Sea Control - Sea Control 587: 20 Years After the Military Response to Hurricane Katrina

Episode Date: September 27, 2025

Links1. Elaine Helm Linkedin.

Welcome aboard, Sea Control fans. Hi, this is Jay, and my guest is Elaine Helm. Now, we're recording this in late August 2025, and we're fast approaching the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated parts of the U.S. Gulf Coast, most notably the city of New Orleans. Elaine was the military reporter for the Kitsap Sun out of Bremerton, Washington at the time. And she embedded with some military in New Orleans and later Houston. They were there performing a hurricane response and recovery. So we're going to talk to her about that experience today.

Elaine, before we get into your experience during this whole Katrina response, could you tell us a little bit more about yourself and what all you've been doing since Katrina? Sure. Yeah. Well, at the time of Katrina, I was a brand new reporter, just graduated from journalism school in June of 2025, and I was out there to take my first big job covering the military in a military town. You know, Bremerton's got the shipyard there, the naval station. You've also got the sub base at Banger very close by. So it's not only about the military as a, you know, a presence in itself, but also about the effect that it has on the economy. It's the biggest employer, at least it was at the time.

So it was a big gig for a very young person to be taking on. I had braces and long hair. I think I probably looked about 14 and had a hard time getting taken seriously at first. But but it was it was such a fun experience. I got to meet a lot of great people and and do some great work. And then from there, I went on to work at the Herald in Everett, Washington, another Navy town. I was the web editor there and actually came out of my experience at Katrina because I started blogging. the the newspaper had never had a blog before reporter and we're going back to 2005 here listeners so i know newfangled stuff like podcasting right right right so i was actually

my title was the new media editor at the time um doing all that fun new media stuff that now is old media um but i did that for a few years and then i got out of journalism altogether and went into public relations and marketing, which is where I am today doing that in the healthcare space. But yeah, it has been an interesting ride. I was reflecting on 20 years. My college reunion is coming up this fall too. And thinking about that and just like 20 years, both seems like a long time ago and and yesterday at the same time yeah exactly yeah we cover um the sea control podcast here is it's international as is in the title and we cover just kind of try to do everything in the maritime realm um and katrina response although it was very joint it was

obviously a very uh military naval specific thing there so anyway really appreciate you coming on and i think this will be uh this will be really cool to talk to you about um before we get into that. I always want to remind listeners that all our opinions here are our own and not necessarily those of any organization with which we are now or were affiliated. So, all right, let's go back here. You already talked a little bit about this. Hurricane Katrina happens in August 2005. U.S. military is involved in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course, at the time pretty heavily. But Katrina wreaks so much devastation along the Gulf Coast there, it requires a pretty significant U.S. military involvement. So could you tell me, as your reporter here, as you said, you're pretty

new. Prior to going to New Orleans area there, what were your thoughts watching and reading about what was happening? Everybody was watching Criterion on the news at the time. So do you have thoughts about that as you already are a journalist? Yeah, I mean, it was just overwhelming to see the amount of devastation from that kind of natural disaster in the United States. um we'd seen it with earthquakes or tsunamis other things around the world but um that feels for me like kind of the first time that we had something that big uh at least that i i was aware of um in the united states and you know my my main focus was on on covering the military so it was something i was covering i was paying attention to just out of personal

interest really sure until i started to hear about some military response efforts and started to ask around about if if any local um if there was any local participation in that from the Puget Sound area. And the first thing that I encountered was the National Guard, the Air National Guard from Washington State was flying from Joint Base Lewis-McChord down to the Gulf Coast and picking folks up and taking them, in many cases, from some of the initial evacuation staging places further and further away from the epicenter of the storm and its impact to uh places that had more housing and more capacity to take on folks who were going to need support for for quite a while um so i had some good relationships with public affairs officers

Those people, yes. Those people. Yes, you did. So I had done some outreach to those folks to just kind of see what was happening and what I could get into as far as opportunities to tag along and write about it. So that first opportunity was with the National Guard. I flew down. It was, I can't remember how long we were there. It was not long.

