“It was bedlam,” recalled Elfin Forest resident Nancy Reed. “Absolute bedlam.”

After being trapped in traffic during the 2014 Cocos Fire, Reed is among many looking to avoid previous evacuation woes. Reed, who scrambled to load her animals and connect her trailer to her car, was unable to evacuate due to traffic along the road. Other residents were unable to make multiple trips back to rescue all of their animals after mandatory evacuations began. 

Reed owns five horses, two dogs and two cats. She credits Jazzi, her 18-year-old competitive riding horse, with helping her through her husband’s death in 2006. 

“There is no way in hell I am leaving her with a fire,” she said. “No way in hell. You wouldn’t do that with your child. You would do whatever you had to do if it was your child.”

Wendy Said, a horse trainer in Harmony Grove, loaded her donkey and two horses in her 40-foot trailer the evening before the fire closed in. She waited two hours to pull out of her driveway and onto Country Club Road, a dead-end passageway that feeds onto the main road. 

“It’s a mess every single time,” Said lamented. “I’ve lived here for 33 years; it gets worse every time.”

Reed and Said are among two neighbors who conducted a census of horses in Elfin Forest Harmony Grove. Coordinating with local and state officials, Reed is working on plans for staging areas when the next disaster strikes. 

“We’ve got to do something better because you cannot let family members perish,” Reed said.

Elfin Forest and Harmony Grove are home to more than 500 horses, according to the neighborhood census, which also includes chickens, goats, and alpacas. When fires strike, residents are at the mercy of the unpredictable nature of the burn — as well as crowded traffic conditions that are exacerbated by cattle trailers and multiple trips required to evacuate pets. 

Residents fear future neighborhood developments may further complicate evacuation. The town council has sued San Diego County over two proposed developments — Valiano and Harmony Grove Village South — that, combined, would add more than 700 homes to the area. Council Chairman JP Theberge said the developments’ approvals violate a “good-faith promise” by the county that it would not approve more housing in the area.

Both of them surround Harmony Grove Village, a 700-home development approved in 2007. The site is estimated to be completed in 2020, according to the company website. Theberge said the new residents have become a part of the community; however, he’s unsure how a full neighborhood will factor into evacuation. 

“We’re still not clear on what’s going to happen when the next fire comes and we have 750 homes already built,” Theberge said. 

Said, whose property is near the site for Valiano, describes the proposed development a “tomb.”

“How would we, in the best case scenario, get our horse trailers onto Country Club Drive?” she asked. 

Said and Reed, both longtime residents of Elfin Forest Harmony Grove, attribute the success of Elfin Forest Harmony Grove, as well as the support they’ve received on forming protocol, to the shared culture of autonomy and ownership.

“This is a resilient community,” Reed said. “People take care of one another. They care about one another.”

Kailey Broussard

Kailey Broussard is a master’s student at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. As an undergraduate, Broussard reported on historic flooding in south Louisiana, as well as fraternity hazing at her alma mater, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her work has won regional recognition from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Southeast Journalism Conference. She also served in various reporting and editing positions at the university’s student publication, The Vermilion. Her previous work can be found in The Advocate, The Current and The Independent. View her work on her website here.

kaileybroussard.com

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They gathered around a cooler on a makeshift bench beside the front door and wiped their brows as they took a mini-break from their day of labor – a change from their usual school routine.

Originally from Saint Paul, Minnesota, the teenagers traveled to Texas to volunteer alongside their church group to rebuild homes that were destroyed in the wake of Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

After a long process of researching communities and contacting organizations, the young volunteers from Macalester Plymouth United Church decided to spend their time working with Houston Responds, a voluntary group that unites church coalitions to support community recovery efforts.

The team behind Houston Responds launched a campaign called “Far From Finished” with the aim of reminding the public that a post-disaster crisis still remains in Houston, almost two years after the devastating storm ripped through communities. 

According to Gov. Greg Abbott’s Commission to Rebuild Texas, over $539 million has been spent on housing and other disaster expenses in Houston as of January 2019  – but many people are still displaced or living in unrepaired homes.

The home the children were rebuilding, belonging to 74-year-old Leola Davis, was one of many in need of repair in Independence Heights, a historically black community in Houston. Over the space of one weekend, two different volunteer groups stepped into the flood-wrecked home.

Colleen Henneke, a Houston Responds volunteer from the Bayou City Fellowship, continues to evaluate homes in the neighborhood for flood damage. She said that while the destructive storm caused major damage to the area, the response and recovery efforts have brought communities together.

