I've just interviewed Dan Verbeck, a veteran radio reporter for Kansas City's KMBZ-AM. The owner of KMBZ, Entercom, was looking for volunteers to go down and work the hurricane at sister station WWL-AM in New Orleans. Dan had gone down three years ago to cover another hurricane and decided to go down again. Little did he know that he would be working 22 hours a day for more than a week, interviewing those who streamed into the emergency command center run by the local government and WWL and talking to callers who phoned in on the two working land lines.
Dan is a straight shooter. He does hard news. He hates spin. He likes keeping his opinions to himself. And he asked me to shut the recorder off when sharing his personal feelings about his harrowing week inside the flood. He's only comfortable describing what he saw first-hand as a journalist. And what he saw was a responsive, well organized local government and a federal response that was "almost criminal" in its indifference and incompetence.
Dan told me about a harrowing phone call he took from a woman in distress in her own home. He witnessed the cheerful resignation of many of New Orleans' poor as he cruised the neighborhoods before the flood. And what about that Fox News canard that the Mayor could've saved lives if he'd just gotten 350 buses out there? "I don't think anyone would've gone," Dan said.
Dan Verbeck was one of the first people on the scene of the 1981 Hyatt disaster in Kansas City. He has witnessed countless tornadoes, disasters, and of course accidents and fires. But he said "I wasn't prepared for this."
Download interview (28 minutes, MP3).
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