‘You do what you can’

When disaster struck, they refused to stand on the sidelines

Except The Spotlight Illuminating

Steve Pickett for his live broadcast, Slidell, La., was pitch-dark. Beneath Pickett’s steady voiceover rolled grisly images from the preceding days: homes underwater and residents on rooftops or wading through dark, waist-high water; faces distorted by pain, confusion and heartbreak; human limbs and hair peeking out from beneath piles of rubble.

Pickett traveled to Louisiana to cover Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, he says, but when floodwaters marooned a city and many of its inhabitants, he became a part of an historic event.

“Like most weather-related stories, we had a team set up to cover Katrina,” the CBS 11 reporter says. He and other reporters took shifts at disaster areas in the weeks following the storm.

“But once we got there, it was clear this was not a weather story but an event, and there is a big difference. Now it is about lives.”

The local news teams in New Orleans had lost everything, their studios and equipment, so reporters such as Pickett were invaluable to the Katrina coverage.

At first, Pickett and his cameraman Billy Sexton spent nights in the CBS news truck as they covered outskirts of New Orleans, such as Slidell and Mandeville, La., and Pass Christian, Miss.

“Once the levees broke, there was no getting into New Orleans,” he says.

Sexton had family in the region.

“Billy’s brother took us in one night. His mother’s home, in Mandeville, was destroyed. Billy worked nonstop while he and his family dealt with the destruction. I don’t know how he did it.”

There was no shortage of shocking news from the suburbs.

“Nothing was left,” Pickett says of the homes and businesses that once populated the area. He recalls the sound of gunshots ripping through the night during one of his live spots, when he was the only visible thing within miles — a target, he feared. The generatorequipped news truck was an added hazard, he says, because of the lack of functioning vehicles in the area.

“There were people who wanted ours.”

What the newsmen encountered when they finally reached New Orleans was even worse — “indescribable,” Pickett says.

Desperate survivors begged them to broadcast messages to loved ones — “Tell them I am alive,” they pleaded, names scrawled on hoisted cardboard signs.

Pickett and Sexton helped a broken elderly couple they found trudging in the blazing sun. “We knew they would die if we didn’t help, so we took them to a makeshift command center where they at least stood a chance,” Pick- ett recalls. “We had to leave them. We asked a stranger to look after them. We saw another woman with a broom, sweeping the street, a dead body only yards away from her feet — all she said to us was, ‘I am not a refugee.’”

Pickett, a longtime Lake Highlands resident, won an Emmy for his Iraq War coverage. He has been on the scene following F5 tornadoes. He’s covered every sort of atrocity. More recently he reported from the site of an earthquake in Haiti, which caused greater casualties than Katrina.

But Katrina stays with him, more than anything.

“To see a city underwater, all hell broken loose, it changes you. You don’t think this can happen in an American city.”

Pickett tried to balance his rescue and reporter modes. He slept in the truck and vacant buildings. His live reports ran during the 5 and 6 a.m. and the 5 and 10 p.m. newscasts.

He rode on rescue boats. Even in the sixfoot high waters, some refused to leave their homes.

“They were in shock. The rescuers were begging them to come and some wouldn’t. As a reporter you have to try to remain objective, but I wanted to scream.”

He realizes there were rampant reports of looting and violence, but that generally was not his experience.

“I saw people in desperate situations who needed help. We saw and documented the efforts to save people. We saw thousands of people getting on buses, no idea where they were going. Older people, a woman who looks just like your grandmother, walking toward you, lost, confused, her lifelong home is underwater, she doesn’t know where her family is or where this bus is taking her, and there is nothing you can do.”

STEVE PICKETT RETURNED FROM A LONG assignment in the Middle East in early 2005. His future-wife Rachel Roberts-Pickett was preparing to graduate Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

After years of grueling workloads, the couple looked forward to time together at their Town Creek home.

A monster storm was brewing over the gulf, though, and it would keep the pair apart for most of the next five years.

Roberts-Pickett had just started her first post-education job as a management development associate with the City of Dallas when Pickett left for flood-ravaged Louisiana.

During the two weeks he was there, she was at her new job, coming out of her skin.

“It was one of those things, something happens, you feel compelled to go,” she says. “I had the training and felt I could play a key role, but I was here, in Dallas, not doing anything to contribute.”

Looking into various recovery efforts, she found an opening with Hagerty Consulting, which was outsourced by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to help

Pickett says. “Maybe military people can understand, but most people would find this unfathomable. And the people I worked with they probably shouldn’t have — but they stayed to rebuild. They fought. It teaches you a lesson about life and resilience.” cities recover from Katrina damage.

She returned to Lake Highlands regularly and always planned to move back after the Katrina work was finished — but it never was. She stayed for more than five years, marrying Pickett in 2007.

She only came home when she was seven months pregnant with the couple’s now 4-year old son Syeed. (Pickett’s 23-year-old son, Patrick, is a LHHS graduate.)

In the years his wife was away, Pickett continued to cover major events both locally and abroad.

He reported frequently on Dallas schools and neighborhoods impacted by the influx of Katrina evacuees.

She left her job of two weeks and relocated to Mississippi. It was drastic, but she says she had no doubt this was “what she needed to be doing.”

Pickett was not happy to see his longtime girlfriend go at practically the moment he returned, but they are the type of couple that encourages one another’s oft-extreme drives and passions.

In her new gig, Roberts-Pickett wrote grants that would help municipalities receive funding for removal of debris, restoration of public infrastructures and emergency protective measures. This involved 60- to 80-hour workweeks visiting disaster sites and interviewing an endless parade of aid applicants whose lives had been toppled by the storm. She worked in environments with spotty electricity and no potable water and witnessed a ghastly amount of ruin to hundreds of cities along the Gulf Coast.

“Whole towns were obliterated. You hear about the devastation in New Orleans but all these other places looked like a bomb had blown them apart. It almost felt obscene to be there — to this day I can smell the smell of death. You can’t prepare for that,” Roberts-

“Lake Highlands and nearby areas like Vickery Meadow and communities just west of Central Expressway were inundated with an incredible amount of people, many who made a new start here, many who have become a part of the fabric of Lake Highlands. You can’t go to any part of our city, even now, really, without feeling Katrina’s impact.”

Both Pickett and his wife feel a strong, lasting connection to New Orleans and the area, and they visit often, taking historic tours and patronizing local bed and breakfasts.

Here at home, they run into people from Louisiana and Mississippi in grocery stores and restaurants (“we know their accents,” RobertsPickett says) and strike up conversations. Their house is filled with art and music influenced by New Orleans culture.

Their Hurricane Katrina experiences began as jobs but ultimately touched something deep inside their souls.

“You are invested in the recovery, as invested as the people who live there,” RobertsPickett says.

The Picketts agree Katrina changed them, taught them that when something happens of this magnitude, you don’t have to stand on the sidelines, you can throw yourself into doing what you can do.

At best, the experience changed our society collectively, Pickett adds.

“You learn a lot in disaster. Hopefully lessons learned from Katrina transcend to other situations.”