Return to Transcripts main page

On the Story

CNN Reporters Discuss Stories Behind the Stories

Aired September 10, 2005 - 19:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CAROL LIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: ON THE STORY coming up in just a moment, but first the latest developments in mission critical. Today, National Guard troops went door to door in New Orleans searching for survivors as well as bodies of victims of hurricane Katrina. When a corpse is found, its location is recorded with a global positioning device and paint on the outside of the houses.
And they're beginning to clean up the destruction among the waterfront casinos in Mississippi. The dozen casinos and hotels along the coast are responsible for thousands of jobs. The rebuilding process is picking up steam. Mississippi's governor has appointed a commission to get elected officials, business leaders and developers talking to one another.

And while the Gulf coast tries to cope with the effects of Katrina, parts of the southeastern U.S. are under a new hurricane watch. CNN meteorologist Jacqui Jeras standing by at the CNN weather center. Jacqui.

JACQUI JERAS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: Hi Carol. Yeah, we're keeping our eye on Ophelia, a hurricane with 80 mile an hour winds. It's just sitting kind of stalled off the coast about 230 miles away from Charleston. We're expecting it to kind of sit here and spin for at least another 24 hours. Hurricane watches have been posted from the Savannah River extending on up towards Cape Outlook or Lookout rather. That means that hurricane conditions are possible with 36 hours.

We're expecting high pressure to build and then that's going to help drive the storm towards the coast. We don't think that's going to happen until sometime tomorrow late likely. It'll be another two days before it makes landfall, looks like Tuesday afternoon. There still is some uncertainty as to exactly where it's going. So keep in mind, the red shaded area, that's just a skinny red line. Carol.

LIN: All right. Good advice, thanks Jacqui. Those are the headlines. I'm Carol Lin. Now back to ON THE STORY.

JOE JOHNS, CNN ANCHOR, ON THE STORY: This is CNN and we're ON THE STORY. Live from the campus of the George Washington University in the heart of the nation's capital, our correspondents have the stories behind the stories they're covering.

Jeff Koinange is on the story of New Orleans and the state of emergency, the death toll, the mandatory evacuation and the rebuilding.

Karl Penhaul is on the story of Army paratroopers fresh from Iraq on a new relief mission in their own backyard.

White House correspondent Dana Bash is on the story of President Bush taking heat for the Federal response.

Medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen is on the story of dangerous water and the health risks to rescuers and residents.

Field producer Jim Spellman recounts his decision to remain in New Orleans amid the early chaos.

And I'm on the story of the changing Supreme Court as hearings to confirm a new chief justice begin next week.

Welcome. I'm Joe Johns. We'll also be talking to our faith and values correspondent Delia Gallagher. Joining me in Washington White House correspondent Dana Bash. Throughout the next hour, our correspondents will be taking questions from the studio audience drawn from visitors, college students and people across Washington. We begin with the aftermath of hurricane Katrina from the rescue, to the evacuation of the devastated areas. Jeff Koinange is reporting from the region. Let's go straight to his notebook.

JEFF KOINANGE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: ... went to Houston, rented some SUVs, drove them 350 miles into New Orleans. The first couple of days we were actually sleeping in the SUVs and trucks, which is fine. In a story like this, we don't need any creature comforts. A couple of days later, we got RVs and were sleeping in them. Since there's no fuel in the city, someone goes out in the morning to Baton Rouge, gets the fuel, comes back with our trucks. So organization has been fantastic. We've been able to get around, no problem.

Every single day you have to tell the story from a perspective on the ground. There's so many challenges. It is filthy. It is dirty. There's garbage everywhere. I don't think you can see it, but I'll just lift it with my boot because I'm not going to touch this.

These are the challenges. Everything from roadblocks, police checks, going into a story and not knowing whether you're going to have a story at the end of the day. I'll tell you what, the first time I walked into that convention center reminded me of a large, giant refuge camp in a third world country. One would not expect anything like this in 21st Century America. It was so sad to see babies crying, people pleading with us saying help us. Give us food. Give us water. Obviously now things are in motion. It looks like a city is slowing, but painfully coming back on its feet.

JOHNS: Jeff Koinange joins us live now from the region. Jeff, we have a question from the audience.

QUESTION: Hi. My name is Keery (ph) and I'm from Gannon (ph) University. My question tonight is about the death toll. I know that they've been expecting a death toll that's high, but what is the death toll now?

