If you asked me about the role of journalism before Hurricane Katrina hit, I’d have give you a canned answer about the vital role the press plays in providing information to the public. But I don’t think I really knew what this meant until after I helped to cover the storm and its aftermath as an intern at The Times-Picayune newspaper in my hometown of New Orleans.

I guess it all started early Sunday morning, when my mother woke me to say the family was evacuating in the face of a Category 5 hurricane. She asked me if I wanted to go with. Despite being worried, I wanted to stay where the news was.

I joined a large contingent of staffers who also elected to ride out the storm at the T-P building in New Orleans, a veritable fortress. With supplies of food and back-up generators, we were set. After helping set up our self-dubbed “Hurricane Bunker” in the windowless photo lab, I went to sleep on an air mattress under my desk.

Throughout the night, T-P staffers blogged from the bunker as Katrina barreled closer.

The building weathered the storm with minor damage, and afterwards reporters and photographers went out to survey the aftermath. Since we had more than enough copy editors to put out our hurricane edition, I got a crash-course in Adobe Photoshop and helped out on the photo desk.

The images were horrific. Entire neighborhoods flooded; people sitting on the roofs of their houses, because that’s all that was dry; and the looting. The looting seemed so senseless with no easy way to get out of a New Orleans that would soon be flooded from a levee breech.

Incidentally, some of the first images I edited from near the breech were of my own neighborhood. It seemed surreal to be formatting and filing photos of stores I used to walk to and streets I drove down every day, inundated with water.

Tuesday morning, I woke up to discover that the yard of the T-P was flooding. The decision was made to evacuate the building for our safety. The only way out, through more than three feet of water, was in the newspaper delivery trucks, treading water to the Interstate across the street.

There was little room on the trucks for more than people. We got out with the clothes on our backs and what we could carry in our laps. With cellphone reception pretty much gone, most of us were uncertain of the fate of friends and family. While headed for Baton Rouge, we were not sure we’d have lodging and a place to work once we got there. In spite of this, the question on our minds was: How do we keep getting the news out?

And that’s what we did. The T-P provided information tooled towards New Orleans residents, a precious commodity during a national TV-news frenzy that seemed to focus on finger-pointing. Until we found print facilities, the T-P published online editions and kept the blogs coming, driven by the superhuman effort of the staff under these conditions. We were fueled by the overwhelming kindness of others, especially Louisiana State University and its journalism school, which offered us places to work and live.

Between Sunday night and Thursday, the T-P’s NOLA.com Web site had 79 million page views. A missing persons forum set up on NOLA.com Wednesday morning had more than 7,400 postings by Thursday evening, according to the T-P.

I spent the week on an emotional rollercoaster, experiencing the exhilaration of covering one of the major news-events of the 21st century, and the sheer tragedy of what I was covering. Regardless, I’ve never felt more right about my decision to become a journalist, and I’ve never felt more proud to be part of this profession.

News Editor Alexander Pegg is a Medill senior. He can be reached at [email protected].