Henneke said that some of the houses were in bad conditions before Harvey came, which was one of the reasons there was not a lot of help in the area. She explained that some of the local churches are not well-resourced and don’t have a lot of general extra funds. 

“It really takes the bigger churches to love on an area like this to get the rebuilds done,” Henneke said.

“I believe that God allowed this storm to happen at a time when this city needed to come together and churches needed to come together.”

Other residents spoke about an increased faith in God during the recovery period, something Henneke noticed as a church volunteer.

A 2015 study from the Department of Economics at the University of Copenhagen found that many individuals turn to religion after disasters “to deal with unbearable and unpredictable life events”.

The predominantly white volunteer leaders said their initial efforts required building trust with the Independence Heights community. Two years later, the evidence it worked was the praise local residents had for the volunteers.

“To build trust, we just kept showing up,” Henneke said. “These are our neighbors. We’ve got lots of people who can go on missions, but you can go on mission in your backyard if you live in Houston.” 

The Minnesota highschool teenagers were one of many out-of-state groups that are still coming to Houston to help rebuild hurricane-stricken homes. Despite the change of climate and strenuous work, the teenagers said they’re passionate about the work they’re doing. 

“It’s dirty, and it’s hard work, but it needs to be done,” 15-year-old Annie Delma said.

“Before we came here, we watched a video that the organization we’re with showed us and it was actually of the person who owns this home. Just hearing the stories, our group is a very connecting group, and so we really empathize with these people.”

Annie added that while they may be young, they believe they can make a difference this summer by helping the struggling homeowners.

“It’s been two years after Harvey and we came to this house and it was completely gutted,” Annie said. “This woman was not able to live in her house anymore. I can’t imagine not being able to live in my house.”

One of their leaders for the trip, Michael Eugene Florey, described how doing the physical work and seeing the damage was a learning curve for the schoolchildren.

“It shows them how much they can do,” Florey said.” For a lot of the smaller kids, waking up in the morning saying ‘I can run a staple gun or a drywall drill,’ they can just expand their imagination of what they can do and accomplish, it’s fantastic.”

Florey said the kids want to be of service, they want to help. 

He added that “it’s been great to come down and see it first-hand, to see how great the need is, and how resilient the people who are still living here are.”

Rachel Farrell

Rachel Farrell is a graduate of Dublin City University in Ireland. Farrell works as a news reporter for Independent.ie, Ireland’s largest breaking news website. She covered major events such as the pope’s visit to Dublin in 2018, the referendum on abortion and Brexit. She is a regular style and entertainment contributor and broke national news stories for the Irish Independent and The Herald newspapers. Examples of her work can be found here.

independent.ie/opinion/independent-journalists/rachel-farrell/

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Headquartered at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, News21 was established by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to demonstrate that college journalism students can produce innovative, in-depth multimedia projects on a national scale.

Twenty-three students from journalism programs across the U.S., as well as Canada and Ireland, are joining 14 Cronkite students for the 2019 investigation. They are examining how local and federal governments allocate funds to communities devastated by natural disasters. They’ll spend the summer meeting and interviewing victims, survivors, first responders and others whose communities have been affected, reviewing thousands of pages of government documents and working on multimedia stories, original data, a documentary and a multi-episode podcast.

Last year’s project on “Hate in America” won the prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Award in the college journalism category. The award honors outstanding reporting on issues that reflect Kennedy’s passions, including human rights, social justice and the power of individual action in the U.S. and around the world.

The students are led by Carnegie-Knight News21 Executive Editor Jacquee Petchel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

“Just in the last week, tornadoes and flooding have impacted communities in Ohio and Louisiana,” Petchel said. “We will be examining how federal and local governments are handling these recent disasters, as well as how communities affected by past disasters have fared over the years, even decades after the fact.”

Fellows are selected for the highly competitive, paid summer fellowships based on nominations submitted by journalism deans and directors from across the country as well as how they perform in a spring seminar at the Cronkite School, during which they prepare by deeply immersing themselves in the topic.

Students work out of a state-of-the-art Cronkite School newsroom and travel across the country to report and produce their stories. Their work will be posted on the project’s destination website and published by news organizations around the country. Portions of previous investigations have been published by major news organizations that include The Washington Post, NBC News, the Center for Public Integrity and USA Today as well as many non-profit news websites.