We flew down to New Orleans. picked up a plane load of people 175 people or so and flew them to houston um and got them off the plane flew back to uh tacoma and and that was that was a long long day um and i was just i was just you know there for the ride taking right but you're riding down on like on a what a c-47 maybe a cargo plane pretty good size cargo plane i imagine yeah yeah yeah um any and you're and you're are you guys landing at a at a just civilian airport down there we did yeah we landed a civilian airport um they walked people out on the tarmac and and you know opened up the back of the cargo plane had them walk right up strapped them down to the deck yeah yeah and and

took off and it was um it was impressive to see a how quickly uh the guard and others were able to respond and be just how adaptable they were to like okay this is the need we're going to make this happen you know and be a part of this this effort and and so you make one trip down um and that's like a long you said a long day kind of yeah and then and then do you go back again then after that you get to go back down there yeah uh so the next trip that i took was was with the navy so uh the uss john c stennis was at the shipyard in bremerton um for it was supposed to be in the dry dock for seven months um so i think i think by august they were out of dry dock but still had not um been ready for sea trials or anything so there were a lot of folks attached to

the the stennis that were uh sort of available for for humanitarian relief support um and i don't i don't know how it all came together but there was a a group of folks about a hundred or so who volunteered or were voluntold to to head down to the gulf coast so i was able to embed with them um was that also through you knew the pao on the cynicism is that correct yeah it was good context yeah so that's right yeah exactly yeah they knew i was interested and and yeah you know what was nice was i was a full-time military reporter so i knew the language i knew who to talk to there were a lot of people trying to cover the disaster or cover the military only when bad things happen or you know only right right when when there was a cool thing that they wanted to do

i had the advantage of those relationships and those building that trust yeah i had not been there very long yet but but they knew i was there um for the the long haul and so um had the opportunity to go down we flew into gulfport into a commercial airport there um and are you flying Did you guys fly commercial down to there, or were you on the Air Force again? I don't think we flew commercial because we had a full plane all, and it was all folks from the Stennis. Okay, all right. But we flew down, and I remember on approach,

you could see every single rooftop had a blue tarp on it. you know from a distance it sort of looked like everybody had a pool but that was not it there were just blue tarps everywhere so we flew into gulf port and then we drove to appropriately the um stennis space center actually a nasa facility down there that was housing the fema relief efforts and kind of coordinating between federal and state uh response so there was um a camp of sorts set up there um tents and cots and a mobile kitchen uh run by a lot of hot shot firefighter groups actually that had flown in to help with the relief work um they made some good chow um but we we stayed there uh for a couple of weeks actually and kind of just did

whatever needed to be done so uh there was there were trips out into the the neighborhoods where folks had um no power um and they had their refrigerators and chest freezers and uh other appliances out kind of on the um on the street corners basically because they'd been without power so long the food was rotting they needed to get it out of the house right right and so one day we went out with a flatbed and picked up a bunch of really really stinky uh refrigerators and freezers packed those up and took them to a disposal facility um and this is you riding around with some get got some folks from the stennis correct which is yeah yeah yeah just checking And for those who don't know, John C. Stennis is a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier with a several thousand person crew.

But this is an example of, yeah, they had folks available who could do this sort of work. So it's kind of, yeah, not what they were trained for, but for the most part, I'm pretty sure of it. No, no. And, you know, they were working, like I said, with the HACHA firefighter crews. There was a CB unit there. There were a couple other kind of more organized groups from different places, but it was really just pretty fascinating to see people applying skills and, you know, experience training with disasters and emergency relief to kind of whatever needed to get done. sure yeah were you um so you're staying there are you all like sleeping on cots in a big space there kind of i assume it's pretty pretty rustic accommodations is it it was yeah tents

and cots uh felt a little like sleepaway camp but um but yeah i mean it wasn't it the the accommodations were not awful uh it wasn't bad um and every day was a little bit different as far as what what folks were out doing um it was eye-opening for me to see how different the scene was in gulfport which wasn't getting as much media attention nationally as new orleans but you know they got hit by the storm surge and so for a couple miles inland from the coastline it looked like a bomb hit that the houses were just gone you could see the foundations and and people's belongings and things kind of strewn everywhere but um but the the the homes that were closest to the water were just completely destroyed and they showed us how far that the

the storm surge went um inland and it was pretty far inland thankfully the space center where we were located, uh, was, I want to say it was two or three miles inland. Um, and so they had some damage, but they were for the most part up and running. Um, and this was just a few weeks after the storm hit. Um, I did have a photographer with me on that trip and he and I rented a car at some point, one of the, one of the days we were there to drive to New Orleans to, to see what it looked like there and as we got further from the coast um and and more toward the new orleans side of things which had been a little bit protected from the storm surge there you you saw a lot of houses that looked fine from the outside but they were full of mold

