Santa Cruz, California, started 2023 with a weeks’ worth of life-changing storms, brutal and relentless weather that left people standard, without power and craving any information they could get about what was happening in their town.
“From Jan. 1 to Jan. 7, we put out 83 stories, 30 email alerts, 86 updates on our blog, our storm blog, and 157 Twitter, Facebook and Instagram posts. Our goal was to use every digital means available to us and to send out as much information to everybody in the community that we can,” says Kevin Painchaud, photojournalist for The Lookout, a digital news outlet covering Santa Cruz. As a result, The Lookout was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in May 2024 for its breaking news coverage of the storms.
Painchaud joined The Lookout when it launched in November 2020, leaving a long career as one of several photographers for the Santa Cruz Sentinel for the opportunity to be the lead photojournalist at the startup website. It took a little while for The Lookout to really find its bearings, due in part to starting a new news organization in the middle of COVID 19 restrictions when the team often couldn’t meet in person, which also made it difficult to come up with a cohesive identity for the new publication.
Those bugs were all worked out by the time the first of what would be months of historic storms hit the California coast, beginning on Dec. 31, 2022.
“On New Year’s Eve, there was the first of a series of atmospheric rivers. That’s a term I had never heard before. When I was growing up, they were called big storms,” Painchaud says. “It hit the central coast on New Year’s Eve, around 11 p.m., midnight. We started to get pounded. New Year’s Day was on a Sunday. There were lots of downed trees, landslides, a lot of damage going on around the county. At the time, our entire news team was on vacation, except me and our managing editor, Tamsin (McMahon). We were the only ones in town. I went out there and started driving around the county, shooting the damage, reporting what was going on. That was the first storm, which wasn’t that bad.”
On Jan. 4, 2023, the second wave hit, bringing with it 20-foot swells that destroyed houses, wharves and roads, extreme high tides, heavy rains and, thanks to already saturated soil, a series of landslides. “That literally made for a perfect storm for the county where the entire county got devastated,” Painchaud says.
As the team came back into town, there were no big meetings to determine who went where to cover what. “There was chaos everywhere. Our team completely stepped up. All of us live in different areas of the county. When the storms hit, everyone knew this was our opportunity to step up and be in service for our community. Without missing a beat, everybody dropped everything they were doing and went to areas they knew needed to be reported on.”
With roads flooded out or otherwise closed, and other outlets unable to provide the same kind of comprehensive coverage, The Lookout became the best source of information on the storm’s damage, how to get help and how to try and get around the area. “No one else could parachute in from the New York Times or the LA Times, they wouldn’t be able to have this kind of information because they didn’t know the conditions and the stories and the areas we knew were susceptible and at risk. We were able to provide that and open up that door and provide so much information for everyone in our area,” Painchaud says. “We won the Pulitzer for the first two or three weeks of our reporting, but the storms went on for almost three-and-a-half months, until March 21.”
Photojournalist Kevin Painchaud is a member of the Lookout Santa Cruz team that won a Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for its community-focused coverage of the flooding and mudslides that destroyed thousands of homes in early 2023.