Other News21 projects have included investigations into voting rights, post-9/11 veterans, marijuana laws, guns in America, drinking water safety, and hate crimes, among other topics. The projects have won numerous awards, including five EPPY Awards from Editor & Publisher magazine, two Student Edward R. Murrow Awards, and a host of honors from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Hearst Journalism Awards program, considered the Pulitzer Prizes of collegiate journalism.

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation provides core support for the News21 program.

Individual fellows are supported by their universities as well as a variety of foundations, news organizations and philanthropists that include The Arizona Republic, The Dallas Morning News, Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, Hearst Foundations, International Ireland Funds, Knight Foundation, Murray Endowment, Diane Laney Fitzpatrick, Myrta J. Pulliam and John and Patty Williams.

The ASU Fellows are:Allie Barton, Hearst Foundation Fellow; Kailey Broussard, Donald W. Reynolds Foundation Fellow; Molly Duerig, Hearst Foundation Fellow; Jordan Elder, Hearst Foundation Fellow;  Jake Goodrick, Hearst Foundation Fellow; Yael Grauer, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellow; Carly Henry, Hearst Foundation Fellow; Anya Magnuson, Hearst Foundation Fellow; Harrison Mantas, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellow; Ellen O’Brien, Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellow; McKenzie Pavacich, Hearst Foundation Fellow; Ariel Salk, Hearst Foundation Fellow; Alex Simon, Donald W. Reynolds Foundation Fellow;  and Isaac Windes, Don Bolles/Arizona Republic News21 Fellow.

This year’s fellows from other universities are:

• Appalachian State University, Boone, North Carolina: Ben Sessoms
• DePauw University, Greencastle, Indiana: Katlyn Hunger and Peter Nicieja (Myrta J. Pulliam Fellows)
• Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland: Rachel Farrell (Veronica Guerin Ireland Funds Fellow)
• Elon University, Elon, North Carolina: Anton Delgado
• George Washington University, Washington, D.C.: Justine Coleman
• Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York: Jordan Laird
• Kent State University, Kent, Ohio: Anna Huntsman (Diane Laney Fitzpatrick Fellow)
• Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Natalie Anderson
• St. Bonaventure University, St. Bonaventure, New York: Christian Gravius
• Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York: Stacy Fernández
• University of British Columbia, British Columbia, Canada: Dustin Patar
• University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado: Natalie Wadas
• University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa: Becca Scadden (Murray Endowment Fellow)
• University of Minnesota, Minneapolis: Miguel Octavio and Jacob Steinberg
• University of North Texas, Denton, Texas: Briana Castanon (Dallas Morning News Fellow)
• University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma: Sarah Beth Guevara, Drew Hutchinson, Bailey Lewis and Brigette Waltermire (Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation Fellows)
• University of Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico: Priscilla Malavet
• University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee: Sophie Grosserode (John and Patty Williams Fellow)

Past investigations and information on the Carnegie-Knight News21 program can be found at news21.com.

John S. and James L. Knight Foundation: The Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. For more information, visit knightfoundation.org.

Carnegie Corporation of New York: The Carnegie Corporation of New York, which was established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding,“is one of the oldest, largest and most influential American grant-making foundations. The foundation makes grants to promote international peace and to advance education and knowledge.

Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation: The Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation, headquartered in Oklahoma City, was founded by Edith Kinney Gaylord, the daughter of Daily Oklahoman Publisher E.K. Gaylord. Ms. Gaylord created the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation in 1982 to improve the quality of journalism by supporting research and creative projects that promote excellence and foster high ethical standards in journalism.

Hearst Foundations: The Hearst Foundations are national philanthropic resources for organizations and institutions working in the fields of education, health, culture and social service. Their goal is to ensure that people of all backgrounds have the opportunity to build healthy, productive and inspiring lives. The charitable goals of the Foundations reflect the philanthropic interests of William Randolph Hearst.

Donald W. Reynolds Foundation: The Donald W. Reynolds Foundation was founded as a national philanthropic organization in 1954 by the late media entrepreneur for whom it is named. During its 60-plus years of operation, the foundation was a major supporter of journalism and journalism education, with commitments of more than $115 million nationwide.

Carnegie-Knight News21

The nation’s most talented journalism students come together in Carnegie-Knight News21 to report and produce in-depth, multimedia projects for major national media. News21 shows the kind of work that journalism students are capable of doing and is helping reshape the news industry.

news21.com

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