Survival journalism: Jim Amoss, editor of the Times-Picayune whose roof had leaked thanks to Hurricane Katrina, had one hope on Monday when he saw Mark Schleifstein, the paper's hurricane expert whose home the storm had flooded all the way up to the second floor.
"Tell us we can relax about Rita," Jim said, standing in a room full of folding chairs and tables, laptop computers and journalists displaced from New Orleans.
"I wish I could," Mark replied.
This was not what people wanted to hear in the 168-year-old newspaper's temporary HQ in a Baton Rouge business park.
Not when they're putting out a paper that's being reported in New Orleans, edited in Baton Rouge and printed in Mobile, Alabama. Not when their roof is leaking, or their house has just drained of floodwater and mould is growing on the ceiling.
Since Mark had the distinction of co-writing a series of stories in 2002 that warned exactly of the cataclysm that befell New Orleans and his family last month, people listen to him now when he talks about hurricanes.
Gone are the days when one editor dismissed it as "more of Schleifstein's disaster porn". I've known Mark since I worked at the Picayune in the 1980s, and like a lot of environmental reporters he seems more than comfortable in the role of Cassandra, sometimes even relishing it.
But, like the Cassandra of myth sounding her lonely, unheeded warning, he was right. Everyone heard him when he talked about the Big One and the 100,000 people too poor to leave the city, but no one really listened.
"Yeah, we were right, but what does that mean?" he said. "The part that everybody failed at was getting the people out."
These are bittersweet times at New Orleans' only daily. Before the storm its reporters got the big story right. After the storm, when most of us thought New Orleans had escaped disaster again, they were first to report that the city's heart was being filled with fast-moving black water.
And for three days, when the Picayune wasn't able to publish an actual newspaper, they made a virtual one online, complete with stories, photographs and pages that looked and felt as much as electrons can ever feel like ink on paper. It is probably the only newsroom in America where staffers pick through boxes of donated clothes in the lobby.
"It has taken extraordinary bravery, not only from our journalists, but from our ad reps and circulation and production people to give it their all under circumstances where they lost everything they owned," Jim said.
One of those people is my friend James O'Byrne, the best man at my wedding and the paper's features editor.
After Katrina had passed on August 29th, he and art critic Doug MacCash set out on bicycles to look at James's house in Lakeview, a 6½-hour trip through the looking glass.
They pedalled down the middle of an empty Interstate 10, surreal enough on its own. When they saw water at a notorious low spot on the expressway, they hoisted their bikes on to some train tracks and set off toward Lakeview. Soon the dimensions of the problem became clear.
"Ten feet of water, and it's flowing down Canal Boulevard toward City Park Avenue," James said. "It was not standing water. It was a torrent."
They continued deeper into Lakeview, reaching a bridge where they could see the neighbourhood's shopping district under 7ft of water. "That's when I realised my house was gone," James said.
By the time James and Doug returned to the paper around 9pm editors were debating the angle for Page 1: Most of City Safe in Close Call or Floodwaters Inundate Lower 9th Ward, Eastern New Orleans and St Bernard Parish?
"We walked into that conversation and were able to convey that we were in very, very big trouble," James said. "We wrote our story, and then we drank champagne." James had brought it in hopes of celebrating surviving another close scrape.
They awoke at the newspaper the next morning to discover water rising in the streets. That, coupled with reports of unrest at nearby Orleans Parish Prison, led managers to decide to abandon the building - 220 people needed evacuating.
They headed to the paper's West Bank bureau across the Mississippi river to raid supplies. There, they sent about 10 volunteers back into the city to keep writing and photographing while the rest found a place to publish.
It led them first to Houma and the newspaper there, the Courier. Some stayed there while others went on to the LSU journalism school in Baton Rouge.
They would stay split like that until they could consolidate operations at the temporary newsroom that James helped organise in Baton Rouge.
Organising is one of his specialties. When we lived here, my wife, Lisa, a former reporter and editor at the paper, and I would not always lovingly refer to him as "Mission Control".
Meanwhile, for the crew who went back into the city, existence was rough. Michael Perlstein, who covers police and their peccadilloes, said they moved among several houses in the dry Uptown neighbourhood, scavenging for food and water and looking for working phones.
The Orleans Bureau, as it became known, eventually settled into a house belonging to Stephanie Grace, the City Hall columnist. She'd had food, water and a working phone line. Soon there was a generator for the laptops and a few fans, and regular supply runs by longtime police reporter Walt Philbin had the kitchen provisioned with lots of food and the ice chests with lots of beer.
The paper started printing four days after the storm. Not many copies made it into town, but Mike said they took some of the first down to the convention centre crowds who had felt abandoned and forgotten. The people were so grateful they surged toward the reporters for copies.
Newspapers are dying, we are told. But when the sludge hit the fan in the streets of New Orleans, newspaper reporters whose houses were full of water, who knew right at that moment that their lives were circling the drain, got the story. They're only guaranteed jobs through the end of October; after that how many will still be working there isn't clear.
"When you suffer this kind of blow, what do you have in this world?" James said. "You fight for your family, and you fight for your newspaper, the company you've given your life to . . . This newspaper is important to me, and newspapering is important to me now more than ever."
- (LA Times-Washington Post Service)