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Q:
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What was the genesis of this piece?
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During the week following Hurricane Katrina, I heard phone interviews on CNN of doctors and nurses who were trapped at Charity Hospital. They said they had no emergency backup power, and they were having to hand-bag people on ventilators to keep them alive. They could offer only first aid health care to people who were critically ill. I'm married to a doctor, and I had never heard of a hospital in this country losing its emergency power. It crystallized for me how desperate people were in New Orleans. Then my editor showed me a story in The Wall Street Journal about the dramatic helicopter rescue of Tulane Hospital patients and staff by the Hospital Corporation of America. Once I learned these hospitals—one public, one private—were catty-cornered across the street from one another, I began to pursue the story.
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Please describe your reporting process. How much is reconstruction and how much were you present for? What sort of research did you do?
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I interviewed more than 50 people, some a number of times, by phone and in person. I went through both hospitals and spent time on the parking garage roof that was used as a helipad. I traveled to Nashville, Tenn., and interviewed HCA executives in the boardroom they had used as their command post. I also went to Columbus, Ohio; Houston, Tex.; Baton Rouge, Lake Charles and Robert, La., to interview people in the story. I collected media accounts, reviewed transcripts, read medical journals and reports from Congress and an engineering firm on the future viability of Charity.
All but the end of the story is reconstruction, based on the recollections of those who were there. I began most of the interviews several weeks after the storm while memories were still fresh. I was present for the reopening of Tulane, and went through the MASH unit set up by Charity and University hospitals to continue to provide emergency health care. To distinguish those discussions for which I was present and those for which I was not, we used quotes in the former, italics in the latter.
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What challenges did you encounter during the reporting process?
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The biggest was separating fact from fiction. Just as New Orleans was rife with rumors, so were the hospitals where people were cut off from the outside world. For me, the greatest challenge was understanding what really unfolded on the rooftop helipad. I couldn't understand how or why each hospital had such totally different perspectives of what had happened. Now I think I do.
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Please describe your process of structuring and writing the piece.
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I have one of the best editors in the country: Jan Winburn. Long before I wrote the first word, she helped me structure the piece, starting by having me write out a detailed chronology, what she refers to as the "horse blanket"—a term she borrowed from the military. In a series of meetings, we discussed characters and themes, then set aside a few days to outline the story chapter by chapter. That outline became my bible.
Initially, we came up with 23 chapters, then reduced them to 22. I assumed several would be collapsed into one day's story. When the editors decided one chapter would run a day and the series would run 22 days, I thought they were kidding. Once the outline was done, the writing began. We did it very methodically in a well-organized fashion. I wrote all 23 chapters, then we went back and one by one, Jan had me rewrite it, do additional reporting, whatever was needed.
Toward the end of the reporting, I learned of another mother whose son had been trapped at Charity. By then, I didn't feel I needed any more people for this story.
But my editor had the vision I lacked, and she suggested I get on a plane to Houston, then drive 2 hours back into Louisiana to meet the woman at her home in Lake Charles. It definitely paid off, and she and the other two mothers became central to the story.
I have always been leery of reconstructed dialogue, unless it's clear that it is based on someone's memory of what the person said or thought. As I mentioned, we used italics to signify anything recollected—whether thoughts or dialogue—and quotes for those statements for which I was present or which were contained in documents or media reports or transcripts. One other point: Everything in italics was precisely as the person recounted. We did not tamper at all with their words.
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What sort of reaction did you get to the story? Emails? Phone calls? Response from other media?
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We have gotten a great reaction. In general, the main theme has been readers have said they can't wait until the next day's episode. I received a number of calls and emails from people asking me to please tell them what happened, so they didn't have to wait. Some people have been frustrated that it has run as a serial. They would prefer to read it all at once.
Most rewarding is the response that tells you readers "get" the story—that they not only see it as a drama detailing the best of human nature, but also as a story that exposes the public policy issues and points to lessons that can be learned from this experience. I have to confess, too, to just loving an email from one family in which they said the husband was reading the series in the paper, the wife was listening to it online, and their son—about to go off to college in the fall—is talking about journalism as a career for the first time!
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Please include any other comments you think would be interesting to fellow reporters, editors and students of narrative.
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This is the first project I've worked on that's been turned into a podcast. People can download it from our website—and at iTunes. That too has gotten positive reviews.
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