and were soaked to the bone, including the little children. That morning before I came so close to breaking down, I interviewed an 18-year-old woman with four children, all younger than three. She recounted her harrowing tale of water rising… escaping to the attic, being rescued by helicopter. But there was only enough room for her, her one-year-old-son, a seven-month old nephew, two-year-old nephew with a heart condition and a three-year-old niece. So this teenager wrapped her arms around all four children and rode in a swinging helicopter basket to safety and a crowded convention center. She left behind all the other adults in her family, in an attic, with a power saw. As three children slept, I took the baby in my arms and the young woman borrowed a cell phone from other evacuees, hoping to make contact with loved ones. That morning, before I felt myself at the breaking point, I met a man wandering outside the convention center. He told me he was looking for his sister-in-law and her four children. He would take them from the convention center back to his home, to safety. Half an hour later, I noticed little twin toddlers- and their mother who was trying to wrangle two slightly older children too. She was wearing an expression I know all too well. Frustration on the edge of a despair, the sheerest veneer of control. “Can I help you?” I asked. “I’m the mom of twins too.” “Yes, please.” She answered, “My ride’s here but trying to get them outside is like herding cats.” I took the twins each by a hand and she followed with a bag of clothes and the two other children, while a shelter volunteer reprimanded me for leaving the media pen. I ignored the reprimand and walked outside the convention center. Her “ride” was the same man I’d been talking to before. Perhaps it’s not surprising that my own feelings had surfaced. My own heart is first-and-foremost a mother’s heart. I want to solve problems, mend boo-boos and generally fix things. In daily life - I’m a fighter, not a flee-er and frequently intervene in other people’s problems on the streets of New York City. And yet - this was more. Ten thousand people packed into one shelter - each one of them with a story to tell… some with near death experiences, many of them, now homeless. That day ended with a ride-along in antique military vehicles through flooded neighborhoods where I saw homes that looked as though they should’ve been condemned as uninhabitable decades ago. For people who live in that kind of poverty, a flood of this magnitude is a life-altering event. Actually, even for people with means and resources, a flood is a life-altering event. Late that night, when I finally made it back to the safety and comfort of my downtown hotel, I FaceTimed my husband and began telling him about my day. I began sobbing. And so did my husband. And something clicked. I lost my own home in Hurricane Sandy in 2012, which wasn’t even an hurricane when it made landfall. I was anchoring on NBC New York as the storm surge washed through my neighborhood and filled my apartment with five feet of water. While I was on the air for hours-long shifts that week, my husband trekked to Lower Manhattan and didn’t return for 18 hours. When he rejoined me at the midtown hotel serving as our own shelter from the storm, he put his face in his hands and cried. “Everything is gone, Contessa. Everything.” I said what so many people say after natural disasters, “It’s just stuff. We can replace it.” “No…” my husband countered, “All the stuff in those bins… letters from your great-grandfather and your childhood dolls. All your photo albums. They all got ruined.” Five days after the storm hit, I was finally able to visit my apartment. My furniture was piled in a trash heap on the street outside. Inside, the water was gone, but the muck remained. It was overwhelming and discouraging. I did a story on my neighborhood - and included my own loss. As I recorded a standup about what the flooding- the irreplaceable momentos now in a trash heap- I began to say “It’s just stuff…” But I choked up and fought back tears. Because losing your stuff, stuff you think is important, losing your home which represents safety and privacy and the intimacy of family hurts. It’s traumatic and emotional and scary, even if you have resources, a support network and a safety net to help you recover. It took us 16 months to return to our apartment - another year before it stopped being a construction zone. We fought with the insurance company, got pregnant and delivered twins and redesigned our apartment to accommodate babies. Apparently- we’re not over the trauma. I was back from Houston for less than a week before I left for Florida for coverage of Hurricane Irma. My mom and three uncles all live in Florida. Uncle Bob operates a wildlife refuge at the edge of the Everglades. It was decimated in Hurricane Andrew and, watching the track of Irma, I worried about the animals, but especially about my uncle and his very ill wife. At the height of the storm, in a hot, humid hotel with no electricity - I got texts through to check on them. Safe - but with significant property damage. I saw it first hand when I stopped to check in on them on my way to the Florida Keys. Rising rivers forced flooded my Uncle Joe’s neighborhood days after the storm passed- and he refused to evacuate and leave an elderly neighbor and the neighbor’s cats alone. Driving through the Florida Keys was haunting… so much devastation in a place where so many people have made happy