Though many know Helena Moreno now as part of the New Orleans City Council and candidate for the city’s next mayor, 20 years ago Moreno was a 27-year-old news anchor who had only been at the desk for a few months when Hurricane Katrina hit. She experienced the storm right along with the rest of the city while having to keep her composure within the tragedy. One of the reasons I wanted to learn about her experience was my vivid memory of her breaking into tears on camera during a live broadcast once people could get back into the city. Another anchor was with his mother at his childhood home, which had been destroyed. Seeing someone in that moment show the emotion we were all feeling connected, I believe, us all as a community. We truly were all experiencing this devastation together. Moreno reflects on her Katrina experience and how the city has done over the last two decades.
We had been through hurricanes before. You had reported on hurricanes before, but did something feel different about this one?
Well, I mean, that’s an understatement. Yes, obviously, I’d covered many hurricanes before, and I was even part of what was the Hearst Argyle kind of like hurricane team. So I would even be sent to hurricanes across the country to cover it for Hearst Argyle stations, and you do the live shots for everybody. So, I had a lot of experience in storms. I had actually just gotten promoted to the anchor desk a few months earlier, and then Hurricane Katrina hit. We were there as a storm came in and listening to Margaret Orr and seeing her incredible concern, we all had to, kind of, just try to keep cool. And then obviously, the storm came. Margaret, myself, Roop Raj, we were all in the ballroom area of the Hilton as the whole Hilton was feeling like it was imploding. The pool came crashing down. We were with all the firefighters and everything. And then, just like everybody else after the storm, we thought, ‘well, obviously this was bad,’ but we didn’t realize at that time how bad it was until I was back at the station and, and there were people from City Hall even coming to the station, like, “Hey, do you have ways to communicate?” We [said] we don’t have anything, we’re way off, we have no computer, towers down, we have nothing. And then all of a sudden, we started to hear about the water. Why is there water on Canal Street? Then I took a walk down to Poydras. And I thought, ‘Wait, why is there water? That doesn’t make sense.’ And then obviously, we all know the rest of the of the story.
There was a moment during a broadcast where one reporter was touring his childhood home with his mother, when it came back to you – in a very real and human moment – you broke down on camera. Can you explain a little into that?
We all dealt with so much trauma, it’s hard for me to, even still to this day, go back and talk about it, because I have such weird PTSD over this 20 years. I remember people calling me and telling me that a friend of mine committed suicide at that time because he thought that he had lost his house and lost his wife potentially. And I remember, of course, the amount of death that was happening. And there was just so much. And we, of course, we had lost the station as far as capability to broadcast out of it. So my news director said, “All right, Helena, Travers, Dan Thomas, I need you all to start heading to Orlando.” We’re thought how the hell do we even get to Orlando at this point, to head to Orlando, and you’re going to be broadcasting from Orlando back into Louisiana and Texas through this site that we had. We get to Orlando, and this just goes to show you like what you’re going through mentally impacts you physically. When I got there, I couldn’t move, my neck was locked up the amount of pain I had through my body. And so there was a medical director, a reporter there who looked at me and was said I was dealing with so much stress they had to put me on muscle relaxers, painkillers. But at the same time, they’re grabbing me to put me on the set right now, and I had no clothes. It was literally the clothes on my back. So one of the anchors there gave me one of her blazers, and they’re like, let’s put her on the set. I just thought, OK [but] I’m in so much pain, I just got out of the car. They put me on the set, and immediately I started talking through what I was seeing, what areas they want to know about, what areas of town, because these were Orlando anchors sending a signal back to Texas and Louisiana, wherever there that people could see them. I’ve got somebody else’s blazer on trying to explain what I’m seeing. Fast forward to we’re in Orlando trying to broadcast, and now it’s to the point where people are able to start coming back into the city and seeing what’s left of the city. Now, granted, I’ve now been stuck in Orlando. And Travers Mackel was the one who was actually sitting next to me at the time when his brother Fletcher – and I’m very good friends with these two guys, and was at the time very good friends with these two guys – brought his mother through their house in Lakeview, and they’re walking through and they’re family photographs are gone and just the amount of damage, and just to see her face, and just as much as I cared for their mom, cared for these two guys, I felt it was just everything that I had been holding in and had to be so strong and tough for all of a sudden it just came out as I was sitting there, and I just couldn’t. Obviously, I was able to compose myself and kept on going. But it was the only time in my time in in the public eye in the city of New Orleans, which is now 25 years of public service in the city of New Orleans, where I have publicly broken down that way. And the reason why, to me, it was, I guess, such a big thing, is because we as women were always judged a little bit differently, right? Men can very much show their emotion, and they say, ‘oh, they’re compassionate.’ For women, oftentimes it’s shown as weakness. And so I was always very conscious of that. But, this was just a point where it was just too much. Even us in the media, who were covering this and who were looking at this with media eyes, this was our city. These were our friends. This was our neighborhoods. We are human, and so that’s how that all kind of transpired and went down.
