Reporting on Laura taught me a new fear
Hurricane Ike hit Houston on Sept. 13, 2008, days before my 18th birthday. We lost power. It knocked a tree in my neighborhood into a house.
Unable to bake a cake, my friends improvised. My twin brother and I blew out birthday candles stuck in a pile of Twinkies.
Growing up in Houston taught me to live with a certain risk of storms. I rolled up rugs at age 10 before Tropical Storm Allison. Students from New Orleans enrolled in my school after Hurricane Katrina. My family sat on the highway with everyone else trying to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Rita. We always had a hurricane kit: For years, our hallway closet was full of MREs. We had flashlights ready, bottled water.
I felt accustomed to living with this risk — until I became a reporter.
Hurricane Harvey was the first time I saw the devastation beyond my neighborhood, when I grasped how much harm the weather can do.
I won’t forget the shocked faces of those being rescued, the moldy smell of water-logged homes. But the flooding — though extensive — was familiar.
Hurricane Laura taught me a new kind of fear.
The morning after Laura made landfall, a photographer and I drove east toward Lake Charles from Texas. When I saw an overturned semi-truck on Interstate 10, my chest tightened.
Nothing felt controlled. We drove through a puff of yellowgray smoke — which we later learned came from a fire at a chlorine plant called BioLab — and arrived to find Lake Charles as if a giant tornado ripped through it.
Every building appeared damaged. Power lines lay in the street, and we joined those driving over them, dazed, hoping the lines were dead. There was practically no cell service.
The day before, we had worried over where this strengthening storm would hit — and what the ramifications for Texas might be. We moved from a hotel in Winnie to sleep in the domed East Chambers High School cafeteria, built to withstand hurricane winds.
Of course, there was a second threat, too: We spaced out our army-green cots yards away from the first responders staying there to try to protect against any spread of the coronavirus. But I slept without a mask. The pressure of an N-95 against my face felt like it would make sleep impossible.
I put in earplugs I didn’t need; it was a night of eerie quiet.
Laura, of course, instead turned east, hit south of Lake Charles, and the story for Houston became one of disaster averted. Fewer readers turned to our coverage.
That looking away was familiar; Ike, of course, was an inconvenience on my street but a catastrophe elsewhere in this region. My family cooked the food in our freezer and carried on.
Before Laura, I struggled to rationalize why journalists drove to the places that people fled. It seemed unsafe, creating more trouble than good.
But driving amid the devastation forced me to witness what I hadn’t before: a family tarping their roof, a mother considering where her family would live, and a man wrestling with the likelihood his home was gone.
Exhausted, I processed these scenes alongside them. I recognized how easily this could have been us. Us with holes in our rooftops. Us with beach homes swept away. Us with chemical plants not working as they should.
It could have been us looking for bodies, us sorting through belongings, us sleeping in the heat.
The stories we published, I hope, illuminated some of this anguish Houston missed. But as we resume our lives here — as I plan to celebrate turning 30 with a real cake — I hope we don’t allow ourselves to forget what they face or stop considering what may be coming for us.
For now, we have the benefit of time to learn and report on what Houston’s Laura might look like and how this region can prevent the worst-case scenarios.
I know why we look away. How else can we live with the uncertainty of life on the Gulf Coast? And yet, we need to witness what Laura wrought. As much for the sake of the survivors as for ourselves and our future.