 Against the backdrop of Hurricane Ida, a deadly power outage, and the COVID-19 pandemic, pro-publica reporters will impact how these disasters overwhelmed vital infrastructure in New Orleans, address inequities that arise in crises, and examine what New Orleans institutions have learned, if anything, from prior disasters. And now, I'll welcome our speakers. Annie Waldman is an investigative reporter covering education and other issues for pro-publica. She's based in New Orleans. Max Blau recently joined pro-publica's New South unit, where he covers health care, public health, and the environment. Josh Kaplan is a senior reporting fellow at pro-publica. He has covered criminal justice, racial disparities, and most recently has been reporting on the events of January 6th. Our moderator today is Dua Deeb, Dua's investigative reporter covering health and inequity in pro-publica's Midwest newsroom. Before I hand it off, I want to note that this session is being recorded, and a link to the video will be emailed tomorrow to everyone who registered. If you'd like to go ask a question, just click the Q&A icon at the bottom of the screen and type it there. Thanks again for joining us, and thanks to McKinsey and Company for their support. I'll let Dua take it from here. Thank you, Connor, and thanks to all of you who are taking time out of your busy lives to join us tonight. You're here because you care, and we're lucky to have some of my favorite pro-publica colleagues with us who also care. I want to begin by talking about the most recent crisis, Hurricane Ida. I remember reading David Ansel's book, The Death Gap, where he wrote that we often think of extreme weather events as acts of God that are indiscriminate in their death and destruction, but we know that's not the case. Annie and Max, there's a line in your story that really struck me when I read it. You're right. The most vulnerable New Orleans residents were left powerless by the city's most powerful company. Let's start there. Annie, can you tell us about the disproportionate impact of Hurricane Ida on the people who lost power, and what it did living without power? What did that mean for the people who stayed? Yeah. Thank you again for hosting this event, and also thank you to everybody who can make it here tonight and join us. So I want to first take us back to the days before the storm and set the scene a little bit. In the week before the hurricane made landfall, it was clear that Ida would be a huge storm and that it would pummel some part of the Gulf coast, but it was really unclear exactly where it would strike. Many people in New Orleans are so used to predictions that a storm may hit the city that they often don't make plans until a couple days before landfall. And so for many New Orleans with limited means, evacuating can be an incredibly expensive task. But of the people who decide to stay, cost wasn't the only factor. So for many people, it's frankly difficult to arrange an evacuation, in particular people with breathing machines or other medical devices or conditions. For example, in the days after Hurricane Ida, we met Wilma Banks, a native New Orleansian who lives in New Orleans East. She graciously spoke with us in one of her most difficult moments. She's lived through Hurricane Betsy, through Hurricane Katrina, and in the days leading up to Ida, it didn't look like it was going to be as catastrophic. So she stayed. Wilma has congestive heart failure and COPD and asthma, and she requires two breathing machines, a nebulizer as well as a CPAP machine, both of which need to be plugged in in order to work. They're not battery operated. So after the storm hit, she spent days calling city agencies. First, she called 311. She also called the Special Needs Registry, which is an agency that was set up by the city to help people with medical needs. And when neither agency was helpful, she did what anyone might do in our social era, which she tweeted at the mayor and at Entregy, the power company trying to get help, trying to be heard. But she received no help. So on the sixth day without electricity, she started to struggle to breathe so much so that she had to be rushed by ambulance to the ICU and hospitalized. There were cases where people didn't get help in time. So out of the 14 people in New Orleans who died as a result of the storm, nine deaths were because of excessive heat during an extended power outage. And two were from carbon monoxide poisoning because families were turning to generators to power their homes. Power outages following hurricanes are somewhat common in New Orleans and in the region, but the scale and scope of the outage after IDA, it put lives at risk and it left many people in New Orleans questioning, why did it unfold in this way and did it have to? Max, walk us through the power outage. Why did the power grid fail? So our reporting had several key reasons that contributed to the failure. And I should say, before we dive into these, there is an ongoing investigation happening and it's to come where the company or the body that regulates the new council will be trying to answer that question fully and to get a complete picture of what happened exactly. But based on what we know now and what our reporting shows, we had found that the utility had made insufficient grid investments in terms that led to failures happening related to its grid. And when we talk about the grid, we mean everything from utility poles to transmission lines that went down. On the night that the storm hit New Orleans, there had been all eight of the transmission lines that impacted or that brought power to the city went offline and remained that way into the coming days. So that was one issue. So found that there had been spending routine maintenance in the years ahead. I think if you talk to New Orleans, one thing you'll hear is there are outages that happened not just during major storms, but on days when there's sunny weather, when