Shay’s first rescue is of a man who’s cut a hole through the roof of his house to keep himself and his dog from drowning. “That first day we saved twelve lives, plus twenty on this 600-foot tanker that was out on the river without power. It was hard to communicate with the Chinese on board, and I wondered what they thought they were doing on the river,” Shay recalls.
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round 8:00 P.M. Monday, Jason Dorval flew out of Mobile in his Jayhawk. “The first thing that struck us as odd, the coast there is normally well lit up, but west of Mobile it was just a big black hole. I mean there was nothing! We’d see people waving flashlights. Then, about ten to fifteen miles west of the air station, we flew over a neighborhood with maybe two feet of water and twenty-five to thirty people waving flashlights at us. We lowered our rescue swimmer, and in the back of a minivan they had this quadriplegic they’d rescued from his house. So we hoisted him and two family members and brought them back to Mobile, and that was our first rescue.
“Later, over Gulfport-Biloxi, we could see the I-90 bridge torn apart and casino barges [by law, Mississippi casinos had to be “offshore”] pushed up onshore and total devastation, so we started going block by block. Hovering over one hotel, we saw a bunch of flashlights and a group of people rolling another person out to the pool area on a serving cart. These were people who’d tried to ride the storm out, and this fellow had had a heart attack, so we put our swimmer down. We called a 65 [that was flying in after them], and they radioed that just across I-90 there was a hospital. We find it, and it’s all lit up on a generator, and we find a dry area of grass and land and expect hospital staff to come running out. Only no one comes out, so the swimmer runs up and pounds on the door, and after two to three minutes they roll out a hospital bed, and they tell us they can take him but are full beyond capacity and please don’t bring anyone else. That’s when it struck me this was pretty dire!
“Later we see some people walking along the highway, and we land and offer them water. I look up, and there’s a Waffle House sign, so we put the searchlight over toward the beach and there’s an empty foundation. Odd that that plastic sign is perfectly intact but the building is gone. We flew seven hours that night, went back to Mobile, and handed the aircraft off to another crew.”
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t. Lance Kerr, a big, tan former rescue swimmer turned pilot, was stationed in Miami the day Katrina struck. “The Miami ops [operations] officer said, ‘Pick three people who have experience in New Orleans and we’ll send them each with a team,’ ” he recalls. “So I picked myself, another swimmer, and Jeff [Lt. Jeff Vajda, an ex-Army pilot who’d transferred from New Orleans two weeks earlier]. Monday night a C-130 picks us up and we go direct to Mobile.”
“That same night we went out. I thought we’d never get there, that we’d have so many survivors on the way.” Jeff takes up the story. “Only there was nothing there. All along the [Mississippi] coast it was just devastation everywhere you looked, things just blown away. So we fly into New Orleans East, and we’re light on fuel and there are flashlights everywhere. This guy had his grill lit up on his roof is what attracted us to him first, and gas lines are exploding, and there was this U-shaped office complex with too many people, dozens of people, on one side of the roof, so we took this gentleman and two ladies off the other side. There were lots of downed wires and trees, so we did a high hoist. You don’t like to, but we did, like a hundred and fifty feet [the standard rescue hoist is from thirty to fifty feet and easier to control]. We did some sixty to seventy hoists down there, all at night wearing [night-vision] goggles.”
Looked at through those goggles, the darkest night is transformed into an eerie lime green landscape. Rescue Swimmer Wil Milam, based in Alaska, recalls his first nighttime mission in New Orleans—being lowered into a flooded warehouse district. After his helicopter flew off to let him listen for cries for help, he saw something on the street, lowered his goggles to his eyes, and realized it was a coffin. There were more in the branches of downed trees, on front porches, even on the steps of a church. They had floated out of their crypts in a nearby cemetery.
