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Gulfport, Hurricanes, and Journalism

Reporters pick up scraps of other people’s tragedies. You don’t realize it at the time, but before you know it, they’re part of you.

The 24-hour news cycle simultaneously energizes and exhausts journalists. It’s a rush to report the news, but it’s exhausting to know how soon it will all be forgotten. That’s how I knew it would be with Helene and Milton. Not one person deserves to be forgotten, yet by now, in the rest of the world — and some of the rest of our own county — these two storms have faded into the ether.

We have a dystopian SOP at The Gabber Newspaper: No forecasting; we report. Where can you find sandbags? Which call centers are open? What do you do if you need a ride to the shelter? After the storm, we document, in photos, on video, and with words, what happened. What does Gulfport look like? How are people doing? What do people need, and where can they get it?

It’s a lot sexier to stand in floodwaters in a shiny rain slicker and talk about the waves. I can only assume it takes less of an emotional toll on the reporter as well.

We also have an incredibly small newsroom: Two full-time staffers — an editor and a news reporter — and a cadre of contracted writers. Since we can’t ask contracted employees to work during a natural disaster — and I recognize that it’s not fair to ask anyone to do so, but that’s what journalists sign up for — it’s a team of three: the two editorial staffers, and me.

We are not The Weather Channel, blowing into town like weather terrorists, sensationalizing four-foot waves and a typical Florida thunderstorm. We live alongside the people impacted by the news we report. Residents before ratings; community before clicks. We don’t publish photos of a business devastated until we know the business owners already knew about the damage. (No one deserves to find out on the news that their home or livelihood was washed away.) We don’t break the law. And, most of all, we keep going. Storms are no excuse; staff in low-lying areas evacuate to our house, a veritable fortress. We get the generator ready; we charge every device we own. Air mattresses get inflated; snacks come out. If not for the omnipresent sense of impending doom, it would be a slumber party.

That’s how it goes in Florida. With hurricanes, we tend to vacillate between “whoo-hooo party time” and “we are all going to die.”

I’m certain they exist, but I don’t know any coastal Floridian who has mastered any semblance of moderation.

On the morning of September 27, with evacuated staffers sleeping on couches and air mattresses in our living room, I climbed out of bed, brushed my teeth as the coffee brewed, grabbed my camera, and drove as far downtown as was safe: The Gabber Newspaper office, which was, miraculously, still there — and still dry. I pulled on my lemon-yellow galoshes — far too cheerful but, should something go horribly wrong, wildly visible. I took a sip of the coffee and left it in the car.

In the dark, with the power knocked out downtown, I could see hundreds, if not thousands or millions, of stars.

If not for what I knew — or, rather, suspected — and the pungent smell, I would have relished the tranquility.

Using my phone’s flashlight to avoid debris, I started walking toward Boca Ciega Bay. The first thing my light hit was a long, rectangular wooden thing. It took me longer than it should have to identify it: a floating dock from the Casino. When the waters rose, it floated off its supports two blocks north at 30th Avenue and Beach Boulevard South. (That, incidentally, is Gulfport’s historic coastline, before we dredged and filled the lower part of what we now call our waterfront district.)

That’s when I realized things were worse than I suspected.

News photographers don’t engage with their photographs. At least, not in the way you might think. The camera gives us distance; its lens creates a barrier between tragedy and the job we’re there to do. And so when I saw that dock, my brain stopped, and my hands and eyes took over, photographing the carnage on autopilot. Later, trying to separate each photo, video, and interview of that day — let alone the three weeks that followed — would feel overwhelming. Had I stopped to think that morning, emotion would have made my job impossible.

Case in point:

O’Maddy’s is core Gulfport. It’s our oldest standing restaurant, a sort of low-tide-scented piazza where former mullet kings drink alongside bachelorette parties. O’Maddy’s is  also legendary for its ability to reopen after a storm, sometimes to the chagrin of our first responders. It’s a tribute to the power of cognitive dissonance that I fully expected that to be the case this time, too. No matter that chairs from Tommy’s Hideaway were blocks away from the restaurant, or that a cherry-red industrial beer cooler was left, almost mise-en-scene, by a crosswalk nowhere near a restaurant or bar. I anticipated a soggy, yet open, O’Maddy’s. 

