In The Thick Of It

A friend of mine, Cheryl, lives in Baton Rouge. She works at WAFB, the CBS affiliate, and sent me this email. Here is an excerpt of someone in the thick of it.

"I cannot begin to express the level of devastation that we have down here. New Orleans is destroyed. You've seen the video. I won't elaborate any further. I'm tired of describing it. Working in television at a time like this is exhilarating, rewarding, humbling and very, very ... very difficult. We've been working 16-20 hour days since Sunday and can't get away from it. It's all we see, it's all we hear, it's all we think about. We've had wall-to-wall on air coverage since Sunday afternoon ... we never thought we would still be going at it 5 days later.

The government response has been shameful. It is still shameful. New Orleans needs an unfathomable amount of help. There are still an estimated 300,000 people left in the city who need to be either rescued or "recovered." So far today they have rescued 5,000 people. Day in and day out it is 95+ degrees. At that rate, there is going to be at death toll in Louisiana alone in the high 5 figures ... if not 6. The tragedy is and will continue to be immeasurable.

Baton Rouge is on the precipice of an enormous change. Well, let me take that back ... we've catapulted over the precipice already. We've will nearly double our size in less than a week. 500 homes were sold in Baton Rouge yesterday (September 1) and there are absolutely NO rental units available as of today. Major corporations are purchasing long vacant office buildings and other kinds of space to move their bases of operations to Baton Rouge. It's very overwhelming. No one here has ever had to deal with this kind of situation before. I'm not sure how we're going to manage. It will be a fascinating study in urban development that's for sure.

Anyway ... it's taken me 3 hours to write this email because I keep getting interrupted with phone calls and emails ... people looking for their missing families ... people looking for a place to go ... people asking what they can do. My name is on our website ... so I'm easy to find and they know that a TV station has people and resources. Our newsroom is a riot of ringing phones. It's insane ... and it's not going to stop. No time soon."