KOINANGE: You know what, the officials aren't saying what the death toll is right now, but they're saying it's going to be less than what many people were predicting, a lot less they say. But remember, it's early days. They have just started draining the waters out of the city and bodies will definitely start showing up in nursing homes, in schools, in houses. People will - in attics. It's going to take a while, but bodies will definitely start showing up. We won't know an overall death toll for weeks in not months.

JOHNS: Hi. What's your name? What's your question?

QUESTION: Hi. My name is Katie and I'm from New Orleans, Louisiana. I was wondering, what is the most prevalent emotion that you witnessed? Has it been anger, fear, gratitude and has that changed over time?

KOINANGE: All of the above. First couple of days, there was so much anger, to see these people suffering and I've seen people suffering in Africa in African stories I've covered. But to see it in America, people who were literally coming to us saying please help us. We're starving. We're hungry. Nobody's coming to help and this could have been taken care of so soon, so easily in avoiding all those troubles of the first four or five days. So someone definitely did drop the ball. We were grateful in the end, because things started moving and we did see a lot of improvement once this operation kicked in. But again, at the end of the day, so many heartbreaking stories, so many tearful stories. This has been one of toughest stories I've ever covered.

DANA BASH, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Jeff, that is so fascinating to me, because you are somebody who has covered disasters made by mother nature, disasters made by man, war. Talk about that, your vast experience, what you have seen in your history in Africa and around the country, around the world I should say, versus what you're seeing there in America.

KOINANGE: I'll tell you, a lot of the scenes were eerily familiar. When we drive up to roadblocks, it reminded me of Liberia or Sierra Leone when we'd drive up to roadblocks. Only there it was 14- year-olds with AK-47s. Here it was well armed and uniformed policemen. Remember those dramatic scenes of helicopters rescuing people on rooftops? Amazing pictures. They reminded me of Mozambique in 2000. Remember when half the country was flooded and people were literally living in trees for four or five, six, seven, days, until the South African pilots started rescuing them and that dramatic scene of that woman who had given birth in a tree and had been rescued. These were so eerily familiar. I thought I would - just to transpose me from here to Mozambique or vice versa, it would have been the same story, unbelievable. At the same time, heart wrenching and it's the children at the end of the day. The children just get to me. I don't have any of my own, but every time I see children suffering, that's not right, because they shouldn't suffer.

JOHNS: What's your name and what's your question for Jeff?

QUESTION: Hi, my name's Molly Marquez and I'm from the University of Florida. A recent request from FEMA to Reuters asked media to not photograph the deceased as bodies are recovered. And it's brought a lot of attention to access issues for journalists and I was just wondering, how has this affected your work? What restrictions have you faced? Do you have any examples?

KOINANGE: Just repeat that real quick, you did what?

JOHNS: The gist of the question Jeff is, there were in fact a request - there were a number of requests to not shoot pictures of dead bodies. How were handling that?

KOINANGE: Well, the thing is, at CNN we shoot bodies very tastefully if you will. We don't zoom into the faces. We don't show any of that or we try to avoid addresses. All we do is we shoot a long shot, a profile of it, just so that we can show, yes, there are casualties in this so-called war. We don't want to - we don't want anyone to censor the stories that we do. We have to cover the stories from both points of view and balance it and be as objective as we can. Yes, at the end of the day, there will be a lot of people who are angry that we're showing the pictures, but we have to show the overall picture, not just 3/4 or half the picture.

JOHNS: All right. Thank you very much. Thank you Jeff. We will be watching for your reports in the days coming. Of course still in the region a number of our correspondents including Karl Penhaul covering how authorities are forcing order from chaos. Karl's back on the story after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JOHNS: CNN's on the story here on the campus of the George Washington University and across the areas of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, struggling through the Katrina disaster. Among our correspondents, Karl Penhaul, a veteran of some of the toughest assignments around the globe. Right now, he's covering the mean streets of New Orleans. Let's look at Karl's notebook.

KARL PENHAUL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We've been following around paratroopers of the 82nd airborne division to find out exactly what they've been doing. Many of them were telling me their last active deployment mission was in fact in Iraq.

UNIDENTIFIED SOLDIER: That's in the past. You can't compare what we're doing here to that.

