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Times-Pic Reporter Finds Lessons For New Orleans in Japan

Gordon Russell on what New Orleans can learn from Tokyo and Kobe, and the rewards of working in a city where people are now much more...
December 15, 2006

Gordon Russell’s two-part series comparing disaster management and recovery in Tokyo and Kobe, Japan with that in New Orleans ran in the Times-Picayune last week. Russell, 37, covers city hall for the T-P, where he has been a reporter for seven years. He contributed to the two Pulitzers the paper garnered for its Katrina coverage, and, together with another T-P reporter, Brian Thevenot, won the Mongerson Prize for Investigative Reporting for stories correcting exaggerated media accounts of murders and other atrocities in Katrina’s wake.

Edward B. Colby: It’s unusual for a mid-sized newspaper to send a reporter around the world to bring back “lessons” for how its own city can recover from disaster. How was this series conceived, and how did you work to advance the reporting one of your colleagues did from Japan last year?

Gordon Russell: We did do a bit of traveling shortly after Katrina, not so much around the world, although we did do some of that — we had a couple of people who went to Holland and did a three-part series on their levee system, and my boss, Jed Horne, went to Kobe, Japan to do a story on how they had recovered from the earthquake. And then we also went to four American cities that had suffered disasters — Grand Forks, Charleston, Galveston, and Miami — to see what we could learn from their various recoveries. So we had done that sort of thing. And then this opportunity arose — there was a delegation of people going from New Orleans to learn more from Kobe, and we thought that we could get kind of two things from this: One was to see what we have or haven’t done at this stage of the game versus what they had done there, or didn’t do there. That was the premise.

And then secondarily, part of the trip involved a visit to Tokyo, which we learned had a lot of its area below sea level like we are, and was at risk for various kinds of catastrophes, and we thought we might be able to learn something from that too, kind of in the same vein as the trip we took to the Netherlands last year.

EBC: What are the most important lessons that Kobe and Tokyo have for New Orleans as it rebuilds?

GR: I tried to boil those down. The biggest one was that in Kobe the government was very insistent that they rebuild in a safer way than before, with the idea that they can’t prevent earthquakes, but they can do their best to make sure that another 6,000 people aren’t killed. And I don’t think, thus far, we have seen as strong of an emphasis here on rebuilding in a safer way. There’s been a lot of talk about our levee system, which of course is an important part of our safety net, but it seemed like there was an emphasis on redundancy in Japan, like not only were they going to make sure the buildings were built more earthquake-proof, but they also wanted to widen the streets, and create these parks — this is in Kobe, I mean — to prevent some of the things that they felt led to the number of fatalities in 1995. [Increased space between buildings helps to limit post-quake fires, while larger parks provide refuge from them.] And I haven’t heard as much emphasis here on requiring that the city be rebuilt in a way that would make it less susceptible to the hurricane, other than having an improved levee system, which of course is important, but we don’t seem to have a lot of backups, I guess is what I’m saying.

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Another lesson, and I’m not sure what we can do with this, is that in Japan — and this is both in Kobe and Tokyo — there’s a little bit more of a communitarian spirit, so that when something is seen as necessary for the common good, there’s more of a collective mentality, where people are willing to give up their private property — for compensation — but if something is needed for a levee project or to widen the street, people go along with it because there’s a feeling that if this is going to make the city safer, then I should do it. Here it feels like there’s been more resistance to that sort of thing.

And likewise, they built a lot of public housing there — that was one major difference between what they did and what we’re doing. And I saw that as a similar kind of thing. People in Japan may not be excited about public housing in their neighborhoods, for instance, but they felt like they couldn’t be opposed to it because people needed a place to stay. And here’s there’s a little bit more of a mentality that people feel bad for people who are affected by a disaster, but that doesn’t mean they want them [in public housing] — we’ve had all these issues here with where we’re going to put these FEMA trailer parks, and are we going to fix our public housing, and there seemed to be less animosity toward those kinds of things there.

EBC: Do you think readers appreciate the difference between having a staff-written story from abroad on the front page and a wire or news service article?

GR: Well, this is the sort of story that you’re not going to get from the wire service, because we tried to have a very local take — it was very much what can New Orleans learn from these places. So the Associated Press just isn’t going to do that story. We had an advantage in this case because some of our incidental costs were covered by this foundation that helped sponsor the trip — we paid for the airfare and the hotels and all that, but they [took care of] some of the travel inside Japan, and meals were covered, which made it a little bit easier for the paper to afford. …

The story didn’t cause the airwaves to burn up or anything, but I did hear from a lot of the thinkers out there, people involved in the planning process, and some leaders that they felt like they got something out of it, so I think for certain people who are trying to think about these big topics, they got something out of it.

EBC: In a piece last December you referred to New Orleans’ “descent into the netherworld” in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. How is the city doing these days? Is New Orleans still in a sort of recovery netherworld?

GR: Yeah, it’s coming along very slowly, I’d say. … People who have visited several cities that have had disasters, one thing that they’ve all said is that it’s going to be very depressing how slowly things seem to move, and I think that’s true here. And in fact people come to visit from time to time and they notice more progress than the locals do sometimes, I guess because we’re here every day. But other people come and they’re shocked at how it looks just like the flood happened yesterday. … The money’s taking a long time to get into people’s hands, for people who are waiting on rebuilding grants, and a lot of people, I think, just haven’t made up their minds long term about the city’s future and whether they’re going to stay here or not.

EBC: How has your journalism, or your approach to it, been changed by everything that’s happened over the past 16 months?

GR: It’s been rewarding in terms of how people are much more engaged in the news now, and that’s a nice feeling — just that people seem to read things much more closely and react to them. And I feel like the paper’s been able to be an advocate and an ally, without losing its objectivity, but be sort of a voice for all the things that aren’t going right, whether it’s FEMA, or things that the city isn’t doing that it should be, or whatever it is — the paper, I think, has been able to be a voice, be an advocate for something, or put the kibosh on something that shouldn’t be happening. I feel like there’s a good relationship right now between the paper and the community. Not that it wasn’t before, but there’s a feeling that we’re one of the few institutions that is working in this city, and also the stakes feel very high right now. Sometimes in this day and age newspapers don’t always feel as relevant as they probably did 50 years ago, and right now, in this city, it feels like the work you’re doing has some meaning and value.

Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.