TUCSON, Ariz. - Most newspapers have a disaster plan in place, but company executives rarely take the wraps off the emergency kit and check inside for the details.

When Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast in late August, Bernard Menge, production director at The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune, said the hurricane tossed he and his fellow production employees into a big storm with little warning.



Bernard Menge, production director (New Orleans) Times-Picayune.
Photo: Newspapers & Technology

Menge said although The Times-Picayune had a hurricane plan in place, the speed with which the breached levees flooded the city left little maneuverability.

At first, 225 employees huddled in the shelter of the paper’s downtown production facility, but as the water rose higher on the morning of Aug. 30, the order was given to relocate staffers to higher ground. The news and ad departments would be sent to Baton Rouge, about 75 miles northwest; production employees were to travel to Houma and the facilities of The Courier, where The Times-Picayune hoped to publish.  

The extent of the storm made the paper’s emergency planning moot, Menge said. For one thing, the paper never expected its employees would be unable to return to the Howard Avenue plant for six weeks.

“We had to fly by the seat of our pants,” he said. “The newspaper loaded employees into delivery trucks and moved out. We left behind 10 of the 20 delivery trucks because we didn’t have enough drivers who knew how to drive the trucks.”

Once the employees were resettled, The Times-Picayune got back to work. The Courier, in fact, supported The Times-Picayune’s production needs for more than two weeks before larger capacity was needed and production was shifted to the Mobile (Ala.) Register, where Operations Director Mel Balch and his crew were able to offer increased page counts and color.

During those unsettled weeks, Ray Maly, vice president of production, never gave up hope, Menge said. That hope was affirmed on Sept. 7, when Maly and a few other department heads were able to return to Howard Avenue to find out that floodwaters had never entered the building.

“Six more inches and the facility would have flooded,” Menge said, but all systems and The Times-Picayune’s Goss International Corp. press were still functional, albeit with some rust and humidity problems in some of the electronics.

“We left in such a hurry that the plates were left on the press and they were fine.”

Six months after Katrina, “operations are different now at the paper,” Menge said. “We are running very lean with no overtime and most employees perform multiple jobs. We have to make the equipment work for another 10 to 15 years.”

Although most Times-Picayune employees returned, most of the part-time packaging personnel never came back, Menge said, “and now we have more work than people.” (See Newspapers & Technology, December 2005.)

“It took up to five weeks to find some of the employees because they didn’t have cell phones, e-mail or computers at their disposal,” he said.