Our newspaper seemed to set the tone in our September 2 edition. It was the first after Katrina forced us to evacuate our flooded office, a handful of reporters and editors piled in the back of several delivery trucks. We were reduced to publishing only an online edition for three days. The banner headline read, “Help Us, Please.” It was a quote from a desperate evacuee shown in a front-page photograph on her knees, wailing in prayer. I believe it spoke for all of us.

I know it spoke for me. While most of our staff evacuated to Houma and Baton Rouge to figure out the logistics of putting out a newspaper, I was part of a 10-person team that, weirdly, became the “New Orleans Bureau” of the New Orleans home-town newspaper. Without access to working telephones or computers, I was out of contact with my family for nearly three days. My wife and three young children—four-year-old Max, and one-year-old twins, Eli and Jackie — ended up nearly 1,000 miles away with family in Milwaukee, after evacuating in bumper-to-bumper traffic and riding out the storm’s outer fringes in a flea-bag motel near Mobile.

Our rental property in Broadmoor, which housed four Loyola University students, was inundated with several feet of water. It now stands gutted. Even more nerve-wracking, I saw the water rise steadily in front of our own home in what is now known as “the wet part of Uptown,” even though the house is five feet off the ground and five miles from the nearest levee breach. As I waded in through chest-deep water on day three, I knew the only way I could return was by boat. When I canoed home a week later, I was humbled to find only a trace of water on our floors from boat wakes and helicopter spray.

We were among the lucky ones. About one-third of my colleagues lost their homes and most everything in them. Many more saw their cars under several feet of water. My Nissan ended up high and dry, but looted. Like everyone along the Central Gulf Coast, we suffered cruelly random degrees of loss.

Working in the storm zone also presented physical and mental challenges. For the first few days, we endured fitful nights in relentless humidity, with little food and water and a maddening inability to communicate with the outside world. When our hygiene reached crisis levels, we bathed by sneaking into a stranger’s backyard swimming pool. Things got better after we scrounged some military MREs, a generator to operate box fans and laptops. But somehow our jobs only seemed to get tougher. And more vital.

As our editorial team worked through those first three days after the storm without a printed edition—the first gap in the paper’s 168-year history—our website logged an unheard-of 30 million hits. For evacuees scattered around the country, we were a critical thread to the home they left behind. For the rest of the world, we felt an obligation to show that New Orleans was in dire crisis, that the slow government response cost lives, and that our longstanding neglect of the poor had created Third World conditions in a First World country.

Even the broadcast big-foots dropped all pretense of detachment. When Ted Koppel grilled now-disgraced former FEMA Director Michael “Heckuva Job” Brown on Nightline, he asked incredulously, “Don’t you guys watch television? Don’t you guys listen to the radio?”

It seemed that virtually every journalist who descended on the story was overcome by the same impulse. As the crowds began swelling at the convention center, reporters were besieged by hungry and exhausted people asking questions like, “Why aren’t they sending help? Can you please tell people what’s going on down here?” We vowed to do just that.