you know full of mud um the the water had risen a lot more slowly but had still um really affected people there so i was i felt good about being in gulfport and being able to talk about some of the impact that was happening there because it was so different from what i was seeing in national media coverage right right um and are you are you filing stories like every day for the for the kids episode are you every couple days yeah i was filing every couple days um and and then I was blogging. So I had, um, I must've had internet connectivity somehow. I really actually don't remember how that worked. Um, but,

but I had a laptop with me, you know, um, and was able to upload to our, uh, web content management system directly, you know, little dispatches every day of what I was seeing and hearing about. and that also helped my editors kind of gauge what they might be interested in for so when i went i had an outline of what i thought i was going to write about a few stories kind of thoughts that i had worked out with the editors of what they wanted to publish but then you know when i got there um like i said every day was so different that it was really interesting to explore a few different things and and i think i came away with some different stories that i had planned

um from the beginning so um the blog was nice though because i could just kind of put up a few paragraphs and a photo or and just give a slice of life for the for the folks who were there from the stennis it you know gave their family or friends back home an idea of what they were up to you know um could take some pictures and show people that everybody was okay and sure because this is this is before too to go to go back to the kids this is before uh cell or smartphones anyway weren't like universal in 2005 necessarily so that was a rare thing you know that was so yeah you couldn't you didn't have constant contact with all the folks uh up here you wouldn't that wouldn't have been the thing so this was what you were doing was was pretty new for a lot of folks

as i recall like oh yeah yeah yeah it was definitely a different uh era we did have text messaging so people could text uh but it was like pay per message so you had to like you know be judicious about what you decided to text home about yeah yeah uh and definitely no smartphones i haven't invented for a couple more years right that was few years too and this is i mean it was a people commonly think of like embedded reporter and at the time in bed reporters tended to be the ones going to you know afghanistan iraq but this was as i recall and from what you talked but this was a very much an embed too you were there with the unit living like they did you know eating their their their literally on the on the ground with them in a pretty austere

environment um did you call it an embed yeah yeah exactly so it was that way yeah and that was i You know, that was kind of at the time like, oh, an embed for a for a humanitarian operation. Not that this was very much as a huge again, for those who don't remember, not for us as a huge military response interagency, but to that. And a lot of the things the Navy did there and the Coast Guard went on to sort of informed the maritime strategy that came out a few years later. That humanitarian operations were kind of, you know, a nice to have before this. but this in the Southeast Asia tsunami, this became like, Oh, this is one of our main capabilities. This is a, you know, something that Navy can do that other things can't. Yeah. Very cool.

Did you, did your, most of your stories and I, I believe this case, you were, you were focused a lot on the group from the status you were there with. Did you work with other aside from the air force trip down there? Did you get, did you work with other militaries, anything like that when you were in other services? No, actually, I mean, part of being the hometown reporter was, you know, trying to localize it as much as possible. And so it was, you know, taking something that was a little bit abstract, that was an international story and bringing it home to the folks in Bremerton and the surrounding area through the experiences the Stennis sailors were having. So I was able to cover it really differently than what I saw in the national news.

And I didn't run into any other reporters on the ground. I can't think of a single time when we were out there in Gulfport or New Orleans running into a camera crew from a TV station or any other national news reporter. So it was kind of interesting to be in the middle of what was a really big story, but, you know, kind of doing it our own way and not having any interference from anybody else. yeah as i i think you really uh at sports terms have punched above your weight there on that one that was i mean the the the publication you work for is fairly i mean it's we're near seattle but it's it was fairly small um paper and there's there's a large navy presence here but it's fairly small vapor so i know a lot of what you were putting out then was getting national navy attention because there just wasn't anyone else um as are many people down there covering it like

you were especially the navy involvement so well something it even it was interesting because i went back to kind of refresh my memory about some of this um and i found a u.s naval institute story from the 10-year anniversary of katrina that described the involvement in relief efforts and you know talked about coast guard talked about the navy um you know and some of the ships that involved the the usns comfort being the hospital ship that was just deployed there but um that article didn't didn't actually mention this group that that went down there and i don't know if there were other um you know other ships or other installations that sent folks the same way the Stennis did. I have to imagine that there were, but it was not nearly as covered as some of the

