He’s not the type who normally spends much time glued to a television screen, but there was something about the coverage of Hurricane Katrina that gripped Brian Triplett.

Maybe it was his family’s connection to the New Orleans area. Maybe it was the stories people were telling about all they had lost.

“I was hooked,” said Triplett, a 21-year-old University of Iowa journalism major. “I was watching CNN 12 hours a day. I didn’t go to some of my classes because they didn’t seem important.”

Finally, Triplett pried himself from the TV. He e-mailed his teachers. He left a note on his bedroom door telling his roommates. He packed a bag, got in his Toyota Camry and drove 15 hours to Louisiana.

“A lot of my friends thought it was crazy,” he said. “I thought it was crazy to sit and watch people who don’t know where their families are and they’ve just lost everything when I could do something.

“Here I was watching these people, and I felt I could’ve done something. I pictured myself facing them and telling them, ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you, I have to go learn the difference between a metaphor and a simile.’ I couldn’t picture myself telling those people that.”

Suddenly, Triplett was in the middle of the mesmerizing story he had been watching unfold on TV. He witnessed the destruction of the New Orleans apartment and a car belonging to his brother and sister-in-law. He says they were “the lucky ones of the unlucky.”

Triplett saw others who were far less fortunate. He volunteered at a relief shelter near New Orleans. He offered to do whatever he could and wound up with four displaced hurricane victims in his car for a 550-mile drive to San Antonio, Texas.

“By the end, we were friends,” he said.

Triplett helped reunite two of his new friends with a missing family member. He also wound up with a touching story to tell for the weekly column he wrote in The Daily Iowan during the fall semester.

More than 100 readers e-mailed him. Some loved the story. Others appreciated his willingness to lend a hand to people in need.

The William Randolph Hearst Foundation also showed its admiration for Triplett’s story. It rewarded him with the $2,000 first-place prize in the collegiate editorial/column writing competition.

“I didn’t do it for any notoriety at all,” he said. “I didn’t do it so I could write an award-winning column. I just couldn’t watch it on TV anymore.”

— Andy Hamilton

Previous | Next