September 2005

[Commentary] By their disposition, hurricanes are a television story: great pictures, an informational crawl at the bottom, and a wind-swept, rain-soaked anchor. But big papers like The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times all dug in, sending dispatches out of New Orleans that shed light where there had been only heat. What exactly happened at the convention center? Is Mayor Ray Nagin a saint or a kook? Were the levees overtopped or undermined? Will New Orleans be a real city again, or just Disneyland with Jell-O shots?

Eight days after Hurricane Katrina decimated the Gulf Coast, CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" included in its coverage of the storm's aftermath a report on toxic water and another piece on global warming. The story on the toxic soup created by the New Orleans floodwaters raised issues about the environmental impact of the cleanup as the dirty water is drained into Lake Pontchartrain. The global warming story explained the complicated cycles of increased and decreased hurricane activity and their relationship with rising temperatures in the oceans.

Telephone and cellphone outages persisted in parts of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi on Sunday as crews repaired damage caused by Hurricane Rita. Joe Chandler, spokesman for BellSouth, said about 560,000 customers were without service, mainly in northern Louisiana and northern Mississippi. He said crews were at work in areas that weren't severely flooded. San Antonio-based SBC Communications said its core network in Texas “is fully functional, with the exception of a small central office in Sabine Pass,” near hard-hit Port Arthur.