advertisement

The day after

Back in New York after two nights in New Orleans. The lasting image of the trip for our traveling team might just be the very LAST image of the trip: the drive, last night, to the airport from our anchor location in the Lower Ninth Ward. We drove for blocks... miles, to be more accurate... through total darkness. Across the Industrial Canal and beyond it to the other side of the Mississippi, we could see the lights of the city. But navigating the Lower Ninth means cautious driving. There are no street signs. Some streets are blocked by 3-bedroom homes that have landed in intersections. Another street was blocked by a river barge the size of an office building. Debris hangs from the dead foliage in a ghostly way. Using the flashlight from my briefcase, we illuminated some of our surroundings while we drove. The spray-painted markings remain on the fronts of all structures... the search results, written in the code used by rescuers... including several indicating that fatalities had been found inside.  There are an increasing number of signs saying "DO NOT BULLDOZE" -- obviously the result of the fears, justified and imagined, of absentee homeowners who want to be the ones to decide whether or not to save their structures. For miles on end... no lights, no people, no animals, no life. The first light source we came upon was an open fire in an oil barrel, the only source of heat on a cold night for two U.S. Army Airborne soldiers in charge of the checkpoint used to enter and exit the Lower Ninth. They seemed happy to be able to wave and interact with someone. I must admit that two of us who made the trip are today feeling it in our respiratory systems. We were not as diligent as we should have been inside the Superdome and in the streets of the Lower Ninth. In both cases, the sludge has turned to dust and is now becoming airborne. The sludge contained human waste and chemicals. Full disclosure: producer Jean Harper brought along face masks, just as we were instructed to... but I guess we didn't fear air that we couldn't see. 

If the lineup we just approved at our afternoon editorial meeting holds up, we will begin tonight right back in New Orleans. Today was the first day back for residents of the Lower Ninth, three months and three days after Katrina. The story there seems to be that they have returned in greater numbers than anticipated. We'll examine what the turnout may mean when we turn to Martin Savidge's reporting tonight.

Andrea Mitchell will look at the "information offensive" in Iraq, specifically, the allegations concerning the placement of sympathetic (to the U.S. military cause) journalism in Baghdad newspapers.  We have an interesting piece tonight on information theft as well -- the pros who are HIRED by companies to intentionally break into their computer systems and see how easy it is to rob them blind.

This is a first as I write this: I am being "observed" in this process (in my office) by Howie Kurtz of the Washington Post. Howie's visits are how I know I have a major life event approaching. The last time he was in my office it was the eve of taking over the broadcast from Tom. Today's visit concerns tomorrow's one-year anniversary of that event, and for a time earlier, Tom was here with Howie and our newly-minted News Division President (our former Nightly News executive Producer) Steve Capus.

We'll conclude the broadcast tonight with something we found happening in the French Quarter in New Orleans during our visit. We hope you can join us.

Read more from Brian Williams 2005

They can't go home again

EMAIL THIS