Interviews of ProPublica Reporters on Katrina
Four years ago, Hurricane Katrina caused enormous damage to the city of New Orleans, most of it the consequences of a natural disaster and the chaotic governmental response. But some of the damage was also the result of quick and desperate decisions people made as they struggled in the wake of the storm. ProPublica has published two very different in-depth investigations that explore the often life-changing actions local residents took. We hope you’ll take the time to read those two reports to see what lessons we can learn from how a few people reacted.
In the last 24 hours, we’ve received quite a few requests for more information about Sheri Fink’s “The Deadly Choices at Memorial” investigation, which we co-published with the New York Times Magazine. Some of those questions were answered in recent interviews Fink did about the story. This morning she was on MSNBC’s Morning Joe (click on “Learning from Katrina’s mistakes, four years later” if it doesn’t load) and WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show. You can also listen to her interviews on NPR’s All Things Considered and KPCC’s Patt Morrison. Fink will be on KCRW’s To The Point with Warren Olney this coming Monday (8/31) to continue the conversation.
We also encourage you to take a look at some of the related multimedia features we did, such as this schematic of Memorial Medical Center that helps you see what the staff had to contend with.
Late last year, we published A.C. Thompson’s “Post-Katrina, White Vigilantes Shot African-Americans With Impunity” in partnership with The Nation magazine. Last night, CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 followed up on Thompson’s investigation in a report that can be seen here. And be sure to read the updates that Thompson wrote about some of the new evidence that has come to light about the shootings.
If you have questions that have not been answered, or if you have tips that you would like to share, please write to us at QandA@propublica.org.
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3 comments
Steve
Aug. 29, 2009, 9:47 p.m.
Your lede in this story is incorrect and propagates an incorrect impression about what flooded New Orleans.
While Katrina was a “natural disaster” in some parts of the Gulf Coast, including Biloxi and Gulfport, the flooding of New Orleans was caused by a massive and perhaps unprecedented engineering failure on the part of the US Army Corps of Engineers. The levees and floodwalls failed because of shoddy engineering and construction.
Several engineering studies, including one sponsored by the National Science Foundation
http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=107007
as well as several books, including one by New Orleans Times-Picayune Pulitzer Prize winning reporters John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein, _Path of Destruction_,
http://www.pathofdestructionbook.com/
affirm this as fact.
Basically your tax dollars and mine paid to flood New Orleans.
joe jones
Aug. 29, 2009, 9:59 p.m.
Sherrie;
Amazing job. Its evident you are a doctor and know what you are writing/talking about. You know your stuff. I was told long ago that this lady would get away with murder and that everyone would look the other way. I never imagined someone would be able to cut through all of that and get to the bottom of it all. Shame on those people who said these patients werent worth saving. Contrary to one doc’s statement….They were NOT already terminally ill. MANY would have survived> THose who had family members there know this. AMEN SHerrie. AND GOD BLESS you CRAIG NELSON for keeping up the vigil for you mom.
sanda
Sept. 2, 2009, 12:14 p.m.
I heard Ms. Fink on DemocracyNow yesterday. As a person with disabilities, I heard the interview quite differently than the brief outline by staff and the interview contends - viz. “what the hospital staff had to contend with”: what did the persons who were ill and/or
disabled have to “contend with”? Medical staff, under oath of “do no harm” were killing them. There was not mention in the interview about preparations for evacuation, if any and I was shocked by the “everyone thinks the dr. (a head and neck surgeon,I think it was said) is wonderful” and “nobody knows what happened” in
re the “lethal injections” (which I call killings).
As Crippen’s Blog in England suggested in a posting on the same day, people make the disabled and the ill,
“The Problem”. Nobody wondered, after stating that people who were living long term in the hospital were overlooked, “Why are people living long term inhospital?”. Many could be living at home with attendant and visiting nurse service.
Most dismaying for me (who lived in NOLA, 1965-67 doing civil rights legal office work, while beginning my art career, having gone to NOLA with spouse for his
community organizing job for the AntiPoverty Program):
It does not appear that Ms. Fink spoke with any disability rights, human rights advocates in doing the research. If so, she’s silent about it. Nobody is presenting the points of view of people with disabilities. Not Dead Yet is a well known group, tackling “assisted suicide” and related topics.
According to http://www.notdeadyet.org, the NYTimes has a rather poor record on coverage of disability, end of life, assisted suicide issues.
I take issue with calling it “euthanasia” and it wasn’t “triage” as Ms. Fink called it in the interview.
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