Brian Williams: We were witnesses

"In His Own Words: Brian Williams on Hurricane Katrina" first aired on Oct. 27, 2005, on Sundance channel. NBC News re-aired the 27-minute documentary on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the storm hitting New Orleans. You can read the transcript below or watch the entire 30-minute video by clicking the link to the right.

Brian Williams Anchor & “Nightly News” managing editor • Profile

We landed at a small terminal in Baton Rouge. And all of our Blackberries, our little e-mail computers, went off.  And through our group it started to spread.

“Urgent Weather Message: National Weather Service, New Orleans Louisiana. All gabled roofs will fail.  All wood-framed low rising apartment buildings will be destroyed.  All windows will be blown out.  The vast majority of native trees will be snapped or uprooted.  Only the hardiest will remain standing.  But, will be totally defoliated.  Livestock left exposed to the hurricane winds will be killed.  And finally, water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.”

Here’s a civil servant using everything in his power, every word in his vocabulary to warn everyone within the sound of his voice, “Folks, a monster is coming.”  That’s how it was when we arrived in New Orleans Sunday night.

My boss said, “I’ve just gotten off a conference call with the National Weather Service and this is the Doomsday scenario.  This is gonna hit New Orleans.”

We made the decision to go.  And, as long as we were gonna go, we were gonna all the way.  That meant get inside that Superdome for this storm.

I think about the faces I saw going in that dome.  What really troubled me, these evacuees were arriving, some of them with children, some of them with very few belongings.  Most of them were obviously poor.  And the National Guard were being quite rough verbally and physically with them.  Not all, but some.

I was disturbed enough to try to look for whoever the colonel was in charge of this event.  I was told, “Homeland Security’s in charge of the event.”  It felt bad. The men were being aggressively patted down.  I asked why?  I was told, “Well, they’re looking for cigarette lighters to enforce the ban on smoking inside the Superdome.”

Once you were inside, you were handed a military meal-ready-to-eat.  Inside every MRE is a pack of matches.  It was that kind of thing that didn’t make sense.

Monday, Aug. 29, 2005
The storm winds started in the morning.

When they lowered the huge corrugated steel doors at the back of the Superdome, we were inside with everybody else, locked inside for the duration of the storm.  It was dark.  The power was out early.  There was no circulating air.  There was only the food we brought.

I slipped on an awful combination of detergent, motor oil, and water on the slick cement ramps going down to the actual field, the turf.

I went down hard.  And I was lying on the Astroturf on my back.  Just gonna take a breather for a second.  And I looked up.  I saw a pinhole in the roof of the Superdome.

And that pinhole, lo and behold, grew larger and larger.

It was welcomed at first.  Here’s how perverse the atmosphere was inside the Superdome.  People welcomed the hole in the roof because it was a source of daylight.

Brian Williams, NBC News Brian's cell phone photo of the Superdome roof the day Katrina hit.

I took a picture with my cell phone camera of the roof of the Superdome.  We were able to transmit that picture somehow to the “Today” show.  And they put it on the air.

There was a noise that I described on the air as an arriving New York City subway train. You heard some shrieks in the stands.

With every hole in the roof, you think that’ll be the end.  That’s got to be the height of the storm. That’s got to be the end of the damage.  And it just kept on going.

We took this storm seriously — at its height we were getting reports of gusts 130, 140- 50 mph flying over the top of the Superdome.  We knew we were having a big blow out there.  We knew we were in the middle of a massive hurricane — one look at the radar would tell you that.

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