it's sunny. And outages are a common part of life there. And the difference between there being a two or three day power outage, which I think many residents, including Wimbledon banks, have long been ready for and was, you know, that is something that is normal. What is not normal in New Orleans is something, an outage that can last for a week plus. And so I think there's still questions to be answered, but the insufficient investments and in some cases, the overstatement of the company's equipment capabilities to supply reliable power after the storms also played a role. And as we all know, this happened in the midst of the pandemic. And the other crisis we're going to talk about tonight is the treatment of COVID-19 patients at New Orleans' largest hospital system. We know when, you know, the COVID first hit that hospitals across the country were overwhelmed. But Annie and Josh, you found something different in New Orleans. Josh, can you tell us what you found? Yeah, so we started reporting on this kind of at the tail end of the first wave of the pandemic. And as we were looking at the data of trying to understand coronavirus deaths better, we learned that in New Orleans there was something unusual happening. People were dying at home of COVID at a much higher rate than was happening elsewhere in the country. And as we started trying to understand those, why that was happening and understand those deaths, we learned that it wasn't really because people weren't going to the hospital or didn't know where to go. In dozens of cases, people had gone to the hospital first seeking care and then were sent home and died after they were discharged. And most of those patients, the vast majority, were coming from one hospital system, Oshna. And as we were talking to families, a number of families said that they felt pressured into discontinuing care for their loved ones. And in some cases, we've been begging the hospital to keep trying. And in one case, we received medical records and had experts review them. And they said that the patient may have well been able to survive if she'd gotten more care. And so, I mean, and once this care was discontinued, the hospice system itself was not keeping up to the standards of care that are normal for hospice. The patients or families were being felt like they're being left alone to care for their loved one in this really difficult situation. And they'd been unable to keep their family members out of pain from suffering from the virus. And also, this was, as you remember, the time when masks and PPE were hard to come by. And the hospitals weren't giving that to families in all cases or in many cases. And so sometimes family members were getting sick because of that, getting proper themselves. And so, I mean, this wasn't ill will from the hospital. I mean, our report also found that the system was very overwhelmed. And nurses and doctors, we talked to make clear that because of the extreme strain on the system, they weren't able to always give the standard of care that they wanted to and were accustomed to. We also found really it seemed to be really serious racial disparities and how this was happening and how this was playing out. In every case, we identified where patients went to the hospital first and then were discharged and passed away. Every one of the patients was black. We're going to get to those racial disparities in a minute. But before we do, Annie, I want to ask you a little bit about how you found this story, how you knew what to look for. I remember when this was happening, we were hearing and you and I were reporting on this in Chicago about families who their patients or loved ones were dying in the hospitals. How did you know to look for patients dying at home? Yeah, so since the pandemic began, as you mentioned, many reporters at ProPublica have been trying to understand the disparities of COVID and also, more generally, how disparities can arise in health care. We really wanted to understand how COVID was impacting communities in a hyper-local way. So you were part of this team. We all requested data from coroner's offices and medical examiners around the country during the first six months of the pandemic. And as we mentioned first, we looked at Chicago. Not only were you on this team, but along with several other colleagues, we all attempted to reach out to the families and close friends of the first 100 people to die of the virus in Chicago. We were trying to understand if anything could have been done to prevent these deaths or improve the health care system more broadly. I live in New Orleans and since the beginning of the pandemic, similarly, I have wanted to understand how the city's health care system handled the early surge of the virus because New Orleans, back in mid-March, as we all know too well, New Orleans became an early hotspot for COVID-19. The virus spread here exponentially. So through a records request, we received data from the New Orleans coroner's office. And we started making calls. We called dozens of families. And they were incredibly generous with their time and their stories. It was not easy for many of them to open up and they were truly courageous to do so. And they told us the horrors that they and their families had been through as early victims in the pandemic. Many still had extensive questions about what had happened. And many were still deep in the grieving process. And it was really from these conversations, as Josh mentioned earlier, that we started hearing things that we weren't hearing in other cities. What was so surprising was that in so many other cities that we looked at, people were exponentially dying in the hospital just proportionately compared to prior to the pandemic. But in New Orleans, for whatever reason, there was a big fraction of the deaths that occurred at home. And at first, we thought it could be that people just weren't getting to the hospital fast enough and the virus