Reporters are for the most part a hard bitten lot. Inured as they seem at times to human suffering, journalists have been criticized more than once for intruding on a family’s grief or reporting from disasters as if it were a ballgame of sorts.

An exception was on display last night. Veteran CNN reporter Jeanne Meserve was reporting first hand from neighborhoods that were underwater in New Orleans last night and showed genuine feeling and emotion as she reported to Aaron Brown via satellite phone. Her voice, shaking with emotion Meserve gave the most mesmerizing first person account of a disaster I’ve ever heard:

It’s been horrible. As I left tonight, darkness, of course, had fallen. And you can hear people yelling for help. You can hear the dogs yelping, all of them stranded, all of them hoping someone will come.

But for tonight, they’ve had to suspend the rescue efforts. It’s just too hazardous for them to be out on the boats. There are electrical lines that are still alive. There are gas lines that are still spewing gas. There are cars that are submerged. There are other large objects. The boats can’t operate. So they had to suspend operations and leave those people in the homes.

As we were driving back, we passed scores of boats, Fish and Wildlife boats that they brought in. They’re flat bottomed. They’ve obviously going to put them in the water just as soon as they possibly can and go out and reach the people who are out there who desperately need help.

We watched them, some of them, come in. They were in horrible shape, some of them. We watched one woman whose leg had been severed. Mark Biello, one of our cameramen, went out in one of the boats to help shoot. He ended up being out for hours and told horrific tales. He saw bodies. He saw where—he saw other, just unfathomable things. Dogs wrapped in electrical—electrical lines who were still alive that were being electrocuted.

Brown asks her if rescue workers can communicate at all with those who are trapped:

They aren’t tonight. When the boats were in the water, as the boats went around through the neighborhood, they yelled. And people yelled back. But Mark, when he came back, told me that—that some of the people, they just couldn’t get to. They just couldn’t get to them. They couldn’t maneuver the boats in there.

Because this had happened before in Hurricane Betsy, there were many people who kept axes in their homes and had them in the attic in preparation for this. Some people were able to use those axes and make holes in their roof and stick their head out or their body out or climb up completely. But many others clearly didn’t have that. Most of the rescuers appeared to be carrying axes, and they were trying to hack them out as best they could to provide access and haul them out.

BROWN: I’m sorry. What…

MESERVE: There were also Coast Guard helicopters involved in it, Aaron, with the seat up (ph), flying overhead. It appears that when they saw someone on a rooftop, they were dropping flares, to try to signal the boats to get there.

BROWN: Is there any sense of—that there’s triage, that they’re looking to see who needs help the worst? Or they’re just—they were just getting to whomever they could get to and get them out of there?

MESERVE: I had the distinct impression they were just getting to whoever they could get to. I talked to one fire captain who’d been out in his personal boat. He said he worked an area probably 10 square blocks. He’d rescued 75 people. He said in one instance there were something like 18 people in one house, some of them young. One, he said, appeared to be a newborn.

Brown asks how high the water is:

MESERVE: Well, I can tell you that in the vicinity where I was, the water came up to the eaves of the house. And I was told by several rescue workers that we were not seeing the worst of it, that we were at one end of the Ward 9 part of the city and that there’s another part, inaccessible by road at this point, where the road—where the houses were covered to their rooftops. And they were having a great deal of problem gaining access down there. The rescue workers also told me that they saw bodies in that part.

BROWN: Any—you mentioned earlier that the water seemed to get progressively deeper. The walkway from this, if you don’t know, is just a question of tide moving in and tide moving out?

MESERVE: Well, I can tell you that the people who were rescued with whom I had a chance to speak told me that the water came up very suddenly on them. They said most of the storm had passed and what apparently was the storm surge came.

Some of them talked about seeing a little water on their floor, going to the front door, seeing a lot of water, going to the back door, seeing more bodies of water, and then barely having time to get up the stairs. One man I talked to was barefoot. He hadn’t had time to put on shoes. Another woman was in her housedress and flip-flops.

As for the water tonight and how fast it may be going up and down, and you know, I may not have the most current information about the tides, but I can tell you that downtown here the water seemed to be, I’d say, six inches or so deeper than it was when I left earlier this afternoon. It may be a totally situation—different situation…

Brown asks if Meserve has any idea how many people may be stranded. Here Meserve actually starts to cry:

MESERVE: Yes. Nobody has a sense of that. And may I say that the crew was extraordinary. We’ve had very difficult situations. Our cameraman is working with a broken foot since 9 a.m. this morning to try and get this story to you. Big words of praise for them and for Mark Biello, who went out and ended up in that water, trying to get the rescue boats over partially submerged railroad tracks. It was a heroic piece of work by CNN employees.

BROWN: Our thanks to you for your efforts. It—you don’t need to hear this from me, but you know, people sometimes think that we’re a bunch of kind of wacky thrill seekers doing this work, sometimes, and no one who has listened to the words you’ve spoken or the tone of your voice could possibly think that now. We appreciate your work.

MESERVE: Aaron, thank you. We are sometimes wacky thrill seekers. But when you stand in the dark, and you hear people yelling for help and no one can get to them, it’s a totally different experience.

BROWN: Jeanne, thank you. We’ll talk later tonight. Thank you.

Jeanne Meserve, been on the team for almost 15 years, I think. She is a very tough, capable, strong reporter, and she met her match on a story tonight.

Superior reporting told with a reporters eye and a human soul.

UPDATE

To keep abreast of events, for links to bloggers covering the disaster on scene, for links to agencies that need help, and for links to anything and everything to do with this disaster, visit Michelle Malkin at least once an hour for updates.

Talk about a journalist giving us the first draft of history, Michelle is doing it for the blogosphere.