In 2012, he was in Hoboken, N.J., when Sandy hit. It wasn’t Smialowski’s first time covering floodwaters of this magnitude. That was a sentiment picked up by media critics this week. Some people told him they felt like the news cycle-and it’s been a busy one, with the elections and the Olympics-came late. I think they’re taking baby steps through what really is an overwhelming experience.” You of course have to be sensitive and sympathetic, but it’s not difficult to approach someone at that point. “I actually find it to be a very easy time to work. “Whether they’re in shock or overwhelmed, they tend to be just a little distracted” he says. Most of those he met were staying with relatives, others had made their way to shelters. Another house, the high-water mark was above my head, so it might as well been underwater.” Another house I went to, the house was clearly underwater. “This one house I went into, the high-water mark was about five feet. “I don’t know if he hesitated because it was a church or because of me, but it was surreal.”ĭamage varied based on neighborhood and could to an extent be estimated by looking at the walls inside. He looked around a lot, spoke with the photographer for a moment, hesitated, then rode around and left. Inside the church, where elaborate murals covered the walls, a young boy rode in on a bicycle. A pastor told Smialowski the church had opened its doors to flooding victims as a shelter but that later it became a helicopter landing zone, picking people up. “I saw pew piled on the side of the street,” he says.
That turned out to be a church where the water had receded, and where locals were in the stages of gutting out the inside. “The first chance that I felt I could tell the story, I hit the brakes as fast as I could,” he says. He began driving east from the airport to areas he knew had been flooded. “Geographically this affected a huge area.” “What I saw was just a very small sliver of what was happening,” he said. President Obama declared 20 parishes for a major disaster. Officials later said at least 13 people were killed and some 30,000 were rescued. Some stores were flooded, others were just closed. He arrived on Monday evening, traveling light.Įverything was shut down. He tried not to go in with expectations-”if you go into something with an image in your head, you’re going to try to find what’s in your head versus what’s in front of you,” he says. These are part of the chorus of descriptions about the floodwaters in the Baton Rouge area after some days of heavy rains.Īgence France-Presse photographer Brendan Smialowski had been following the coverage as he prepared to travel to the region earlier in the week. since Superstorm Sandy slammed into the Eastern Seaboard nearly four years ago, according to the Red Cross. “Historic.” “Unprecedented.” The “worst” natural disaster to hit the U.S.
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