Seeing it turned overnight into a gutted, unwitting open-air eatery was a sucker punch in the throat. 

I saw the city manager, whom I’d reported on since he returned to the City in 2004, standing by the Casino. In 2015, when the Casino received its historic designation, he’d asked me to write the language for the plaque. I have a 20-plus-year history with this seaside city; his goes back to his toddler days. His grandma raised him here; he coached Little League, he served on city council. He looked at me, rubbed his hand over his face, and opened and closed his mouth a few times without making a sound. In the 20 years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him speechless.

“Have you ever seen it like this?” I asked. He looked at me, shook his head, and didn’t say a word.

Likewise, then-mayor Sam Henderson was among the first people downtown. He looked… rough. I knew I looked no better. There was nothing to do, and everything to do. The scope of destruction and lives upended drove home how powerless any one person is in the ultimate face of nature.

While talking to Jim and Sam, I noticed a young woman walking with a bottle of booze in her hand. I asked her where she got it. 

“O’Maddy’s,” she said.

“It doesn’t belong to you,” I said. I could feel the bile rising in my throat. No doubt Joe Guenther couldn’t serve that booze, but it wasn’t hers to take. 

She gave me an odd look and said, “It’s a souvenir.”

“It’s not yours,” I said again — and louder. I saw red and said things to her that the part of me pursuing the Four Noble Truths would have been ashamed of. I walked away, angry at not only her, but furious at how easily people’s dreams get washed away. Sam quietly approached the woman, talked to her, then took the booze, and put it in a City truck. 

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By the time I returned to the car, my morning coffee was ice cold. My stomach was churning with too much acid to drink it anyway.

I went home. Barry — El Cap, if you remember — asked me how downtown fared. I started to cry. And I didn’t stop crying, not really, for about three weeks. Every night, I would cry. In the shower, I would cry. When I saw someone downtown who had lost almost everything, I would cry.

“How are you doing?” I asked the owner of the Wine House, Paige, one day.

“Well, I haven’t cried today, so I think I’m doing better,” she said.

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That made me cry.

During Milton, the woman I’d yelled at the morning after Helene saw a video of me on The Gabber Newspaper’s TikTok channel. She messaged us. 

I met her for coffee at SumitrA the morning the City issued the boil-water rescission (that’s how I measure these two months, in terms of the actions after the storms). We saw each other and she started to cry. I started to cry, too. We hugged. 

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you names. That was wrong.”

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said. “You were right. I love it here.”

We had coffee. It was a bright spot. Even turned inside out by forces beyond our control, I love it here more than anywhere else.

I am incredibly proud of the job our news team did throughout both storms, but when I think back and look at all we didn’t do, it’s overwhelming. Everyone touched by those storms had a story, and it was our job to tell them. I wish we’d been able to tell more of them. Did we capture the impact two near-miss storms had on Gulfport and South Pinellas accurately? Absolutely we did. But did we come anywhere near close to showing the true pain and the currency of personal loss? 

Is that even possible?

Somewhere in between Helene and Halloween, the paper’s operation manager, Patrick, pulled me aside.

“You can’t do everything, you know,” he said, not unkindly.

No. I can’t. No one person can. But through the storms and the aftermath, watching Gulfport be Gulfport, I held out hope that a community like ours can.

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A note about hurricane relief and charities:

Throughout two unquestionably devastating hurricanes, Gulfport — a city of some 12,500-plus people — saw nothing from the Salvation Army or other charities with one notable exception: José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen.  WCK paid a Tampa food truck to, day in and day out, show up, prepare hot meals, and give them away for free. The next time you consider donating to a charity, please keep them in mind.

We did have assistance from FEMA and the National Guard (the latter requested by the city manager, not sent without invitation), and the City of Gulfport, Mississippi. Countless Tampa Bay residents brought food, water, and supplies. Others donated money to certain restaurants with the understanding those businesses would feed people for free.

The Red Cross showed up at the Gulfport fire station one time, with no warning at 11:30 p.m., bearing hot meals. The fire chief had no way to store or distribute the meals and suggested they try another community. To my knowledge, that was the single contact with any charity other than World Central Kitchen.

Thank you, World Central Kitchen and Jose Andrés, for showing up for Gulfport.