was progressing so quickly that people weren't able to get medical care in time. But as Josh mentioned, in conversations with these families, we began to realize that many actually sought care, many got care, but then were sent home. And in many of these cases, patients were sent home to die with hospice care. It was completely alarming and something that we weren't expecting to find in our conversations with people. You were being shocked when I read your story at that point. I'm going to stay with you for a minute because you worked on both stories. And several of the people you met were reporting after Hurricane Ida faced medical problems that were exacerbated by the loss of power. Do you see a pattern between those who are stranded home alone during the power outage and those who are sent home to die? Yeah, that is a great question. Well, of course, the first waves of COVID had a vastly different impact on the city than Hurricane Ida, both in terms of severity and also the specific effects. There are some very nuanced parallels. Do you open this conversation referencing the work of David Ansel, which I think is a completely appropriate way to kind of use him as a lightpost for this conversation? For those who don't know who he is, he's a physician and epidemiologist and an author who's also a leading thinker in the world of health equity. For those who haven't read his book, The Death Gap, Ansel investigated health disparities in Chicago and beyond, truly illuminating that there are vast differences in life expectancy between the wealthiest in the poorest neighborhoods, sometimes 35 years of a difference. And what Ansel described in stark detail was that in America, if you are without means or without power, where you live can also dictate where you die. And truly, the structural violence of our society, whether it be discrimination, racism, economic exploitation is part, if not the full reason why. And so I think that that one parallel that I see in these two stories that we reported on is that the suffering of the individuals, whether it be with health disparities in COVID or disparities at the power outage, they were curing in communities where structural forces have perpetuated inequality for decades. And the calls for help were there in both instances. This is what was so painful in the process of reporting. Many people were asking for help. We're trying to seek help in some way, but they weren't answered and their voices weren't heard. So both the hurricane and COVID were both disasters that exposed the city's deep structural flaws, just as Katrina had years before. And as investigative reporters, we write not only about what happened, but why it happened. And we ask if the failures, the deaths, the trauma, the loss could have been prevented. So I'm asking, I'm gonna get back to you. What do you think, as Annie mentioned, hurricanes are nothing new in New Orleans, we know that. Was this power failure inevitable? I don't believe so. When you look back to Hurricane Katrina and to the mid-2000s, Hurricane Katrina was not a disaster of primarily of power outages though there were like the largest extent of that damage happened due to the breaking of the levees and then the flooding that happened afterwards. And what you saw in the years that came after that were a $14.5 billion project to rebuild the levees and to improve flood management within the city of New Orleans. And a few years after that, when Hurricane Gustav hit Southeast Louisiana there was probably the closest example of a precursor to IDA that the city has seen in the past 20 years. There was hundreds of thousands of people in Louisiana that lost power and all but one of the transmission lines bringing power in New Orleans had failed. And so there was a window that existed after Gustav and after the damage and the power failures that occurred to make investments into the infrastructure, into the grid to truly modernize it and make it equipped to handle storms that are hitting, stronger storms that are hitting more frequently as climate change has. And so there are, what you saw instead of that kind of dramatic investment with the levees after Katrina and instead you saw poles being put up after storms, smaller repairs happening to get the grid back up and running, but there wasn't always the same kind of dramatic investment to do things like bury lines around or to make the system more resilient in terms of transmission lines that would prevent the scope of the outage from being the same as it was with Gustav. Annie, the story points out that New Orleans has nearly doubled the federal poverty rate and its low income residents face one of the highest energy burdens in the country, second only to Memphis according to a 2016 study that you all cited. How did IDA and its aftermath compound these issues? Yeah, so notably as you mentioned, New Orleans low income residents face one of the highest energy burdens in the country. And this was something that I don't think at the start of Hurricane IDA when we started reporting on this, I don't think this is something we fully reckoned with until we started to have conversations with people. To give you a sense of kind of like what an energy burden means, half of the city's low income households pay about 10% or more of their earnings on their energy bills and a quarter of low income residents pay about 20% or more. So to give you a comparison, on average households across the country pay about 3.5% of their income on their energy bills. So this is a drastic impact on families, especially low income families in the city. To give you a sense of how this impacts people personally, I want to talk to you a little bit about Grace Hollins who she's one resident that we interviewed for our story who's among the group of New Orleans who spends a disproportionate amount on her electricity bill. Typically she pays about $300 for energy charges each month. This is for a 1200 foot shotgun