PENHAUL: So what we had was this rather strange sight of uniformed, armed paratroopers handing out meals ready to eat rations to clients (ph), to patients (ph) in Johnny White's bar on Bourbon Street. That bar really hasn't closed since the hurricane struck. Some might say that could be a waste of the paratroopers' time, because these people are having to stand there and drink. It's (INAUDIBLE) can't obviously get their own food and water. Paratroopers say residents do not (INAUDIBLE) good times would soon be rolling again. It may not be Iraq, but these paratroopers know that their disaster relief mission is going to be more of a struggle than a stroll down Bourbon Street.

JOHNS: Karl Penhaul joins us live now. Karl, you also have been all over the world. I'd like to ask you, I guess, first of all, this is a very different kind of assignment for the 82nd airborne. What are they trying to do at the root of it?

PENHAUL: The root of their mission is really to help in any way that they can with this relief mission and today actually again, we've been wading waist high through this filthy flood water with the 82nd airborne. They've been going house to house searching for the living, also searching for the dead. But it's got shades of Iraq there as well. At one point, we went into a school and it was these urban warfare techniques that they know so well, guns to the ready, trying to clear the school, making sure there was no chance of looters or snipers in there. Then we see these battle hardened troops, their hearts soften as they go and collect stray dogs off the street. So a mixture of everything there Joe.

JOHNS: We have another question from the audience. What's your name? What's your question?

QUESTION: Hi, Andrew, (INAUDIBLE) Pennsylvania. Had there been an honest assessment on how the deployment of heavy equipment and personnel to Iraq and how that has affected the National Guard's ability to respond to Katrina and what do you think about the larger issue of how this will affect the proper use - how this will affect the larger issue of the proper use of the National Guard to protect American citizens?

PENHAUL: It's a little difficult and I haven't seen any thorough assessment of how the deployment of machinery and equipment to Iraq has affected the relief operation here. Of course, the government says it really hasn't affected it at all. Today in fact, we did see some armored vehicles that are also amphibious that belong to the Oregon National Guard. They're being used for both SWAT missions and also rescue missions, so they seem to have equipment that they need for the job Andrew.

BASH: And Karl, you obviously have been with the 82nd Airborne. What are they saying to you about how it feels to be doing the kinds of things that you've described on the streets of America.

PENHAUL: Well, certainly when they were clearing out that school today, they all said that this was the first house clearing operation that they'd ever done in wading boots. It feels a little strange to them to be honest and as battle hardened as they are, they are nervous at these fetid flood waters because as you know, the disease officials have said or the health officials have said that there could be a lot of bacteria and disease there and they're all very nervous of catching something nasty out in those waters.

JOHNS: A question from the audience Paul (ph). What's your name? What's your question?

QUESTION: I'm Amy from George Washington University. As a reporter, how do you prevent from becoming completely emotionally drained?

PENHAUL: It's a difficult question that applies to all the disasters and all the wars and all the conflicts we've covered. I think people are looking through the lens of a camera, then that separates us somewhat from the issues that are going on, certainly from the emotional sense. It's usually once we get back in the evenings and sit down and are maybe going through the shots of the day or talking to fellow journalists about what's happened that you really have time to reflect on these peoples' suffering. Then again, you're talking to fellow journalists and try and find some way over it. Down the line in our quiet moments, not when we're at work, but possibly when we're far away from work, from time to time it does hit us and we just kind of think, what's really going on here, not only here, but also in the other disasters that we've covered in the past Amy.

JOHNS: Karl, you've also been out with some of the shrimpers. Of course, this is a situation where their whole livelihood has pretty much been destroyed. Talk about that a bit will you.

PENHAUL: Exactly and it's not only individual shrimpers in an individual industry that has been affected, but these are whole communities that have been devastated, communities that depend on fishing, that depend on shrimping. You know this really is the economic lifeblood of the bayous around New Orleans and you know, it's famous the world over, Louisiana shrimps and just to see their homes devastated, to see two and three feet of thick mud that has gone through their homes, all their possessions destroyed, to see grown men - you know they're grown up from the water. You know these are hearty breed, but to see those guys just break down, shake their heads and say, what do we do now? It just shows the levels of desperation that there are here.

JOHNS: And that issue of the evacuations. Do you have any sense when they're actually going to end up forcing people from their homes?