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fter the wind and rain began to subside, Petty Officer Jessica Guidroz and her crew from Station New Orleans spent Monday evening driving around downed trees, power lines, and storm debris on the north shore of the lake, searching for a place to launch their 25-foot boats. Eventually they found a cleared boat ramp in the middle of a swamp in Robert, Louisiana. “By now it was 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. We drove back to our CO’s house, and he said, ‘We’re going to be on the water at sunrise.’ ”
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
By the time Jason Dorval woke in storm-soaked Mobile Tuesday morning, New Orleans had flooded, filling up like the soup bowl it is. Closer by, a massive oil rig, torn free from its dry dock, had jammed under the Cochrane/Africatown USA suspension bridge, becoming one of the visual signatures of the storm’s awesome power.
At the air station it was decided the 60s, with their greater range, should head toward the Big Easy.
“We took a maximum load of fuel, water, and MREs [meals ready to eat] and flew to the eastern end of New Orleans that night, out by Six Flags. All the houses were flooded and people were waving flashlights off the roofs. We came on this first family of four on top of their house—and it was hot, I mean it was 100 to 103 degrees in the middle of the night with humidity off the charts—and we lowered the swimmer, and the copilot says, ‘Jason, look out in front of you, you won’t believe this.’
“I’m concentrating on holding the aircraft where the mechanic wants me to, because I can’t see back there [where the hoist is taking place]. When I look up it’s like every third house has people standing on top, and they’re all flashing lights at us from everywhere ’cause we’re the first helicopter on scene, and there’s just hundreds, thousands of these light beacons as far as you can see.
“So we start lifting people off roofs till there’s no more room, twelve or fifteen people in back plus the crew. That first night there was no extraction point, so we were just putting people on highway overpasses and discovered the cloverleaf [interchange] where I-10 meets the lake. That was dry, and there were some ambulances there, so we began landing on the highway and off-loading people.
“There was also some desperation that night. People were to the point where we’d be hoisting someone and see someone else trying to light their house afire thinking maybe they’d be a higher priority. We also saw some houses just blow up like bombs where the gas lines broke and erupted.
“We’d move house to house and to apartment complexes with seventy people and more on the roof. The swimmers would enlist the larger individuals to help them, to keep things orderly. Where we couldn’t take everyone at once, soon they saw that when the bare hook came down that meant we were leaving, and sometimes they’d rush the swimmer, and sometimes we’d have the swimmer hop in the [rescue] basket ’cause it was getting a little dangerous.”
Later swimmers began working in pairs to maintain crowd control. Their standard gear for rooftop rescues, similar to cliff rescue gear, became a shorty wetsuit, helmet, knee pads, and work boots.
“People were also bringing belongings up with them and we were hoisting people with dogs and cats,” Jason recalls. “We hoisted twelve dogs and four cats. Suddenly this cat, this brownish gray tabby cat, is sitting on the [control] console [between the pilots] with the switches and everything, and my copilot flips out and says, ‘Control this cat or he’s going out the door!’ and the owners got ahold of it.”
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took off from Mobile Tuesday morning and started picking people up and dropping them off at the [New Orleans] lakefront. There were Army Chinooks taking people out of the area, but we were the only ones flying who could hoist people,” Miami pilot Lance Kerr recalls. “We lucked out in that we were working a daytime cycle, so we could see more. We did 133 rescues in four days, which is about what I did in eight and a half years as a swimmer.”
I ask him what his most memorable rescue was.
“Just to the west of downtown we saw two gentlemen on a grassy knoll, and they told our swimmer there were fourteen children in this house. So we decide to see how many we can bring up, bringing the kids up two at a time in the basket, and we were pushing the limits. We were pulling 98 percent of power—you don’t want to go over 90 percent—and we got everyone on board. Now we have eleven children and three teenage mothers in the back [of a small orange Dolphin], and I look and there’s nothing but flesh back there, just all these eyes. We’ve got fourteen people plus me, the [other] pilot, the flight mechanic, and the swimmer.
