Floods stink

And I don't mean that flippantly. My one brief experience with massive flooding, way back in my previous life when Hurricane Floyd hit, is that a flood of any size leaves behind nothing but homes and businesses that need to be demolished and mold growing everywhere and that stench -- dirty and dark and fetid and impossible to forget. Add in the heat and the hunger and the decaying bodies and the ants and the snakes and the desperation, and I cannot imagine what life is like in the Gulf Coast right now. None of us can, I suspect. I can, however, pass along a snippet of an email a colleague received recently from a fellow reporter working down there.

"If hell exists, it is here in New Orleans. After being evacuated from several places and braving the wilderness, I've found some electric and believe it or not a computer.

I've never experienced anything like this in my life. I doubt the state or the nation has either. You should see the faces of the refugees. Many have nothing but a bag, or the clothes on their backs or a baby on their hips. Mostly everybody has lost everything. The superdome looked like something from the third world. People are hungry. And desperate. The 9th ward is gone. The 8th and 7th gone. Eastern New Orleans and even Lakeview all under.

There are children here who haven't eaten in days. I would say 97 percent of the people are black, many poor and most will have no place to call home. Most of the workers here, the police, the emergency workers us reporters, none of us know if home still exist. I lost my car. Not sure about my apartment. And those things seem like simple sacrifices in the face of what this community, the entire city is going through. Family, television can not paint the picture we're seeing here on the ground.

Most of us in the field have nothing either. I've slept in places with no air conditioning, no electric and no running water for days. My newspaper relocated while I was at camping out at city hall. I left the paper monday night, to switch with another reporter with a ham sandwich and a bag of toiletries. Phones around the city were down. All of the circuits busy. I found out later that they evacuated. Several feet of water surrounded our building. Our cars were swallowed. They rolled. I didn't find out until late the next day when no truck showed up and the water was rising. We are grinding. We have no homebase and we are working extremely hard to get information out there. And we are actually doing it. We have traveled almost an hour away at times to find a landline or a place with a phone or enough light to dictate stories over the phone.

Its real out here. And our small losses, us lucky ones who have so far lived to relay the tragic stories emerging from this city, pale (understatement) to the thousands of people who died. Many stayed in their homes. The babies. The infirmed. The elderly. People are dying because they don't have enough medicine. People are dehydrated. People are turning increasingly violent in the face of such disasterous circumstances.

Pardon me now while I leap up on my soapbox: Journalists get a lot of shit these days for being lazy and corrupt and self-absorbed. On any given day, a lot of the criticisms thrown the main-stream media's way are fair and almost accurate. But there are also an awful lot of hard-working, honest reporters and editors and photographers and videographers and radio newshounds out there whose goal in life isn't to be famous or risk their lives trying. All they want to do is report the news, maybe do some public good, maybe even get all writerly once in a while. In Biloxi today, 30 percent of the newspaper staff haven't been found yet. In New Orleans -- or rather, in what was New Orleans -- they're trying to find a reporter who was supposed to be covering the hurricane from the Mississippi coast. He was staying with his mother.

I guess this is my way of saying I can understand the urge to do in-the-moment media criticism, especially when cutlines refer to whites "finding" food and blacks "looting" it. But I don't really think this is the time, just as I don't really think it's the time to criticize the feds, much as I would enjoy raging about Condi's up-close tickets to "Spamalot" the other night.

Let's count our dead first, OK? Then we can honor them by making the world a better place.

Here endeth the sermon.