PENHAUL: That's a whole controversial issue and so far, in fact in sweeps that we were doing today with the 82 airborne paratroopers, there was nobody at home in those regions in the mid city area of town, neither survivors who wanted to be rescued nor people that didn't want to be rescued who wanted to stay in their home. So I think the number of people in the city has shrunk dramatically over the last few days, but I think it will be shocking to Americans in general if we do see law enforcement officials going into peoples' own homes and having to handcuff individuals and drag them away from their own properties because this is a disaster and by carrying that out, it would only seem to compound the injuries that these people have suffered.

JOHNS: Karl Penhaul, thanks so much, great work and we will be watching. What Karl describes can be felt and heard right here in this town as the political fallout gets louder day by day. White House correspondent Dana Bash is back on that story after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JOHNS: Here on the campus of the George Washington University in the District of Columbia, we're on the story. The winds died, the water rose and so did the accusations that the rescue efforts were too little, too late and the questions went right to the top, to homeland security, to FEMA, to President Bush. CNN White House correspondent Dana Bash is on that part of the story. Check out her notebook. BASH: This week was all about trying to illustrate activity, action and presence.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: So long as any life is in danger, we got work to do.

BASH: In the days after Katrina hit, so you saw the president, the first lady, the vice president, a slew of cabinet officials going down to the region to assess it and to essentially have a presence that Bush officials admit was lacking in the days after Katrina hit.

One of the most fascinating scenes here at the White House this week was Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, walking out with Republican lawmakers from a private meeting with President Bush, having her stand in front of the White House and say that she told President Bush that his FEMA director, the person who had been initially in charge of this situation, should be fired.

NANCY PELOSI: He is incompetent, has no credentials for the job that he holds.

BASH: And watching the speaker of the House essentially behind her turn away in disgust. That was very illustrative, emblematic of the kind of intense partisanships that we had seen after this kind of event. The Democrats even tell you privately that they sense a very weak president right now and they want to essentially take the offensive on that.

JOHNS: And Dana Bash is here with us right now. We do have a question for you from the audience.

QUESTION: Hello. My name is Zak. I'm from the University of Wyoming. To what degree should homeland security chief Michael Chertoff be held responsible for FEMA's delay in the recovery response?

BASH: Well, that's going to be a question that a lot of people are going to be asking, already are and they will probably be demanding answers to for some time to come. When you talk to the White House right now or even just look at what happened at the end of the week, with the FEMA director, Mike Brown, being pulled. The way the reaction has been that all levels of government should be held accountable and that they all did not do probably the best job they could do. When you talk to the White House, specifically as the week went on, you got a lot more push back as we call it here in Washington, saying look, we didn't do the best job we could have, but the local officials basically they were the first on the ground. They were the ones who were first responsible, could have asked for help from us earlier. So the answer to your question is probably, is it definitely one that's being asked. It's going to take a while to figure that out.

JOHNS: What's your name?

QUESTION: Hi. My name is (INAUDIBLE) and I'm from Ohio State University. My question is how can citizens make sure that the government is handling projects such as the work projects in New Orleans appropriately and to what extent does that watchdog responsibility belong to the media?

BASH: Well, you know, one of the fascinating things about sort of observing the way this story has unfolded is that because reporters who are essentially on the ground, many times before the government officials were, there has been a tremendous sort of watchdog to use your term, kind of dynamic here in the story, a real time watchdog dynamic and you saw probably a serious consequence of that almost unprecedented in the Bush administration with Mike Brown, his guy on the ground, being pulled back. The fact that the president essentially we now know gave the green light for that in the middle of the week, saying you got to do what you got to do. We've got to get that fixed and then having the very public, not firing, but slapping down of somebody who was in charge. That just shows the kind of real time watchdog and the kind of consequences we're seeing as it happens.

JOHNS: So how serious is that in the long term for the president and this Mike Brown thing. There's a lot of question about the doctoring of a resume perhaps, something along those lines. Does that sort of play over to affect the president as well?

BASH: The bottom line - you're hearing this from Democrats Joe on the Hill, is that when Katrina hit, this was already a very weak president. His poll numbers were already about as low as they had been. We even have polls that are out this weekend showing his approval rating is even lower, but the most frightening thing for the White House is a "Newsweek" poll out talking about the president's handling of Katrina and it says 57 percent disapprove of his handling of Katrina. This is a president who has, who essentially made his presidency, his legacy was leadership, particularly after 9/11. That is essentially what he ran on. That's how he got reelected and they know that once that is eroded and they see that it is eroding right now with this particular situation, what they've thought again was going to be his legacy is going to be a big problem. That's why we are probably going to see the president out there again - continuing to be out there in a very public way, maybe even giving a national address to try to correct that perception.