“Every time at the cloverleaf these first days, you’d have no idea where you’d land, and I aimed for the grass and did this steep approach and came up to 100 percent power and I’m still descending [instead of hovering], which is not good! So I’m counting on this air cushion effect when you land. I aimed for the grass but came down on pavement, and the air cushion effect worked anyway, so we landed OK, and I put my hand back and they all gave me high fives!”
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essica Guidroz and her station crew launched two of their 25-foot boats at dawn Tuesday with ten on board including her CO and a radioman.
“Approaching the city, what caught our attention was the loss of visual references. The Dock and Jaeger’s, this bar and a seafood restaurant I’d gone to as a kid, were gone—they were just pilings in the water—and the marina’s sailboat masts, instead of pointing straight up, were pointing in every which direction.
“So we come back to the station and tie up, and we had two of our guys drive our trucks and trailers back down. There were all these people randomly wandering around, and we initially put them on the ground [at gunpoint] ’cause we didn’t know who they were or what was going on. They had been rescued by helicopter and dropped off at the base, but there was no one there, so they’d just taken over our duty rooms and broken into our lockers and taken our clothing and attempted to break into dry stores to find food. Someone also tried to break into the ammunition locker with a sledgehammer, but that’s like a big safe bolted into the concrete, and there was no way they were going to crack it.”
She helped corral the crowd of about sixty into the station courtyard. Among them were a pregnant woman, a diabetic, and a schizophrenic man off his meds. They placed a Coastie by the ripped-up security fence to keep other people out and began confiscating drugs and alcohol from the folks on base. “There was a lot of alcohol they’d taken from a bar down the street. There was lots of marijuana, hash brownies, we found prescription pills, knives, a few guns. We had a pretty good stash once we got done,” she says wryly.
“So then we fed everyone, and more Coasties arrived with big F550 stake-bed [cattle] trucks, and we loaded these people onto them and dropped them at this FEMA station by the Causeway exit at Interstate 10.”
Jessica then went to the Seventeenth Street canal bridge after someone came by to report an injury. They found a man with a gashed leg who, trapped in his Lakeview attic, swam down through his flooded house, kicked out his living room window underwater, and, after surfacing, swam to the bridge. They took him back to the station and later got him medevaced out.
“We had no sanitation or water on base, and the rooms were trashed. The building was pretty gross,” she recalls. “Some of us had left cars by the seawall, and they’d all been pushed into a pile on the side of the building. I had a ’98 Corolla in the pile and went and got my change out of its ashtray. For the first three or four nights, nine of us slept in this one room that wasn’t too trashed, although that first night I don’t think any of us really got any sleep.”
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uesday afternoon, Chief Warrant Officer David Lewald and his flotilla motored back into the drowned city. On the way downriver they saw thirty- and forty-foot trees snapped like twigs and ships and barges tossed on top of levees. Entering the Big Easy, his crew was impressed by the blown-out windows on the downtown high-rises and the people waving towels from the windows of hotels where they’d waited out the storm and were now trapped by the water. Smoky fires were also beginning to smudge the skyline. Lewald got through to Sector Command in Alexandria and was telling them about the levees being breached and the city flooded and was being told they didn’t have any reports to that effect when his radio and cell phone went dead.
In response to a local marine radio request, his boats carried out their first evacuation of a hundred people from the Navy station on the west bank of the Mississippi over to the Naval Support Activity on the east side, where it was dry.
They next got a request from Sheriff Jack Stephens of St. Bernard Parish to help evacuate the traumatized Chalmette flood survivors. Lewald asked the Navy if he could take people to the Naval Support Facility in Algiers. He was told that they were in lockdown mode and didn’t have the Marines to keep control of the situation and that there were criminals on the loose. “I told them we could handle security, but they said no, they didn’t want anyone on their base.”