other efforts. And so that, you know, lucky break for me that that was able to get on people's radars a little bit more. Yeah, it definitely did. As I recall, as a local PAO at the time, that was it was good stuff to keep up on and then i think you also went to houston with national guard after that too you did another little trip down is that correct that was the one i was talking about that was actually all right that was okay that was first right that was that was a trip all right i just remember that was happening around there okay very cool thanks um any was were there any i guess that looking for any like as a as a reporter or for for uh other navy folks working with media like that did you have any lessons learned were there any particular challenges

you had in working with the group um anyway any thoughts like that if here's how it should have been done differently wish i'd done this learn something pretty open-ended gosh you know i had a really great experience i will say it was an interesting time to be a reporter covering the military. And I think the same is true today, where you have so few people who have served or are serving, that there's this military civilian divide. And after I was a reporter for a brief time, I was working at a public relations agency that worked with the US Army, if I can talk about them here. And specifically supporting the recruiting marketing program. And one of the things that I really learned or understood more deeply because of that was just how few people

really understand what it means to serve um the impact that it has on families um the opportunities that are there and um and so i think as a reporter that was one of the things that i was really fascinated by and i wanted to really tell those stories that were real human you know not not the the technical specs and the um you know the amazing ships and uh and all that although i i did a fair amount of that type of reporting because navy town people were interested in that but um but you know really focusing on kind of those slice of life things like being able to you know be with that group in the middle of relief efforts and how they were living what they were doing for fun a very non-traditional not what people think the navy does really you're like you're on ships

right you're like well they do this other stuff too yeah yeah so it was it um i i think you know i came into the job with a certain set of expectations about what it was going to be like and the guy who handed the reins to me talked about you know you're going to want to play golf with the commanding officers get all your intel intel that way and i was like oh that's not really me like i don't see myself doing that um and i read a book uh that somebody recommended to me maybe they got me a copy of it called pen and sword a journalist's guide to covering the military it's by ed offley um short book very practical um but it was published in 2001 during you know the aftermath of 9-11 when the united states was in uh at at war for the first

time in a long time and you had a lot of people who were getting thrown into covering the military with no background no experience and as i said this this disconnect um from the military experience so um it was a great primer um there were chapters about how to work with public affairs officers and you know what they do uh how to work with uh commanding officers um the kind of military as industry and and the impact on business government contracting and all that good stuff so it was a great background but But it didn't really prepare me for, you know, covering the Navy or the military in general as part of the fabric of a community. Right, right.

And that's what I enjoyed and really tried to do when I was at the Kitsap Sun and on this trip with the Stennis Sailors during Katrina. But I think for folks who are working with reporters today, it's just important to know that, like, there's a lot that people don't understand. And it's not necessarily out of malice. It's, you know, just lack of exposure. So on the reporting side, it helped me to be really open and curious, ask a lot of questions. I played up that looking like a 14-year-old thing to just say, well, tell me how this works. But it was great to work with people, you know, on the public affairs side, too, who were willing to explain stuff and to show me how things worked or give me access to things and experiences. like the trip to Gulfport, where I got to see behind the scenes, but get to know people as

people and cover it that way. So I think that a lot of that, those dynamics between the military and the media are probably still true today. You have fewer and fewer reporters, traditional journalists out there, um, just because of the contraction of the media. Um, and, and then there's still kind of non-traditional journalists, um, and reporters who are pretty important for telling the stories that you really do want to tell. Um, but you have to kind of think about how to get on that human to human level with them so that they can really understand and see the way things are nice thank you and i uh one reason i reached out to have you on here i i was uh i think you did you did have a a unique contribution to navy operations over the last few decades there

you're reporting there that was that was really that was good stuff so it it it wasn't it wasn't captured many other places you kind of mentioned that was that was unique and so it was cool so it was great to talk with you about that again today thanks for all you did there um i'll close out with um where can can if you would like folks to find you online or read anything else uh you're writing about or you got any any projects that folks might be interested in and if not that's that's cool too yeah i uh i don't have anything else cooking today but um folks can feel free to reach out to me on linkedin if they want to connect or you know talk about the link up there The good old days of my military reporting.

Sure. It was. All right. Well, thanks again, Elaine. Thanks so much for being with us. And to all the listeners out there, thanks for joining. And we will talk to you next time. © BF-WATCH TV 2021

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