JOHNS: Another question from the audience.

QUESTION: Hi. I'm Dan. I'm from Philadelphia. My question is, why didn't President Bush send the National Guard to the Gulf coast before hurricane Katrina made landfall?

BASH: That is - there are a couple of answers to that question. First of all, when you talk about the National Guard, that is something that is a state responsibility. It's the governor that does that. But the White House admits that looking back with hindsight, they did rely on the fact that there were local responders, that there was National Guard and that they essentially delayed in getting the Federal response, the Federal security response in a way that they shouldn't have done so. And so they understand now looking back that that's why the president was, has been blamed for it, the whole Federal response has been - has looked like it has been completely inept essentially and they realize that in the future, if God forbids this happens and it's this kind of catastrophe, either by natural causes or by terrorism, that they're going to have to act differently when it comes to the Federal government getting control of a local situation.

JOHNS: Dana Bash will be staying with us. We have lots more to talk about from politics surrounding the Katrina story to concerns over body and soul. Faith and values correspondent Delia Gallagher joins us and on the medical beat, problems linked to the flood waters still covering much of New Orleans. CNN medical correspondent Elizabeth Cohen is back on that story after a check of what's making headlines right now.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWSBREAK)

JOE JOHNS, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: We're ON THE STORY. The images are burned into our memories, the floating bodies, the vile brew of floodwaters, waste, oil. This week brought new worries about the risk to health to survivors and to those coming to help.

CNN Medical Correspondent Elizabeth Cohen was ON THE STORY. Here's here Reporter's Notebook.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Everywhere we tried to go there were flooded roads. There were checkpoints, cell phones not working, Blackberrys not working.

(on camera): If you were exposed to that water in New Orleans, you should get a vaccination against Hepatitis A.

(voice-over): To hear that it had a high fecal contamination content was not exactly shocking. It was really just a confirmation of what we knew already just from looking at it.

(on camera): We were at a hospital and talked to a mother who was missing her 5-year-old son. She got separated from him when she went into labor. That's really been the hardest part of this is watching people who are going through these really incredibly difficult times.

There was one very eerie moment when I was standing in front of a shelter in Baton Rouge with 5,500 evacuees and one of them came up to me with a flyer looking for a missing loved one and I felt like I was back in New York City.

And I have here with me Vinnie Kamasz (ph) whose father Rocco was in the World Trade Center.

(voice-over): I felt like I was back in Manhattan when hundreds of people came up to me with that flyer.

(on camera): One thing I'll definitely take away from this is whatever is going on in your little life is so tiny compared to what these people have had to endure.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

JOHNS: Elizabeth Cohen joins us now. The water obviously a huge concern, do we know everything we're supposed to know about what's in that water Elizabeth?

COHEN: Joe, this is what the federal government says. The Environmental Protection Agency says they tested fecal coliform levels, in other words bacteria from feces up ten times higher than what's safe.

Now, CNN did their own testing and what our lab found was that it was 100 times higher at least. That's what the lab that we contracted with said, so definitely that's in it and lead is in it. Lead can be a particular threat to unborn fetuses.

JOHNS: A question from the audience, what's your name?

BEN, WASHINGTON, D.C.: Hi, I'm Ben from Washington, D.C. Last year there was a lot of concern with the lack of flu vaccinations in the U.S. and now with the potential for a widespread disease outbreak in New Orleans. How equipped is the government from a medical supply standpoint for handling the potential disease outbreak?

COHEN: Well, it's interesting because the CDC this week sent out recommendations for vaccinations that evacuees need and when I went to hospitals and to a shelter in Baton Rouge and said, "Do you have these vaccinations?" And they said "We didn't even know we were supposed to be giving them?"

As a matter of fact, the shelter that I went to, the first aid folks heard from me that they were supposed to be giving vaccinations not from the CDC and they said, "Well, now that we know we can't even give them because we don't have them."

JOHNS: What's your name?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: My name is Kamil (ph) and I'm from Floyd (ph) International University. Are the hospitals giving free emergency service to the people affected by Hurricane Katrina?

COHEN: Yes, I did not see anyone turned away. I was in several different hospitals. I was in shelters and I didn't see anyone turned away for lack of money. As a matter of fact, they were concerned that people wouldn't seek out care and so they really put the word out that the care was free.