apartment house, one bedroom, it's almost a fifth of her and her son's total disability checks of about $1,600 a month. Also, because of misunderstanding, she ended up missing several bill payments and energy New Orleans, her power company cut off her electricity. So now she's on a payment plan that has nearly doubled her monthly bill. So on average, she normally just has to pay $300 a month. Now she's paying $590 a month, so which leaves her about $1,000 left to pay for everything else in her life. So including rent, including food and including her son has cerebral palsy and he has a lot of medical expenses like diapers. So in a month when you have a hurricane like IDA or any kind of strong storm, it creates a completely unexpected financial burden, not only just how you manage in the days following the storm but also if you have to evacuate. And so what happened with Grace was that she actually ended up using money that she would have set aside for her electricity bill to help get her son and her out of town. After about a week, they evacuated to Atlanta because her son has a seizure disorder and she was worried that in the hot days that followed Hurricane Ida that he might have a seizure. So I think what's important to be clear about here with Entergy and to really kind of put it in the most clear way possible. Entergy and Entergy New Orleans, they have monopoly control over the city's electric grid. And so consumers like Grace who have are living on limited means, they have little choice but to pay the company for light. If they want their lights on, if they want their AC on they have to go through Entergy and Entergy New Orleans. And without true competition, companies like Entergy make decisions that will make them the most money, that pose the lowest risk to their bottom line and these decisions ultimately can have a negative effect on the people who are the most vulnerable. And that's really what we found in our day to day reporting speaking with residents all across the city. So when the company's electric grid failed for as long as it did in New Orleans, it really threatens to destabilize families like Grace or even family individuals like Wilma who might be living on the edge a little bit and who eventually have to leave or have other expenses that come up. And for many low income residents, a prolonged outage like what happened in Hurricane Ida can also create lasting obstacles that if the power had come back on quickly they would have been able to get over relatively easier. We've talked a lot tonight about this layering effect poverty on top of this investment on top of systemic racism. Josh, going back to the, sent home to die story what do you see as the root causes of what went wrong at Oshner and to what extent are they unique to New Orleans? Yeah, I mean, so I think there are two real underlying issues that are the cause of what we found in this investigation. And the first is something really quite specific to New Orleans. This was simply the use of hospice for COVID patients at all. We talked to officials at hospitals and other cities that were hit really hard during the first wave of coronavirus, so New York, Seattle, Chicago. And other hospitals we talked to said that they simply were not using, they simply were not sending COVID patients home that were for hospice care. And they also were overwhelmed just like Oshner was but they, one were worried that they would be getting people sick and risk exposing others to the virus by sending very ill patients home. And then also they, COVID is such an aggressive disease and such a frankly brutal illness. And it just didn't, they were worried about the quality of care that someone could get outside of a hospital setting from untrained professionals. And so that was if not unique to New Orleans at least quite unusual and it was exacerbated by the fact that the hospice system wasn't built. It wasn't set up in a way that was guaranteeing that that transition would go smoothly and that people would get the standard of care that they should be able to expect from the hospice system. So patients were stuck at home without any hospice worker coming to see them for sometimes days at a time. Then the second issue, I mean, I think speaks to something much larger in the pandemic, although you know, get into it a sec manifested in specific ways in New Orleans, but it's just that palliative care and end of life care, how we, how doctors and families make decisions together about how to best take care of someone who is truly extremely sick is a really difficult system that was shot to all how by the strains of the pandemic. And can have the people who bear the front of that often are marginalized, come from marginalized communities and are the people who have the least resources at their disposal to kind of force their way on the system. I have a follow-up to that. It's something that you alluded to earlier of the two dozen or so patients who first sought care at an Oschner hospital and then died after they were discharged, often sent home to die with hospice care, all of them were black. What should we make of these racial disparities? Yeah, so I mean, and I think to really answer that fairly and seriously, you have to really talk about the end of life care system, which is deciding when you pull the plug, deciding how to prevent unnecessary suffering of your loved one if you think they don't have that good of a chance of making it. And I mean, these are impossible choices where there's no right answer. And as end of life care has become common and it really depends, it's a kind of uniquely delicate balance within medicine that requires trust and a lot of communication and also time, which was short during the pandemic. And even before COVID hit, normal times, research had found that black people had disproportionately negative experiences with end of life care in a number of ways. And so as hospitals were low on resources and