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he day after the storm, Air Station New Orleans was littered with debris. It had no power or water and only one tanker truck of aviation gas that was rapidly being depleted. The Navy had locked up its fuel depot before evacuating the adjacent airfield. Taking the initiative, Electrician’s Mate Rodney Gordon got into the Navy fuel farm, found some tanker trucks, and, using a scavenged generator, forklift, and electrical wire, got the power working to siphon gas into the trucks.
With their fuel secured, the air station ops center now gave what would become its standard instruction to newly arriving aircraft, “Go out over the city and rescue people.” The station’s five helicopters would rescue more than fifteen hundred people that week, as many as they had saved over the previous twenty-two years.
Like the Marines in war, the Coast Guard is designed to go in first during disasters while larger forces are mobilized. Only in this case those larger forces—local, state, and federal—failed to mobilize due to incompetence, inattention, and jurisdictional disputes, particularly between the Bush White House and the State of Louisiana.
Meanwhile, Coast Guard resources—boats, aircraft, and people—continued to flow in from around the nation. By Tuesday, Air Station Cape Cod had sent six of its eight aircraft. The Canadian Coast Guard volunteered to provide backfill, taking over search and rescue missions out of Cape Cod for the next two weeks.
A Coast Guard C-130 was the first heavy transport plane to bring relief supplies into New Orleans. The pilot of another C-130, sent to do an environmental survey, decided her plane would be more useful acting as an air control platform linking helicopters with hospitals and improvised landing zones, so that’s what she had it do.
“By now we had multiple calls going all the time,” says New Orleans pilot Shay Williams. “A director at Tulane had forty people who needed evacuation, the medical center had patients to get out, and we’d just get aircraft anywhere we could—say, sixty people here, ‘come here, take these patients’ there. We took women and children off the roof of a Winn-Dixie downtown. You just do it till you can’t do it anymore.
“We just kept working for two days straight. I flew so much that they grounded me on day three and dropped me off at the Superdome, where I represented the Coast Guard [among twenty-five thousand hurricane refugees]. That was a bad scene. No food, no water, no order.
“I don’t want to get into the politics, but we found ten FEMA trucks with food and water and cut the locks and had our aircraft kick it out to people at UNO [the University of New Orleans campus, which had become a refugee center], the cloverleaf, the lakefront . . . Eventually, come day five, six, or seven, the Regular Army, the 1st Cavalry and 82nd Airborne, arrived.”
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’m interviewing the square-jawed, brushy-blond lieutenant at the air station three weeks after Katrina and in the immediate wake of Hurricane Rita, which has reflooded the Ninth Ward and smashed through the western part of the state, including Lak
e Charles.
I ask the former Army Black Hawk pilot how the two services he’s worked for differ. “The Coast Guard is more focused. I joined because it mixes flying and lifesaving, and that’s a pretty thing,” he answers.
He’s still working nonstop amid what looks like a gypsy camp of RVs, trailers, office cots, communications gear, and pallets of canned water, soda, and brown plastic MREs. The roof of the hangar remains damaged, but running water and electricity have been restored. I ask about his apartment in New Orleans. He says he hasn’t had a chance to get over there to check it out yet.
Outside the gates of the Belle Chase Naval Air Station, where the Coast Guard is based and a tan-colored tent colony is being erected, are scenes of vast devastation and some one million environmental refugees living under damaged bridges, in carports, moldy offices, rural barns, marine lab dormitories, tents, and refugee centers, and with families scattered across the nation. Daily I’m reminded of war zones I’ve reported from. The casualties are fewer (some sixteen hundred estimated dead) but the area of devastation far more extensive. Over 150 square miles of wetlands and barrier islands have simply vanished beneath the waves.
A big C-130 from Sacramento lands and taxis, as does a Jayhawk from Clearwater with a crew from the Weather Channel on board. Larry King’s producer is calling for the captain, but he’s on the phone with Fox News. The ops center wants a copter to check out a reported levee break in Abbeville to the west.
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