In Harvey’s Wake: What’s it like covering a Category 4 hurricane?
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Texas Tribune reporters Kiah Collier, Brandon Formby and Neena Satija talk about the chaos that comes with covering a major hurricane, the people they met amid the storm and how they’re thinking about future disaster coverage.
Hurricane Harvey will go down as one of the worst natural disasters in Texas history, and our journalists were on the ground covering the storm from the very beginning.
Tribune reporter Brandon Formby was in Aransas County, which took a direct hit from Harvey, and documented the devastation in Rockport and surrounding areas for Tribune readers. Reporters Kiah Collier and Neena Satija — whose groundbreaking reporting on Houston’s vulnerability to flooding and hurricane storm surge has been widely cited by other media — spent more than a week writing about the city as it flooded under the heaviest recorded rainfall in U.S. history.
And that was just the beginning of the Tribune’s coverage. Brandon is now embedded in Houston, focusing his reporting on that city’s recovery efforts. Neena and Kiah have continued to advance their earlier reporting on Houston’s lack of readiness — and how the city and state are responding now.
From the interviews that have stuck with them to the difficulty of transitioning back from a disaster zone, Brandon and Kiah offer Texas Tribune members an exclusive glimpse into what it was like covering a storm of this magnitude and its aftermath.
Q: Is there one person whose story has stuck with you during your reporting?
Brandon: Pretty much every person I’ve talked to has a story that sticks with me.
Harvey impacted so many people in so many different ways. Two men lost their entire house and all of their belongings and are now staying with friends while they figure out what to do next.
Another family that lives paycheck to paycheck lost their cars and their apartment, forcing them to find a new place to live with no transportation and no income.
One man whose house flooded is resentful toward government officials he blames for not better preparing for catastrophic rain events and plans to sell his longtime home, even if its value is greatly diminished after this.
The storm upended so many lives in ways that will reverberate for years. It’s hard for their stories not to stick.
Kiah: A few people, actually.
Eddie Rogers and his 6-year-old daughter, Karla. They had just landed a unit in a public housing complex after a stint in a homeless shelter. The complex flooded badly during Harvey and a lot of the units, including theirs, were deemed uninhabitable. The day we met them they were hanging out on the sidewalk, waiting for a FEMA inspector who told them they’d have to wait to see if they qualified for assistance. They were staying at the emergency shelter at the convention center at that point and had walked a mile to get home. They had lost their car, too.
Then there was Joanne. I forget her last name. She was a spunky elderly woman we met at a temporary shelter at Westside High School, near Barker Reservoir. She had hesitantly decided to evacuate, but when she got there she was told she would be put on a bus to Dallas. She was really pissed off about that, said she was too old to relocate. She was waiting for a friend to pick her up and take her back home and said she was prepared to ride the storm out on the top of her car. We tried to call her later to see how she was and she didn’t answer.
Q: What did you see during the hurricane that you wish you could have included in a story but didn’t?
Kiah: I guess just more of the chaos and heartbreak. A day or two into the storm, evacuees started arriving at the convention center in city dump trucks — poor, wealthy, all different races and ethnicities. A lot of them were barefoot and carrying babies and dogs. We were there at night and it was still pouring down rain. That’s the moment it hit me how big of a deal the storm was. We also gave rides to several evacuees who had very different life stories.
Q: What surprised you the most before or after the storm?
Brandon: What was most surprising is how people in coastal and southeast Texas compare hurricanes, storms and flood events like North Texans compare particularly hot summers.
“I didn’t leave for Carla, but I’m leaving for Harvey.”
“This was worse than Allison.”
“This is the third time in three years I’ve flooded.”
“I didn’t flood the last two times, so I thought I was going to be OK.”
Kiah: This might be more of a during-the-storm kind of thing, but I was struck by the juxtaposition of the best of humanity — strangers helping each other without being asked — with the worst of humanity — people cutting you off at the gas pump, blatantly running red lights, looting. It felt like martial law sometimes.
Q: What was the most difficult part of doing your job immediately after the storm?
Brandon: Covering preparations for and the immediate aftermath of Harvey didn’t really present any problems. We knew what kind of logistical hurdles to expect and were prepared for them. The hardest part, for me, was going back to Austin and Dallas. The culture shock of going from a devastated swath of Texas that was completely knocked offline back to cities that weren’t impacted hit me like a ton of bricks. Re-acclimating to society was by far the most difficult part.
Kiah: Figuring out what stories to do to best serve our readers and build upon our previous reporting about Houston’s extreme and growing vulnerability to flooding. Also re-acclimating to society.
Q: Who or what do you wish you could revisit a month from now?
Kiah: The reasons why this storm was so bad and what local officials are doing to protect residents from the next big one, which is sure to come. Also, the people I mentioned up above. What happened to them?
Q: If you cover another hurricane or flood, what would you do differently?
Brandon: I would better prepare psychologically for leaving the area and heading back to an unaffected city.
Kiah: Ensure that the hotel has back-up power.
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