were less able to do what they might normally do. Anyways, I think it made a lot of sense that these disparities were made worse in these harsh conditions. I mean, and we wrote this at a time where the conversation on racial disparities in COVID was pretty limited to pre-existing conditions and different living conditions in different groups that might expose someone to the virus more. But who's made what this, I think our reporting made really clear to us and hopefully sparked some conversation about was that those disparities also exist in the hospital, not through ill will necessarily, but the end of life care, particularly, but other forms of care are guided by so many small decisions that can be influenced by structural forms of racism that can manifest in this sort of really stark and disturbing result. ProPublica, we're all about accountability and impact. So you may be able to guess my next question, which is, who's to blame here? And I'm gonna open this up to all of our panelists because I want to hear from all of you. But I mean, really, when you look at both of these stories who had the ability to change things but didn't, we received several questions from the audience in which people express their frustrations and their anger, what can they do to push for reforms? I guess I'll jump in first and do a short response to your last part of your question, which is when people read our stuff and when they get upset, how can they either push for reforms or participate or engage in some way? And as ProPublica journalists, we always go by the saying that sunlight is the best disinfectant and transparency and shining a light on issues, I think is to start to any conversation toward reform or changing a system that is kind of entrenched with inequities. And so I have to give a short and shameless plug that for people who are here and they have knowledge that something is wrong and that it should be fixed in some way, finding data and reaching out to reporters and helping us investigate things and brings stuff to light, that's critical. As reporters, we rely on readers and people who we engage with outside of our newsroom to really flag for us what's important, flag for us what we should be looking into. So I'll keep it short. So definitely send us tips. On the enter G and hurricane side, I think it is really easy for people to blame enter G. And of course they do share, you know, they do hold responsibility for what happened with the power failure. The way that power is like the way that power is regulated and who is really held accountable is complex method. It is a collaborative process that exists between a power company and the body that regulates. And that's true in New Orleans and else where there's an investor owned utility that promises to provide safe and reliable power in exchange for having exclusive territory in a particular region. And so what you see in New Orleans is there's a fairly unique setup in which enter G, New Orleans, which is a subsidiary of the larger enter G is regulated by the New Orleans city council, which also handles everything from trash pickup to other city services. And as opposed to like a state public service commission, which only focuses on utilities and has experts on staff to really complex decisions around how utilities should, what they should invest in and how they can collect money from their customers. And what we have found in our reporting is that the setup in which a very powerful company or subsidiary of an even larger company can have in time again, overpowered city council members in terms that don't have the sufficient resources or expertise to effectively regulate the company it's supposed to be watching over. This has gotten better in recent years. And I think one example of that is that there is an investigation that's happening and that is a first step. But I think if folks want to see reforms come in terms of enter G and hurricane Ida being involved in the process of how going to council meetings and speaking to folks at a local level that have the ability to make those decisions is one of the best ways of doing that. We also, one of the things that we also do pro-public is try to reflect on lessons learned. Annie, what do you think New Orleans institutions have learned if anything from prior disasters and what specific lessons do you think can be drawn from these two investigations? So I think it would be wrong of us to not mention Katrina a little more in depth at some point. What happened with Katrina was truly a textbook example of how natural disasters, labor, latent structural bias in our society, racism, discrimination neglect. Some people have called it an unnatural disaster for that reason or even a man-made disaster. I'm also gonna plug the floodlines podcast which is really a fantastic podcast about Katrina that the Atlantic did with Van Newkirk. You should all listen to it. But when Katrina hit the city, the city had a quote unquote good Samaritan plan essentially calling for people with cars to help people who didn't have cars because the mandatory evacuation order came only 20 hours before the storm actually made landfall. And because the evacuation order came so late and the city's officials were really relying on the residents to kind of help each other out, this left many vulnerable people stuck in their homes. And after Katrina hit and the city flooded, the people in power actually blamed those who stayed for their own misfortune. I mean, even if you turn to the response of the head of FEMA at the time, Michael Brown, he attributed the deaths to choices of people who did not leave. But it truly wasn't about choices. I mean, structural inequities are rarely about individual choices. So with COVID and with Ida, what have we learned? I believe that more people are aware of structural inequities and how they persist and how they can lead to tragic circumstances. But I think that all too often people empower