memories. Restaurants, hotels, marinas, RV parks, private homes, boats, businesses - wiped out. Cell phones, electricity, sanitation, running water, the basics we all take for granted had taken a big hit on the island chain. Monroe County Sheriff’s deputies manned checkpoints to keep evacuees away from their homes, where the infrastructure couldn’t yet support an onslaught of returning residents. When I talked to them, I mentioned my cousin, Misty, only six months older than me. She was a Monroe County deputy when she was killed in a car crash on Highway 1, on the job, in 2010. The deputy at the checkpoint, reached out to pat my shoulder and tell me, his sergeant knew my cousin well and had taken her death particularly hard. He told me where to look for her highway memorial, to come back to the checkpoint tomorrow and maybe I could get through to Key West to do my job. Just outside Key West- on Stock Island, we stood before a home that had been peeled apart my Irma’s winds. The roof and exterior walls were gone, exposing the kitchen, like a television or movie set. As my photographer tried to get enough cellular bandwidth to set up a liveshot - a man approached me with an aggressive posture and his teal shirt unbuttoned to his beer belly. “Who do you work for?” He demanded. My cap was emblazoned with my employer’s name. “You should not be here. You should not be shooting this. You people are going to make it look like -this- is all of Key West. This is NOT the story!” He was invading my personal space. And I explained that I had seen the roads cleared in Key West… the people sitting on Duval Street enjoying a beer. But this family no longer had a home. “It’s one individual example!” “No sir. It’s up and down throughout the Florida Keys and all over south Florida. There are thousands of families with hurricane damage.” He pulled out his cell phone to begin recording me, and I turned to walk back to my news truck. Just then a woman approached and told me in Spanish, the destroyed home I was standing near was hers… that she’d lost everything, including clothes and shoes. She asked, did I know how to contact FEMA. “Oh great!” Yelled the aggressive man. “Now you really have your story.” No sympathy. No expression of human kindness. Just concern that I might disseminate what he considered fake news. He continued recording me as I flagged down police officers and asked them to help the devastated woman standing with me. “Fake news” has become a commonplace accusation. In that darkened hotel lobby during Hurricane Irma, I overheard two men discussing the news coverage of the storm. “I saw it on CNN,” one insisted. “Well, CNN. That’s fake news” the other countered, with no obvious sign of humor or sarcasm. A Gallup poll conducted last December, after the presidential election, asked respondents “Rate the honesty and ethical standards of people in these different fields”— and then listed the usual nurses, doctors, insurance salespeople, lawyers, car salesmen. 41% of respondents ranked journalists’ honesty and ethical standards as low or very low. Bankers and lawyers scored better. Members of Congress, as a profession, scored worse. And yet- those who ranked journalists’ ethics as very high or high has remained fairly steady over the past decades. Perhaps it’s because some Americans truly believe that we cannot have a functioning democracy without a free press. Perhaps it’s because some Americans have a deep love of current events, of the stories reporters bring them from around the globe and around the corner. Perhaps it’s because some Americans know personally a reporter, know the heartbreak and the drama that reporters encounter on the job. Those experiences enrich journalists, bringing a complexity to our coverage that we rarely explain to our viewers, listeners or readers. Interviewing parents who have lost a child has always been gut-wrenching to me. But now, I too have lost a child, a son who was born too early. That colors my view of bereavement and loss. Being unemployed myself has influenced the way I see the struggle for jobs, adding to my understanding, for instance, why laid-off workers in coal country wouldn’t go through job retraining and switch careers. And, yes, losing my home has affected the way I perceive natural disasters that wipe away entire landscapes. Years ago, when I first began at MSNBC, our nation was engaged in the Iraq war and patriotism was running high. Everyday on our programs we would profile a service member and talk about where that person was stationed. One day, our rundown included the story of a member of the armed forces who was killed in battle. The script included a letter the man had written to his unborn child. In preparing for my newscast, I’d read the script and the letter several times, welling up with tears each time. I thought I was fine. And yet, when it came time to present the story, I choked up again, my voice breaking. I struggled through long pauses before finishing. After the show, I got a call that our editor-in-chief wanted to see me in his office. I was terrified of the scolding I would get for allowing my emotions to cloud the objective presentation of the story. Jerry Nachman, who the New York Times described an old-style newshound in its obituary of the legendary news editor, sat me down and said, I know you probably feel bad about choking up on the air. Don’t. Today you showed our audience a journalist with heart. You’re young. You’re going to cover a lot of stories. Don’t ever lose your heart.