Looking back over the 20 years, has the city come far enough?
No, there’s still no doubt about it, [there is] a lot of work left to do. But what I look back on that, to me, was inspiring, is that when there came that point to try to get all, all of this money to come down for New Orleans in our region, for the type of levy protection that we needed at that time, when we were having all these congressional hearings, I was actually sent to Washington D.C. to cover all these hearings. During my time in Washington D.C., I was able to see, you know, a really inspirational at time. At that time leadership from United States Senator Mary Landrieu. Let me tell you, this woman was refusing to let Congress go home until the people of Louisiana, our region, got the money that they deserved. And you know, the level of tenacity that she had the fight within her to be able to deliver that was truly inspiring. She really led the effort. She, along with, the Mississippi delegation, really led this, this effort. And because of their effort, we were able to get the billions of dollars necessary so that we could really start moving forward toward the recovery process, and no doubt about it. I mean, this shows how, when you work urgently and in collaboration, that you really can get some major things done. That level of funding that came to our area is what built up our levy system to what it is now. And that levee system, built up the way that it is now, has been able to withstand storms that are to the caliber of Katrina, and we approved that during Hurricane Ida, which also got to be a Category Five. That levee system protected us, so it did its job. And so that, to me, I guess, is the one big thing that during Katrina that I said, wow, like that is inspiring. That is leadership. And I will never forget, you know, being with Mary Landrieu at that time, embedded in her office at that time, watching her work night and day, and refusing to go home for Christmas, letting anybody go home for the holidays, until the people of Louisiana got what they needed.
What impacted you the most during Katrina, and what’s kind of stayed with you these 20 years?
I mean, obviously what impacted me the most was just the overall loss. I mean, that is hard to get over, and especially because there was so much of it. I mean, during that time, it was like constantly, ‘Did you hear this person passed? Did you hear this person passed?’ Or ‘did you hear they can’t find this person?’ It was just constant. And so that, to me, is something that is you can never forget. But then, of course, the other pieces that you don’t forget are kind of like certain smells and things like that, you know, when we were back and trying to get the recovery going, like all the refrigerators and all of those things, and the amount of bugs and things like that. You think about just you have the memories of everybody parking on the neutral ground because none of the street cars were running. You just have those. Every once in a while, you get those memories pop back. But really the most impactful will always be kind of that just constant, just hit over and over and over again by that loss. And I mean even to pets. I lost my pets. There’s just so much. People tell me that there are these beautiful documentaries about Katrina that I just can’t get myself to watch. I felt like I already watched it in person, and it’s just too hard for me to try to watch it again. And I’m sure that these are amazing, beautiful documentaries, but it’s just, you know, hard. I go back, and I just appreciate all the different people who were part of the recovery. You know, we had so many local heroes who were not first responders, who were out there saving people, and some of them were members of the media. And so I just think about so many different things. They all keep coming back 20 years later. Sometimes it still feels like yesterday.