whether it be politicians, decision makers, doctors, power company executives, I mean, even journalists, they don't always question the power imbalances or how our actions might be worsening or neglecting persistent disparities. And in some cases, there might be people in power who are in fact exploiting these structural imbalances or companies or agencies that are exploiting these structural imbalances. So besides a very obvious lesson that we should be interrogating our actions and the effects of our actions and they have on others, I think it's clear that our society needs to have a deeper investment in vulnerable communities, both financial and emotional, so that we're not having these moments of reflection only when disaster strikes. I mean, we shouldn't be having a Slack chat or like a Zoom meeting about crises only weeks after Ida or a hurricane or the next pandemic wave. We should be having these persistently throughout the year. I would add that we shouldn't be having the same ones over and over and over again. Josh, it's been a year since you and Annie reported on Oshner. What happened after that? What investigation, what impacted your investigation, how? Yes, I mean, unfortunately, the answer is not as simple or as satisfying as I think anyone might hope, but when we did, we know we started some conversations, which take that as you wrote. We've heard from a lot of doctors around the city, not just at Oshner and not just people we talked to about they were glad that this story came and they're glad that it forced people to think about issues in a time where everyone was working so hard that it was easy to not be cognizant of the harms were being caused by some of these patterns. But at a more official level. So after the story came out, legislators received a lot of emails about them and the Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus wrote a letter to the governor demanding an investigation into what transpired. He met with the caucus, agreed to this and there was last year an investigation by the state health department, which was pretty narrow and done quite quickly into simply the question of whether or not any regulations were broken and it found that there were no regulations broken by Oshner. There was also a talk both by the governor and the caucus itself of doing a much larger and kind of more in-depth study of what happened through the third party and that some people in the caucus felt would be better positioned to speak without bias or potentially political favor. And it's possible something has happened that we're not aware of, but when we last checked in with the legislators several months after the story or several months ago, they were themselves trying to figure out what was going on with us and whether it was actually going to happen. So that I don't know, it doesn't mean it necessarily hasn't but it's still on the table but and people still have pushed for it but to our knowledge, it hasn't happened yet. And the second Annie's plug earlier asking for tips and sources and anyone with information about that or anything else to reach out to us, that's really one of the key ways we do our jobs. I want to end with one last question before we move to the audience submitted questions and this is something I want to hear everyone's thoughts on. This is, we've looked back and I want to look forward what lies ahead, what choices do you think that Intergy and Oshner face? What choices do the residents and patients of New Orleans face? I'll take it. So I want to go back to something that Annie mentioned earlier in terms of how we shouldn't be having these conversations in the days or weeks after a crisis. When we spoke with experts about what means to happen moving forward, one of the things I kept hearing over and over again was that this conversation about making power grids more resilient is a conversation that needs to happen every single day of the year. And so I think now as city council and the Louisiana Public Service Commission are starting to look at what happened and ultimately figure out the reasons behind the failures, that's not enough to fix the underlying issues. What needs to happen in addition to that is a dramatic investment looking at that solves the underlying issues related to the grid. And so those are some of the things moving forward. Yeah, and I want to jump in really quickly there as well. Just to remind people that like in the New Orleans has its power back on, there are still lots of people without power, without homes to live in, who are living in tents next to their destroyed homes who don't have FEMA funding and the river parishes, for example, it would be insane for us not to mention that they were struck way harder than New Orleans as the city was. And there continues to be daily reporting on this from local reporters who are really illuminating the stark reality, which is that the story continues. Like people still aren't getting their services. And anyway, I just want to, we're talking about this as though the story has almost hit like an end of a chapter or like that it's over, but it's not. And people's suffering continues. And I think that that's an important thing to always remember and keep in mind when we're having these conversations. But also I want to note on that note, there are some incredible local reporters who, we have relied on their reporting to help us, whether it be Emily Woodruff who's at the time's pick and the advocate who's a healthcare reporter there who's fantastic and has done a lot of meaningful reporting both around COVID and also related to Hurricane Ida as well as Michael Isaacstein at the Lens and the Lens in general, which is another fantastic local nonprofit here in New Orleans. So I just wanted to make sure that we give them a little shout out because they do really incredible work that without these kind of local institutions, there's no way that even national institutions like us could come