JOHNS: Delia Gallagher, our faith and values correspondent, is in Baton Rouge. She joins us now. Delia, are you there?

DELIA GALLAGHER, CNN FAITH AND VALUES CORRESPONDENT: Yes, hi Joe.

JOHNS: Right. Off the top I think could you sort of tell our viewers a little bit about the role of the churches and what they're been doing throughout this crisis and how well prepared they were for it initially?

GALLAGHER: Well, the amazing thing here, Joe, is that the churches that's the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Church, the Methodists, the Episcopalians, all of the churches you can imagine have a branch of relief. They have year-long relief branches that come in, in these emergency situations that are able to just pop up with emergency supplies ready to go.

All of these people were on the ground on Tuesday here in Baton Rouge with relief supplies for the evacuees. You combine that with the southern hospitality, the people of this area who have opened up their homes either through their churches working as volunteers and/or opening up their homes to evacuees to crews, our crew is staying with a family in Baton Rouge, all that combined make for a good scene down here in terms of relief.

JOHNS: What's your name?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Good evening, my name is Shelby Peterson (ph). I'm from Elon (ph) University in North Carolina and my question for you this evening is what are some of the questions, concerns that the younger victims of Hurricane Katrina are asking and how are adults in the community dealing with these questions?

JOHNS: That's Elizabeth or Delia either one. Go ahead, Delia.

GALLAGHER: Well, I can tell you that I -- I met a family, a single mother with a young 2-year-old boy and an infant child. There's a church here specifically for single mothers with infants under six months. And, this 2-year-old boy she told us was waking at night with nightmares, obviously traumatized. Every single person here has a very traumatic story.

We heard from a woman who has three children and who delivered her infant child the night of the storm. She was in labor as she was driving her car. She went to a hospital in the dark without anesthesia with her three other children in the room she delivered that baby.

She did not even get to take a shower afterwards because there was no running water in the hospital and she got back in her car the next day and drove here to a shelter.

So there is a lot of trauma going on but there are many people here also, many of those from these religious organizations who are going around and really just listening to the stories because these are people who are still stuck.

They're still stuck in the trauma of the events and they're still missing their families so they're not even at the stage yet where they can think about relocation and they can think about new jobs. They're still trying to find their daughters, their mothers, their brothers.

JOHNS: Elizabeth from your perspective also what about the children? COHEN: Well, I was amazed at the resiliency of the smallest survivors of the hurricane. I covered an airlift of 29 babies and they all came through it fine. They were in downtown New Orleans.

They were airlifted to Baton Rouge and then sent on to other cities and even the preemies, even one one-pound-four-ounce baby whose mother we met really had come through pretty well and their doctor said babies are amazing. They're really kind of elastic. You have to bend them quite a bit before you break them.

I interviewed one 5-year-old boy as I said who had escaped from New Orleans via helicopter, ambulance bus and I said was it scary or was it fun? And he said, "It was fun. I got to ride on a bus." So, it was pretty amazing.

JOHNS: You've talked a little bit about 9/11 and the similarities and the differences. Could you sort of go through that for me?

COHEN: Well, the similarities we talked about in that Reporter's Notebook, which was people coming up with those flyers saying "Help me find people. Help me find people." But beyond that it was all differences.

In New York, you were looking at people who were missing a person. Here I was talking to people who are missing ten family members, eight family members and they were, of course, completely panicked and there was really in the beginning no structure to help them. And even now the structure is not completely there.

In New York almost instantly there was this incredible organization to help them find their missing loved ones and they were taken care of in every way possible but in Louisiana that's not what I saw at all. I think actually chaos better describes what I saw.

JOHNS: Mental health needs obviously a huge issue in this entire story as we go on the days and weeks. I'd like to address that to both of you. How do we deal with the mental health of the people in the region going forward?

COHEN: I think that right now they're just beginning to deal with mental health issues. When I first got down there, which was two days after the storm, it was really just search and rescue. They were just worried about getting people out of New Orleans and out of that water and I think only now they're starting to deal with some of those mental health issues.

And you certainly saw that there were some services for people to talk to say in the shelters but you have to wonder how effective 5,500 people in one shelter, I don't think there was enough services for all of those people.

JOHNS: Delia, from your perspective?

