I had no idea how sick he said he was during Katrina:
The newsman made it back to the Ritz. Sickness was coming on strong. He was “fading in and out,” he said. “Somebody left me on the stairway of the Ritz-Carlton in the dark on a mattress.” Williams said he was delirious with fever and unable to eat.
But dangers beyond dysentery stalked the hotel. That same day, Brinkley wrote, “armed gangs had broken into the 527-room hotel, brandishing guns and terrorizing guests.” Williams said he lay “eight or ten steps from the exit door. They were going to lock in or down the Ritz, shut it to keep the gangs out. Nobody was allowed out. No exceptions.”
Somebody tried to push an IV on him, which Brinkley said Williams was “desperately in need of” but nobly declined. “There were so many ill people in line who needed it more than me,” Williams said. “My conscience wouldn’t have felt right if I had tried to pull rank. But I was in pure hell. I had no medicine, nothing.”
He eventually made a break for it, “wading” out into what is described as “two feet of floodwater, barely able to stand.” In front of the hotel, a violent confrontation loomed. “A gang was waiting on the streetcar tracks in front of the Ritz, ready to ‘smash and grab,’ as Williams put it, to take the vehicle.” Some Louisiana National Guardsmen then materialized to confront the marauders and ensure the “NBC trio didn’t get their escape vehicle hijacked. ‘They aimed weapons at the men on the street,’ Williams recalled. ‘Then we were on our own.’” Somehow, Williams said, he soldiered on, making all of his broadcasts.
much more at the link
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...-williams-said-terrorized-him-during-katrina/