in and try to hold systems accountable. Absolutely, I couldn't agree with you more. We're going to now transition to questions that were sent in by the audience. There were so many of them that we won't be able to get to all of them but we'll do our best to get as many as we can. We had several questions, revolving around the issue of preparedness. Max, one reader asks, why are utilities slow to prepare for these crises? Why do we continue to remain unprepared for infrastructure failure and how should communities mobilize to hold them accountable? One of the things you're seeing after Ida and to agree with what just happened in the past is Entergy will say that they need, there's a choice that needs to happen. They either need to get funding from the federal government to help offset costs to modernize the grid or to get things back to normal or they're going to have to increase the monthly bills of their customers. And in the middle of that decision, it's sort of a false binary that they're offering to people in Louisiana because they are as a monopoly guaranteed profit for everything that they do. And they could potentially take a cut away from shareholders and come up with a plan to dramatically invest in modernizing its grid. But they, and so far they've indicated that they're not going to be doing that to moving forward with Ida. They either want federal aid potentially, either in the form of grants or from infrastructure bill or our warning costs would have to be borne by customers as to what communities mobilize to hold them accountable. I think I touched on this earlier, but this unique things about New Orleans is that the people who are regulating Entergy are council people that are now in the middle less than two months away from a city-wide election. And so now is the perfect time to talk to the people who are tasked with regulating Entergy because if you live in the city of New Orleans, you have the chance to vote for them or vote for someone else. Thanks, Mack. The other issue that came up a lot in the audience question was comparing the aftermath of Katrina and Ida one reader wanted to hear the panelists reflect on the differences more than the similarities of the two. And Annie, you already kind of touched on this earlier, but I'm wondering if you can expand on that a little bit and whether you think the city learned anything different from Katrina than from Ida. Yeah, so I would love to. Katrina was an unparalleled event. So I think that it's very hard to compare other storms or even crises to kind of the singularity of that moment. That said, let's put the two storms side by side. I mean, Katrina was a cat three at landfall compared to Ida, which was a cat four. Katrina's wins were 125 miles per hour compared to Ida's, which went up to 150 miles per hour at landfall. Ida even had a greater storm surge than Katrina. So I think like, if you compare the storm side by side, I mean, they were both extremely catastrophic storms, but the difference really was with Ida, the levees didn't fail. The levees, since Katrina had been rebuilt as Max brought up earlier with a price tag to a tune of $14.5 billion. And the city had these levees during Katrina. I mean, I think that would have been a lot more resilient if they had been properly built back then. But ultimately there were grave construction errors by the Army Corps of Engineers when the levees were built in about 80% of the city flooded with Katrina. So another key failure in Katrina was the government took roughly a week to put in place a thorough rescue effort, which left tens of thousands of people stuck in the city without shelter, without food, without water, because they were unable to evacuate before the storm, during the storm and even after the storm. And so while there was no post-storm evacuation plan in place after Ida, the city also didn't flood. So many people could still live in relatively workable homes while the power was being fixed. So I would venture to say that neither the levees nor the federal government responses were central issues with Ida, but nonetheless, there were structural issues that were laid bare in Katrina that persisted today which makes any strong hurricane an incredible risk for vulnerable people in the city. One example that came up in our reporting, it wasn't so much in our article, but I think that it's worth mentioning was the special needs registry that the city set up. So I mentioned this at the beginning of this event when I was speaking about Wilma Banks who lived in New Orleans East, she was part of this special needs registry. So what it was was after Katrina, the city set up a registry so that before hurricanes or other extreme disasters, the city can connect with people in wheelchairs with people with medical devices, people with oxygen tanks or those in bed rest. And I believe that the program was put in place so that the great death toll of vulnerable individuals that happened during Katrina wouldn't happen again. The city would be able to connect with the most fragile and make sure that they had the support that they needed before, during or after a hurricane. So what was so striking was that a few days after Hurricane Ida, I was walking door to door in central city. A lot of people were out on their porches because it was so hot and humid that week with a heat index of above 100 degrees. And I spoke with a handful of people who had special needs, who reached out to the city prior to the storm. They were on this special needs registry. One woman I spoke with who was in a wheelchair, her wheelchair was at like 20% battery by the time I spoke to her. She told me that she connected with the city's special needs registry pack to go back, put it by the door, expect to be evacuated and no one ever showed up. I mean, the city agency never showed up. They never responded to her request for help. And this was something that was echoed in a lot of things that we heard from other