GALLAGHER: Joe, I want to tell you I walked around with a chaplain the other day in one of the shelters and in terms of mental health he was talking to the people trying just to listen to them. But to give you an idea he was talking to a grandmother asking her "How are you doing?"

He had a paperback Bible. He was holding her hand and she was talking to him and then an announcement came over the loud speaker and said "The bus for Wal-Mart leaves in five minutes" and she said, "Pastor, thanks for talking to me but I got to get on that bus."

So, I think the sense of normalcy for these people is very important and even if that just means a trip to Wal-Mart she wasn't buying anything just to get somewhere where it's normal, get back into some kind of routine can also be very helpful. It's the small things sometimes.

JOHNS: Got it, OK, thanks. We'll leave it there for now. Thank you Elizabeth Cohen and Delia Gallagher, keep up your work ON THE STORY.

Coming up, more on the hurricane aftermath plus the future of the Supreme Court, I'm back on that story after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JOHNS: We are ON THE STORY of the state of emergency in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

We are also following the story of the future of the U.S. Supreme Court in a week that saw the burial of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and the re-nomination of Judge John Roberts to succeed the chief justice.

Joe Johns was on that story. Let's look inside his Reporter's Notebook.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHNS (voice-over): I thought that we were just cruising into the nomination confirmation hearing of John Roberts for associate justice, which was scheduled to begin on Tuesday.

(on camera): And just hours before that frankly on Saturday night the chief justice died and throws everything up in the air. The court is saying the casket is not leaving here until about 1:30.

(voice-over): I don't know that we really were able to fully talk about his record and say what he was, discuss his legacy the way I wish we could have.

(on camera): It's been a long time since we had a different Supreme Court chief justice than Justice Rehnquist.

(voice-over): You sere Roberts around in all these different ops an stuff at the Capitol meeting with Senators, walking through the halls and so forth but couldn't get close to him and I went into the court just for a second and there he was. (on camera): Here you have a man nominated for chief justice of the Supreme Court and he wasn't afraid to stop and talk with someone he knows clearly as a correspondent for a national news network.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BASH: Joe, I remember seeing that e-mail from you on my Blackberry saying, "Oh, I just talked to John Roberts." And, you know, for those of us who have been covering this for a long time, we understand what that means. You don't talk to John Roberts as a reporter. They just won't let you.

JOHNS: That's for sure. You know it's pretty remarkable really. You had -- anytime somebody is nominated for a position that could be controversial here in Washington there's that tradition where they're cloistered. You can't get anywhere near them. You can't shake their hand.

There he was and I just walked up and had a very brief conversation. I think it was inappropriate to really start grilling him. I mean he had just carried the casket with the other pallbearers up the stairs of the Supreme Court. It was inappropriate to start slamming him with questions about what are you going to do next?

But and he basically said, look, you know, I'm just trying to give the next few days to Chief Justice Rehnquist, very pleasant, looks you right in the eye, personable just like people said and so that's something. But I mean it's much more complex for him because he has a lot of Democrats who are going to really come after him.

BASH: And just it shows the confluence of events of having the person who was nominated to fill the chief justice role at the funeral as a pallbearer. I think we have a question for you from the audience now Joe.

JOHN: My name is John. I'm from the University of Wyoming and my question is if confirmed Justice Roberts or Judge Roberts would be the youngest chief justice since John Marshall. That coupled with his seemingly conservative nature could be roadblocks for him in this confirmation process. Do you see these as roadblocks and should the Senate be concerned with his age?

JOHNS: Well, you know, I just said a minute ago that a lot of Democrats are going to come after him. The truth of it is we don't really know whether Democrats are going to come after him, you know, publicly in the hearings.

It's very hard to say. There are a lot of Democrats who say he's too conservative for my taste. But I think the truth of it is that this is a chief justice, a potential chief justice just like any other person who ever went to the court and the truth of it is they're very hard to predict.

You just don't know. It's a life appointment and you may read through everything they said and everything they wrote and they might turn out to be completely different, so it's difficult to say which direction he's going to go.

And now I'm being told we probably need to move on because there's some more stuff that's going to go into the show. We'll see in the coming days how the court story shares the headlines with Katrina.

We're back on how CNN correspondents did their job in New Orleans as the city fell apart around them. Field Producer Jim Spellman was ON THE STORY. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JOHNS: We're ON THE STORY here in Washington and in New Orleans.

