Abstract
The BBC's Washington correspondent recalls reporting from the streets after Hurricane Katrina: "In New Orleans that day... It was a battle between fact and fiction, reality and rumour, fear and sanity. In the absence of working mobile phones and wireless communications everyone was struggling. Even the military was reduced to employing "runners", last used in the Civil War. Ironically the city's few remaining pay phones, abandoned relics in the era of mobile technology, were working perfectly and experienced a brief resurrection. A colleague from The Daily Telegraph resorted to sitting on a stranded armchair in the middle of Canal Street, juggling quarters and dictating his story to a copytaker in London. Everyone was floundering and improvising. What surprised my colleagues and me is that the authorities - city, state and federal - floundered longer and improvised less than most."
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