people, maybe not to that extent. But Wilma Banks was tweeting at the city about the special needs registry, asking for help, asking why this plan that was supposedly put in place never came for her, never helped her. And we reached out to the city and we didn't receive a direct response from them about the special needs registry. So I think that, yes, Katrina made it clear that the city has a responsibility for its most vulnerable individuals and the city even created systems. They put systems in place or safety nets for people so that if another Katrina happened, these people would have somewhere to go or they would have a plan. But having that plan go into action is a whole other thing. And I am not sure that the city has that down yet. Well, another reader wanted to understand more about the reporting process. They write, what were some of the challenges you faced when finding sources for the story on patients being sent home to die? How did you overcome them? How did you get doctors to agree to retroactively evaluate some of the cases you mentioned? Yeah, so the most important sources for us in this story were the families of patients. We were grieving and we reached them at frankly a horrible time for the family. Although they were also some of the most eager to help them to, you know, they were upset and starting to understand this was a broader problem and were eager to help us as one put it, shine light in the darkness on this. The nurses and doctors and getting inside the hospital was a little trickier. I mean, Oschner had essentially told its employees that they cannot talk to the press at all. And there was also, you know, because we wanted to be honest with people as we're calling them, like this is going to be a tough story. We're hearing some things from patients that we think need to be told. There was a bit of a defensiveness, I think, because they were working there really hard and they knew the system was strained and a lot of them really believed in what them and their colleagues were doing, understandably. But, you know, I think we were able to communicate that, you know, we're going to report this, but we need to be able to show what you guys are going through. We need to be able to show what it looks like in a strained system. And so we're able to earn people's trust that we would try to really capture the, you know, horrible situation that was going on inside some of these hospitals at different points. It's for the doctors who went on, reviewed these medical records and went on the record. I mean, it was a process. I won't lie, you know, Annie and I spent a while trying to find people who would do this. I mean, it was a time when, you know, the pandemic was still raging, you know, people were busy, no one really wanted to critique a colleague who was probably trying their best in difficult circumstances. And, you know, in some cases, Dr. Lutz, who, you know, is an Oshner doctor, you know, is that personal list to him to speak on this. But, I mean, the doctors we spoke to were, we built a trust and, you know, their belief that this was important for the public to understand. And also, I think the key to that was just from a reporting perspective, is we really, really, really learned every page of these, you know, hundreds and hundred, you know, 700 pages of medical records, so we could say. What about on page 573, when this number changes? Like, wouldn't make of that? And we're able to kind of, you know, as they're themselves managing the crisis, be able to not spend too much time with us. Along those same lines, Annie, another question was, what is the most difficult part of reporting on such issues? Yeah, I mean, to echo what Josh said, I mean, we ask so much of people when we show up on their doorstep or we call them on the phone. We are asking them to open up to us when many are still in the very, very early days of grief and some people haven't even really started to process what they're going through at all. And it is so much to ask somebody to share not just their emotional journey, but also as investigative reporters. We ask so many detailed questions that frankly can be quite overwhelming. So every time someone is willing to speak and share, it's truly a testament to their courage and their resilience of being able to kind of open up at such a challenging moment. But truly the most difficult part is asking so much of people who owe the world nothing, who owe us nothing and asking people to open up. But I think people do share because they know the power of their testimony and they know the power of sharing that truth and what it holds. And, you know, for us, it's a huge responsibility as reporters to take that truth and try to hold other people accountable with it. But, you know, it's our goal is really to make sure that we do right by the people who share so much with us. Thank you, Annie and I. I think we're probably going to need to end there to wrap it up and what an important note to end on because we are so grateful to anybody who opened up to us and who lets us share their stories. So we do, it carries so much weight to make sure that we give justice to their stories and we do our best. So thank you to everyone who has, you know, who spoke to all of you for their stories and hopefully will speak to us in the future. And Connor, I will turn it over to you to close this out. Great. Well, thank you all. Thank you to our panelists, Annie, Josh and Max and our moderator, Dua, for this excellent conversation. Thank you to the audience for joining us today and for all your thoughtful questions. If you enjoyed this conversation, we're hosting another event on Thursday called the Climate Gap and Housing, which examines how climate change has magnified the affordable housing crisis. You can register at propublica.org slash climate gap. From all of us at ProPublica, thank you for joining us. Have a great rest of your day and I hope to see you next time.