CNN correspondents were there through the storm and through the early days of the emergency. One team, including Field Producer Jim Spellman and Correspondent Chris Lawrence were among the first to talk about how people were struggling to survive. Here's their notebook.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CHRIS LAWRENCE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I always look at it like this. There's nobody setting bombs in the street, there's no car bombers.

Police are telling us it's way too dangerous to be anywhere on the street. They told us to come off the street. We are right here. Police are surrounding this rooftop.

JIM SPELLMAN, CNN PRODUCER: We came here to cover a hurricane not a war and that's what it seems like it's become.

(voice-over): There's no electricity. It's pitch black and there's thousands and thousands of people inside this dense, this dense crowd inside the convention center. It's just simply unsafe.

KIM SEGAL, CNN PRODUCER: It breaks your heart. There's nothing else you can say to sit there and look at these people suffering and not being able to help them and knowing that, you know, you have transportation and you have water and you have food but I guess telling the story is what we're here to do and hopefully that's going to get them help.

LAWRENCE (voice-over): Putrid food on the ground, sewage, their feet sitting in sewage. We saw feces on the ground. It is -- these people are being forced to live like animals.

(on camera): Seeing those people at the convention center and you see those mothers like holding their babies, the old woman in the wheelchair who died and she just put her body against the side of the building with a blanket, man, that's just so -- it's just so sad.

BEN BLAKE, CNN PRODUCER: I'm just glad we could cover this story for these people and I hope in some way that although -- although they're suffering now that we can -- we brought the story to the world. LAWRENCE: I just think nobody knew how bad this was, you know, until it was already like too late.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

JOHNS: Jim Spellman joins us now, a question from the audience.

STEPHANIE: Hi, I'm Stephanie, originally from New Orleans. One of the most frustrating things for me was not knowing specifics about my family and my home. I just wanted to know were you more concerned with showing the entire spectrum of the chaos or were your more drawn to specific stories, people, areas of town?

SPELLMAN: Well, we were mostly stuck to the area of town that was dry frankly and which is a lot of the reason why people ended up in the convention center. It was dry and from the lower 9th Ward through Bourbon Street, French Quarter area, everybody who was coming out of the floodwater was funneling that way towards the convention center.

We stuck to that early on when we were in the floodwaters and at the Superdome but it became ever more difficult to get around through these floodwaters. We lost about I think five vehicles we had to abandon just that were dying in floodwater. So, we had to stick to that part of town.

CARLOS PEREZ: Hi, I'm Carlos Perez from Boca Raton, Florida. In your opinion going in do you feel you were prepared to handle a story of such magnitude and at what moment during that story did you feel most helpless with the way this whole ordeal was handled?

SPELLMAN: Helpless, I mean all that we could really do was the most basic type of journalism, point a camera at it, describe exactly what you're seeing. And so, were we prepared? We were prepared to do that and that was really all we could do at the time.

There was -- it was impossible to grasp context or, you know, when it would stop or why it was becoming like that but being able to just point a camera at it, describe exactly what we were seeing that's what we were prepared to do and that's what we did.

JOHNS: There's another question from the audience.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hi, I'm Jilly (ph) from George Washington University. As a reporter in New Orleans how are you able to continue and report the situation watching those people suffering right in front of you without aid knowing there's nothing you could do?

SPELLMAN: Well, the way that we were able to keep doing it despite seeing all the suffering was to work the next thing in front of us, call it, get it on the air, do the various things that we do, edit, we edit, you know, we have to feed stuff on these video phones.

The more we could just keep working, you know, really for 48 hours that we worked we spent the night on the roof of the police station, didn't sleep at all, didn't sleep the night before that, that was the way. It wasn't until we got back really when a lot of it hit us.

JOHNS: Jim Spellman thanks so much.

We'll take a look at what's coming up next week ON THE STORY. We'll be right back. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

JOHNS: let's take a quick look ahead next week ON THE STORY -- Dana Bash.

BASH: Well, the president is going on his third trip down to the region, Mississippi and Louisiana, Sunday and Monday, and I'll be going with him.

JOHNS: Jim Spellman.

SPELLMAN: We're going to take a look at some other major American cities and see if something like this could happen there. Are they ready to go if a catastrophe strikes?

JOHNS: For me, of course, on Capitol Hill, it's all the Roberts hearings.

Thanks to Dana Bash and to all my colleagues and the audience here at George Washington University. You've been great. And, thank you for watching ON THE STORY.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com